Battle stations

The moment was pure poetry, so romantic, that the fingers of impending danger gripped the throat and held it in a claw. Tiger Hill: a han...

The moment was pure poetry, so romantic, that the fingers of impending danger gripped the throat and held it in a claw. Tiger Hill: a hanging rock, etched out against an ink sky by the tender light of the circle that was a white moon STAR News. It was Friday night on TV; a major and perhaps final Indian military assault on the mountain was expected tomorrow, said Barkha Dutt ominously. You gazed upon the hill, wonderingly: how menacing was its silence before the roar of artillery fire.

So is television in the time of Kargil constantly changing. As the conflict lengthens into the monsoon, maybe beyond, the focus has shifted quite appreciably. Does this change in the coverage reflect oscillations in the nature of the conflict, or, media perceptions of it? And do media perceptions, in turn, reflect a change in the public mood, or, is the media helping to create new perceptions? Difficult to know.

The print media has registered the shift too. You get the feeling that the human angle to the conflict isslowly, surely taking over centre stage. Because it8217;s one thing to read about a few good men dead, it8217;s another to see coffin after coffin, day after day rolling out as if on an factory assembly line.

Once that begins to happen as it already has the human loss is far more compelling that victory and defeat up-there-somewhere. And the media reflects this shift in importance. A month ago, most of us thought Kargil spelt a mouthwash. Thirty days ago, most of us thought Kargil would be another brief encounter8217;. So four weeks ago, what we experienced was a war of words, with talking heads reporting on the action or analysing it.

There were delightful, pleasing-to-the-eye graphics of Kashmir and telephone conversations with reporters still far from the distant thunder. Then, a week or so later, we inched closer: we began to see stock shots of soldiers marching as to war, cannons smoking, helicopters whirring fans in the sky.

And many more talking heads, which the more they changed, the more they remainedconstant. A week on and another shift in focus: now there was extensive coverage of the daily defence briefings in New Delhi; and as the number of dead bodies increased, so did the stories on those who received them at home. We stared into the faces of families expecting to see pain and unexpectedly encountered stoic bravery. This has been one of the more astonishing discoveries unearthed by the media, the TV cameras: beneath the cynical exteriors beat many Bravehearts. And still there were those experts in the studios, talking war and peace.

In the last week we moved to another level: we are now in the war zone or as close as we are about to get to the smell of it: BBC took us into the heart of a Pakistani village, two kilometres from the border where men carry rifles waiting to shoot them even as the Lahore bus plies to and fro; STAR News talked to soldiers who had just returned to base camp from a successful assault and we listen to a young jawan tell us how many men he killed; Zee News joinedterrorists8217; as they scaled up the wall of mountains.

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TV correspondents have taken much longer than newspaper and magazine journalists to send back despatches. But they have got there and we are now seeing, listening to men who have to kill. Barkha Dutt has so far been a first among unequals STAR News. The human interest stories pour in from all parts of the country; the military briefings continue although pushed to the side of the screen. The politicians are ubiquitous.

Especially on Doordarshan. What can one say about a channel that promises us a report on the Anantnag massacre, then blanks out for the next two minutes, carries on without so much as an apology and buries its best story a feature on Kargil village marts overflowing with vegetables and fruits, in the nether regions of the bulletin when everyone has already switched channels 30.6.99, 2.30pm? Say nothing. After another night of the long arms, you are left with a thought: how will media coverage which now focusses on the human wagesof war, influence our attitude? Will it, like media coverage of American losses in Vietnam, lead to us asking ourselves 8211; why are we fighting?