Baba Umar
Usually, such victims in Kashmir never live to tell their stories. They are simply bumped off. And if they’re not, they are purchased or coerced into obedience.
A few weeks ago when the victim of Handwara molestation case appeared before media to narrate her account, it challenged all the ‘manufactured truths’ the state told through its veritable arm – media. Thanks to the rights activists and lawyers who salvaged her release from what was advertised as ‘protective custody’ for almost three weeks.
Had the Shopian women lived to tell what had befallen them in 2009; things would’ve been little different. Omar Abdullah, who ran the restive region, then was among the first few to declare that the duo had drowned in what were ankle-deep waters. The character of the victims was questioned as protests intensified. The commission that sat for instant probe gossiped its observations with media randomly, leaking details here and there, with the name or anonymously.
The confusion prevailed. The media vocabularies kept changing. Kashmir ultimately lived with the dominant state argument. The victims who would have defended themselves from these narratives were dead. Kashmir moved on.
In the Handwara case, a sustained and flagrant effort was made to paint a different picture of the incidents that led to the killing of five civilians.
Sample Times of India news stories. There was a marked difference between the first three or four news stories written by a Kashmiri Hindu journalist and the last one written by a Kashmiri Muslim journalist.
The first series of news stories called protesters ‘mob’. The girl’s accusation, TOI journalist wrote, was a ‘wild rumour’. An anonymous observer in Delhi was quoted who again repeated: “mischievous rumours blaming Army for the alleged molestation.”
In fact, in one story ‘mob’ was used five times. In another, it appeared six times. The last written by Fozia Yasin called them ‘protesters’.
This tells the framework under which a journalist works.
Young journalists reading this piece must understand that editing doesn’t start at the desk. It starts in the head of the writer. It’s the journalist on ground, who chooses what to observe, what to ask, how to frame a story and the language before the copy goes to the sub-editor – the anonymous drudge. This drudge may sometimes have no idea about the context the journalist is following and simply amends the piece for grammar, structure, and typos.
Moving on, when it comes to Kashmir dispute, the battle for narrative control is fought on all levels. Media is very much part of it. That’s why I argue that Kashmir has essentially become a quadrilateral dispute between Kashmiris, Pakistan, India and Indian media. Before we negotiate on something, we must ask Indian media as a new player what exactly it wants. I would rather say a section of Indian media because the reportage of certain outlets has been laudable for all these years. But they aren’t in majority.
Coming back to the media terminology, protestors are those who show that they disagree with something by standing somewhere, shouting, carrying signs, according to the Cambridge dictionary and mobsters are those who are often violent and not organised.
So if one manages to establish that protester are actually ‘mobsters’, force (of any kind) on them becomes largely acceptable in this part of the world. That’s why killings are justified because of ‘protesters’, we are told, were actually ‘violent mobs’.
Sometimes a protester dies of ‘cardiac arrest’ and not the bullets armed forces puncture his torso with. See the language the state uses, cardiac arrest is blamed for taking a life and not the men who fired bullets.
The use of terminology is imperative in influencing our opinions, outlooks, and actions. Our thinking is defined by the interplay or the jugglery of these expressions.
Similarly, Kashmir’s pro-Independence or pro-Pakistan rebels or resistance leadership have been labeled or reduced to ‘separatists’ by the dominant Indian media when these groups reject to be labeled so. Journalism rubrics say we identify the groups the way they identify themselves. But who cares about ethics when higher TRP is the goal.
We’ve often heard one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter or vice versa. Top global news organisations follow this maxim seriously. But for Indian media, all Kashmiri rebels are “terrorists” and their hosts “terror-sympathisers”. But wait, you don’t often see news channels describing Hindu Naxal rebels as “Naxal terrorists”. Perhaps, because the Naxal rebels are not Muslims. I’ve been suffering New Delhi media reportage on Kashmir for a long time. Recently when India Today (formerly Headlines Today) anchor screamed ‘terrorists’ being trained in Kashmir’s Pulwama, its local reporter in Kashmir continued to call the rebels ‘militants’. The divide between India and Kashmir was obvious.
But this jaundiced language in a section of powerful Indian media – represented these days mostly by the Hindu nationalists – is a huge racket. This racket has been running since 1989, so much, that even the victims of this conflict unknowingly acquiesce into accepting the media language that sees the conflict differently.
Campaigner Parveena Ahanger still calls her disappeared son’s uniformed abductors ‘security forces’. If they were really ‘securing’ her son, why would they disappear him? It’s not her fault. I blame the media. The scribes have been feeding her dosages of ‘security forces-took-your-son’ one-liner ever since the poor boy was subjected to the custodial disappearance. Same is the case with pro-Independence leadership. I’ve often found Yasin Malik taking the media bait, unknowingly I would say, and calling himself a ‘separatist’ or the government forces ‘security forces’. The definition says separatists are those “who support the separation of a particular area or a group of people from a larger body or a geographical entity on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or gender.” However, in Kashmir, the pro-Independence or the pro-Pakistan leadership don’t see Kashmir as part of India ever. They compare their struggle to the one in Palestine. The Palestinians don’t see their struggle as ‘separatist’ struggle and hence are not mentioned as Palestinian separatists.
