Reporting a tragedy is markedly different from reporting its haunting presence in the public psyche, especially if the tragedy involves seeking judicial correctives in judicial proceedings. If you remember accounts of European journalists covering the Nuremberg trials on the Holocaust, the significance of the task sinks in. So how did some of the major English dailies report on the developments in the judicial trials on the Gujarat riots?

On April 9, 2012, a special fast track court convicted 23 persons and acquitted 23 others in the 2002 Ode communal riots in Gujarat. The following day (April 10, 2012), the Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate declared that the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation (SIT) had not found any evidence for prosecuting Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi and some top bureaucrats and police officers, and recommended that the investigation in the 2002 Gulbarg Society case be closed.

The Indian Express (IE), The Hindu, The Times of India (TOI) and The Hindustan Times (HT) chose to report the story on their front pages (on April 10th and April 11th, 2012), and in doing so each paper  briefly recounted the chronological trail leading to the Court judgment. In their editorial comments on the Ode verdict, the papers struck a common chord of optimism, IE summing it up tersely as: “The Ode judgment is a glimmer of hope for the riot victims, SC has been their guiding light. In the end, for it to be meaningful or enduring, the narrative of development must find a way to connect to the story of justice in Gujarat.”

Talking of following the trail, IE does not seem to be thinking of bringing the curtains down on the Army story. On April 11th, it has a full page feature on Army Chief Gen VK Singh’s interview to Santosh Bhartiya (Editor, Chauthi Duniya). The paper has translated the interview from Hindi, and is perhaps sending the signal that the last word has still not been written on the Army saga. The ripples that the Express story created could be felt in the Court also.  TOI  and IE reported on their front pages (April 11) that the Lucknow bench of  Allahabad High Court barred the print and electronic media from publishing and broadcasting any news related to the recent troop movement controversy. And defence being the flavour of front page stories, Praveen Swami reported on the front page of The Hindu (April 10): “The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence has summoned the chiefs of the three armed services to testify before it…after top military officers told the members that India may not be able to meet a two-front war.”

Asif Ali Zardari’s first visit to India as President of Pakistan resulted in photo-ops splashed over front pages of the papers, and attracted editorial commentary too. Terming the visit as ‘shrine diplomacy’, The Hindu (April 10) observed: “A visit covering two cities in half a day with talks squeezed in before lunch was never expected to solve all the problems between the two countries, but its symbolic value can hardly be underestimated… Sunday’s Zardari-Manmohan meeting will hopefully give new purpose to the dialogue process between the two countries.”  Locating the centrality of economic diplomacy in Indo-Pak engagement, eminent foreign policy analyst C Raja Mohan remarked in his opinion piece in IE (April 10, 2012): “If Singh and Zardari persist in expanding trade and economic cooperation, they have a historic opportunity to restructure India- Pakistan relationship. The logic of economic growth finally impinges on India-Pakistan relations. That is the main message from the discussion between Singh and Zardari on the China model.”

Yuvraj Singh’s return to India also provided ‘celebrity recuperating’ photo-ops for front pages, as did the re-election of Prakash Karat as CPI(M)’s general secretary. Reporting an important development in the neighbourhood, The Hindu had a front page exclusive (April 11) stating that the “Nepal Army has taken control of the Maoist People’s Liberation Army”. That could be long awaited good news for the Indian establishment, as it might be a major breakthrough in Nepal’s peace process and political stabilisation.

So did you notice two ladies writing opinion pieces on something without which they most probably cannot survive a day at home? Sagarika Ghose’s (‘No To Social Apartheid’, HT, April 11) and Nirmala Sitaraman’s (‘The Helpless’, IE, April 11) chose to comment on the plight of domestic helps. While Sagarika tried ‘helplessly’ to pass off some random notes from her show on the same topic as an article, Nirmala Sitaraman’s piece was caught in stereotypes of ‘spokesperson-type’ polemic. IE has one thing to answer here too: do IE opinion page editors think this page is read in Delhi only? The blurb for Nirmala Sitaraman’s piece reads: “Dwarka lesson..”. Ask anyone about Dwarka outside Delhi and chances are that it will be identified as the Hindu pilgrimage site in Gujarat.

Remember Robin Jeffrey? The man, who produced a seminal work on newspaper readership in India (India’s Newspaper Revolution, 2000) had some profound observations to share on social configuration of mainstream media houses. His piece (Missing From The Indian Newsroom, The Hindu, April 9) exposes the social stratification that runs across the skewed structures of news media organisations. Do read it if you haven’t.

Image Source [http://www.flickr.com/photos/valeriebb/1681924558/sizes/o/in/photostream/]