Echoes of a missing voice

In the eight years since, little seems to have changed on the ground. The recent case of a derogatory and casteist headline in a national Hindi daily denigrating a senior leader of the Bahujan formation has rekindled this debate yet again.

Today it is difficult to deny the exclusion of a significant section of the socially oppressed from the newsrooms of this country. In fact, it points to a deeper malaise which conveys a high degree of insensitivity towards iniquitous relationships in our society revolving around caste and gender as well as community. Coming to the latest incident, while the newspaper sought to manage the situation by terming the “castiest slur” as an “accident”, the police swiftly moved in and prima facie took it as a clear violation of the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Prevention of Atrocities Act.

This, to be sure, is not the first time that caste biases have come to the fore. During the anti-Mandal agitation — in the aftermath of the announcement of the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations — also proved to be an eyeopener of sorts when upper-caste Hindu biases of the establishment became visible. The prominence and spin given to reportage of anti-Mandal protests left no doubt on that score. A few studies have been done about that inglorious chapter in the history of the Indian media, shedding light on how a dominant section opposed this egalitarians measure and provoked upper-caste and middle-class students into the agitation. It also — inadvertently or deliberatively, as the case may be — popularised highly casteist/classist forms of protests like street-cleaning or boot-polishing.

As the feminist scholars Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana have written: ‘‘These activities were designed to signify that meritorious men and women, who would otherwise occupy white-collar positions, would be forced as a result of the reservation policy to earn a menial’s livelihood.’’

It would be instructive to look at similar surprises one has come across in more recent times. Recall, for instance, the debate on whether caste should be discussed at the Durban conference on race in 2001. A popular television programme took up the issue for discussion, bringing together around a hundred people in the studio. Imagine everyone’s surprise then when it was discovered that not a single dalit was present amongst them.

It is obvious that the absence of dalits in journalism impacts the quantum of stories about dalits. Till adequate numbers of persons belonging to the backward classes are inducted in the information sector, we will continue to consume totally unrepresentative reflections and analyses about our society and economy.

The writer edits a Hindi journal, ‘Sandhan’