Media did it?

I was not depressed that the politician of the day blamed the worst Gujarat communal frenzy on the national English media. It’s the tendency of successive governments to blame the media when the genie they uncork slips out of their own control.

My predicament was the hate mail pouring in from the readers and arm-chair Gujarati columnists, who sitting in Mumbai, dish out pedestrian expletives at us, specifically the reporters of national English dailies.

It was perhaps too much for me to expect these columnists, some dubbed as acclaimed literatteurs, to have basic human compassion if not sensitivity towards the issue. One of them, the crudest one, also claims to be a journalist though he has visited newspaper offices only to deliver his columns.

In one of his columns, he has even justified the attack on the media at the Sabarmati Ashram.

That one knows of the many skeletons overflowing from the cupboards of these columnists is another matter.

I have personally seen some of them jumping into the lap of the government of the day, whichever party is at the helm. What is more dangerous is that a large number of people, most of whom are unaware of the reality, often believe these columnists, who have been too lazy to go even to Godhra or to the scenes of the massacres thereafter.

Both sets of people, thus, take on face value what the politicians repeat with suffocating frequency.

It was frustrating to find that the readers do not see the fact, and the columnists do not even wish to, that many, many more people would have died had it not been for the media raising the alarm.

In this propagandist criticism of the media, based on falsities and half-truths, there is a virtual justification of the killings post-Godhra. There is a justification for murder. What crime did we, all the reporters covering the riots, commit in reporting the facts?

Was it our fault that a huge majority who were killed, in an unimaginably cruel way, were Muslims?

The common criticism is the media did not report or condemn Godhra enough. Everyone who read the English newspapers on February 28 knows that every single paper had a six-to-eight-column page-one banner headline and every paper had a leader article condemning the incident.

All words used in the post-Godhra violence were used in Godhra also: gruesome, barbaric, inhuman, massacre, carnage, etc.

But Godhra did not recur. In contrast, a Naroda Patia, a Gulbarg Society, a Sardarpur, a Pandarwada, a Best Bakery, still occurs in varying intensity. Is this the fault of the media? Should we not report it? Did we plan and execute Godhra, did we ispire the killings post-Godhra?

All these questions, against the backdrop of harrowing tales of children tortured, women raped and people butchered, of which the national English press has reported only the part that was printable, kept on pricking me during my three days of leave.

The leave that kept on pushing me towards what I had intended to leave behind, however, concluded with a clarity: the truth has to be told, even if you are the only one saying it. I know I must remain one of those who still dare report an event as an event — whether it helps or hurts someone is another matter.