#Goodbye2016: The Year Media Belatedly ‘Found’ Caste

How many Dalit bodies make a ‘national’ story? How much of their humiliation merits a debate? Anti-caste activists have been asking such frustrating questions of this country’s media for years together. A journalist with a national daily who has reported widely on caste pointed out, “The first question the editor asks is, ‘Has someone died?’ Someone has to die. The new atrocity has to be worse than the previous one. This attitude has not changed even today. My most poignant memory is of pitching a story to an upper caste leftist editor. The idea was promptly shot down with the words, ‘What is this extreme Dalit thing?’”     

By 2016, in the backdrop of an altered media landscape, particularly thanks to social media spaces, several caste-related incidents sparked nationwide outrage. Caught on the back foot, traditional media was forced to break its long-standing, obstinate silence on caste and follow suit.

The year opened with the tragic suicide of Hyderabad Central University student and Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula on January 17, 2016, spawning an avalanche of stories and debates in print, electronic and online media, which never stopped quoting his poignant last words from his suicide note.

Before traditional media woke up to the story, news about Vemula’s expulsion and that of four other Dalit scholars was already doing the rounds on social media. The five students were expelled in August 2015. One of them, Dontha Prashanth, had even posted a video. Some southern dailies carried brief reports on the expulsion, but largely, mainstream media ignored this development. Vemula’s suicide changed that.

For the first time, there was a semblance of discussion on the issue of caste discrimination in higher education institutions. Dalit activists have been crying hoarse over it for nearly a decade. The Hindu’s Sunday supplement ran a full-page article titled ‘Caste on the campus’ – stories on experiences of Dalit students on various esteemed campuses.

Media coverage ranged from acknowledgment of the problem to its outright denial, without a serious engagement with the Brahminical nature of institutions and poor representation of faculty from marginalised communities.

Times Now’s iconic prime time segment – The Newshour – titled the debate on Vemula on January 20 as ‘#NotAboutCaste’. It was less about exploring the underpinnings of the incident and more about declaring Vemula’s death had nothing to do with caste bias; but was about politics. The conclusion was pre-decided.

Just when caste debates were getting traction, the savarna media used the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar to swiftly turn the discourse to patent upper caste pursuits like nationalism, secularism and freedom of speech.

In July, caste atrocity took centre stage again, with the surfacing of a shocking video in which a group of Dalit men, stripped and tied, were being brutally beaten by gau rakshaks for skinning a dead cow in Una taluka in Gujarat. It fomented massive protests by Dalits.

“Had the video not gone viral, it would not have generated so much publicity. Media outlets such as National Dastak and Awaaz India TV have a firm Dalit-centric focus,” said Manjula Pradeep, executive director of Navsarjan Trust, a leading NGO working for Dalit rights in Gujarat. “However, the biased writing style of the local language press and the pro-ruling-party stance of local channels have not changed. Social media has given a voice to activists and common people. We are able to call out these biases. The power and control once exerted by formal media is decreasing.” Recently, the Ministry of Home Affairs cancelled Navsarjan Trust’ss licence under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA).

Journalist Sudipto Mondal, who covered Rohith Vemula’s suicide as well as the Una flogging for a national English daily, observed that many of the correspondents were covering these stories only as a compulsion. “They did the bare minimum, gathering sound bites from politicians or relaying visuals of students shouting, not trying to look for anything more,” said Mondal. “The first time I arrived in Mota Samadhiyala village in Una, there was no presence of state or national-level media. A handful of local reporters seemed more interested in subverting the story than highlighting it. By my second visit, media presence had increased. Women in the village had set up a makeshift kitchen to cater to visitors, but many journalists ate at nearby snack stalls. When a local MP visited, he invited all the journalists to the lone Brahmin house in the village. That’s where many of them actually ate.”

Rohith Vemula and Una got media attention owing to the outrage generated on social media by a large section of vocal Dalits. Mondal feels the challenge for “anti-caste” journalists like him is “to find ways to include Dalit lives as part of journalism.”

“Is our community only fit to be covered for atrocities?” he asked. “We have now reached a stage, where atrocities will get covered, because the media have realised these stories sell. They are also aware of the pressure from Dalits; enough hits are being generated for these stories. The big challenge now is to cover Dalit lives.”

Success stories              

Besides these devastating events, there were heartening developments which proclaimed the success of Dalit-Bahujan struggles. The stunning success of the Marathi film Sairat and later Tamil movie Kabali, IAS aspirant Tina Dabi’s feat of topping the civil service examinations in her first attempt and the Ramon Magsaysay award for eradication of manual scavenging campaigner Bezwada Wilson were shots in the arm for the Dalit movement. A new kind of Dalit assertion was also seen in music as Punjabi teen singer Ginni Mahi became a sensation with her singles ‘Danger Chamar’ (2015 release) and ‘Fan Baba Sahib Di’ (Ambedkar’s Fan, 2016 release). The media hailed these success stories. They began talking about Dr BR Ambedkar’s legacy. The alternate media used these news pegs to cover stories of inter-caste marriages, cases of discrimination, manual scavenging, profiles of anti-caste activists and so on.

Caste consolidations

Quota agitations by numerically bigger castes – the Marathas in Maharashtra and Jats in Haryana – presented a pattern of consolidation of intermediary castes, coming on the heels of the Patel agitation of 2015. In Maharashtra, the Marathas demanded changes to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, after a Maratha girl was gang raped by Dalit youths in Kopardi village, sparking a debate on the Act’s alleged misuse in local media.

Activist Manjula Pradeep feels the media did not give the same coverage to post-Una Dalit agitations in Gujarat, as it did to the Jat and Patidar (Patel) stirs. This shows the media’s continued focus on reservation and their tendency to reduce the caste issue to reservations.    

In other noteworthy events, demolition of the historic Ambedkar Bhavan in Dadar, Mumbai, saw a massive morcha led by Dr. Ambedkar’s grandson Prakash Ambedkar.

The traditional media’s dogged denial of caste has led to a flourishing of anti-caste discourse in social media spaces, which are streets ahead in depth of content. Media platforms such as Round Table India (RTI) and Dalit Camera have been on the forefront of bringing out anti-caste accounts. RTI’s giant repository of news reports, features and research pieces has become a resource for media professionals.

Many stories on Dalits and Adivasis these days are first broken on social media and the traditional media then follows them. A recent example being the deaths of Adivasi children in Malkangiri, Odisha.

A protracted silence over caste and biases in reportage has made the traditional media irrelevant to the realities of large sections of marginalised groups. Some of the most progressive and vibrant articulations are happening on Facebook and Twitter.

A few media outlets have recognised the need to democratise news rooms and are actively seeking representations from marginalised groups. Meanwhile, the anti-caste movement is critical of savarna writers appropriating Dalit-Bahujan articulations. Aware of such sensitivities, progressive alternatives such as Feminism In India, an online “intersectional feminist platform” announced in July 2016: “We formed a new editorial policy where men don’t write on women’s exp, upper-castes on Dalits, heterosexuals on LGBT, etc. No appropriation. This is an attempt to make our feminist politics as intersectional as possible & give voice to the most marginalized. FII is a place for all.”   

The traditional media are lagging far behind such evolved positions. Unless they democratise, interrogate the pattern of caste privilege and disadvantage that defines much of Indian reality, and stop approaching caste through the agency of upper castes, they will be sounding their own death knell.