Some of the Indian columnists and Track II officials have carefully glued into our memory ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ to describe both factions of Hurriyat. To them, pro-Pakistan Geelani is a ‘hawk’ or ‘firebrand’ (Sholazubaan) and pro-talks politicians like Abdul Gani Bhat is a ‘dove’. These phrases look good in opinion pieces but we find them in news pieces mostly.
Even ‘mainstream’ and ‘fringe’ is interchanged. Indian media and section of local Kashmiri outlets like to call pro-India Kashmiri politicians as ‘mainstream’ and pro-Independence leader as ‘separatists’.
By definition, mainstream is current thought that is widespread and its opposite are small, isolated and fringe theories. In Kashmir pro-Independence or pro-Pakistan thought is widespread. But channels would never accept the reality and call them ‘mainstream’.
Fed regularly by government press communiqués, there are many phrases that even the cleverest of clever journalists have been using in Kashmir context, knowingly or unknowingly.
Last year in August, The Tribune story included a phrase we often get to read -militancy-infested’ area. That time it was ‘militancy-infested Tral’. It’s sexy but it’s a cliché and a statist phrase.
The fact is Kashmiris have continued to support the armed rebellion since 1989. The statist catchword used by the correspondent makes germs out of rebels or ‘militants’. And what do we do with the infection? We hate and eliminate it. Our conscious and sub conscious mind is forced to liken rebels and germs.
The army or police press notes often mention ‘neutralising’ rebels. ‘Neutralised’, obliquely to mean to stop something (rebels in this context) from being harmful. You will find it in Zee, PTI, Times of India, etc and government press statements. The idea is to say that rebels are harmful and government forces are saviours. To the non-Kashmiri journalist or the anonymous drudge, I mentioned above, it could be the spicy word in the copy.
‘Militancy’ is often blamed for Kashmir’s current situation. “Yene Militancy Vech – Ever since militancy erupted…” is the common refrain. Haven’t we succumbed to this phrase? It’s daily fed to say crackdown and killings in Kashmir resulted from armed rebellion. Or if there were no armed rebellion there wouldn’t be suppression in Kashmir. ‘Militancy’ is often blamed for triggering the conflict. Occupation by military force is purified as innocent.
The new spicy word is ‘Jawan’. Indian media uses Jawan in wholesale to refer to soldiers fighting against the hostile population and armed rebels in Kashmir and elsewhere. Jawan is an Urdu word meaning young or youth. So crimes committed by Jawans could be easily forgiven or dismissed as youthful exuberance. My old employer Tehelka would use Jawan in my stories sometime. I never used the word ‘Jawan’ in my text, yet the published ones had the word shrewdly inserted by the anonymous drudge.
In Kashmiri, the Indian army man is an ‘armywoul’, but in some cases, media misquotes and thrusts Jawan in the people mouth in an attempt to chip in the word into the local vocabulary as well.
Ever wondered why Kashmiri rebels are always ‘heavily-armed’. The Indian media often quotes witnesses as having seen Kashmiri rebels ‘heavily-armed’. Official count says there are mere 200 rebels fighting mostly with snatched weapons against over 600,000 Indian soldiers, over a lakh local police and thousands of Indian paramilitary forces. But nobody gets to see the ornaments of this huge army.
Rebels are also ‘feared’, ‘dreaded’, or ‘notorious’ but government soldiers responsible for massacres or rapes are just Jawans performing duty in the most hostile terrain. They’ve Indian media’s sympathy because they’re away from home and wives.
Even ‘holed up’ is an illogical phrase. ‘Holed up or Hole up’ means hiding or to hide out as if in a hole or to be hiding in a safe place. In news stories on Kashmir, rebels are always ‘holed up’ even when sometime few rebels take the fighting into the heart of army garrisons or headquarters. I can imagine a rebel fighter ‘holed up’ inside the stronghold of one of the world’s largest and better-equipped armies. But news channels make it sound otherwise. The latter is brave and the former, a chicken who’s ‘hiding’ or ‘holed up’. A rebel fighting from behind the wall of a building or attic doesn’t mean he is ‘holed up’. It’s the best position that suits him to lengthen the fighting and wear away the opposition.
Then comes the whore of a word – alleged or allegedly. This saves journalists’ skin at times. In Kashmir context, though, when the government or the army officials claim something, they just ‘say’. They could be ‘saying’ anything. Without verifying the claims made, the journalists usually take the claims at face value and hence hesitate to use the word allegedly. But when the victims or families of those killed or raped make a claim against the government forces or the army, they’re simply ‘alleging’.
The media spin is visible when it comes to framing a story on those subjected to enforced disappearance. In Kashmir context, the Indian news channels label ‘forcibly disappeared’ as ‘missing’ people. If somebody remains ‘missing’, the state is simply absolved of any crime. By writing somebody is ‘missing’ despite clear evidence that he/she was taken into custody by soldiers or troops or armed forces, removes the culpability on part of the power that ‘disappeared’ a person.
To say a section of powerful Indian media is at war with the Kashmiris won’t be wrong. We saw how 2014 floods were covered. They tried doing the same in Nepal and were immediately asked to leave the country.
Their language has seeped deep into Kashmiri media as well. That’s why it becomes imperative for the Kashmiri news organization to adopt a style guide, written editorial policy and demonstrate the ability to examine journalists’ choice of words. Because the job isn’t to get the stories only, but avoid dehumanizing language and people as well.
Originally published in Kashmir Reader
