By ROHIT GHOSH / Article14
Kanpur: A*, a 41-year-old journalist who has worked in Hindi-language newsrooms in the city of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh for the past 15 years, has become used to the openly offensive remarks that follow news of Hindu-Muslims tensions flaring up in some part of the country, communal violence, or when a Muslim is accused of a crime.
“If a terror attack takes place in Srinagar in Kashmir, the general comment in the newsroom is that all Muslims are terrorists,” said A. “If communal violence breaks out, the common refrain is, ‘Muslims are never going to change. They will remain illiterate’.”
“The comments are passed off as jokes, and I’m expected to laugh,” he said. “Despite knowing I’m sitting with them, fellow journalists are not careful with their words. Such things have become common post-2014.”
A, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal from his employers, was referring to the year that the former chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, led the Bharatiya Janata Party to power at the centre. Prime Minister Modi’s two terms heralded an era of Hindu majoritarianism that legitimised the persecution of minorities and the press (documented here and here).
The eight Muslim journalists that Article 14 spoke with said that anti-Muslim bigotry in newsrooms of mainstream media outlets—dominated by the Hindu upper caste—has become more open in the years after 2014, manifesting in comments, masquerading as jokes, and dictating editorial decisions including the framing of headlines as well as the selection and display of the stories.
Aslah Kayyalakkath, the founding editor of Maktoob Media, an independent media outlet, told Article 14 that Muslim journalists “have been silenced in a variety of ways”, and “newsrooms can re-create Islamophobia”.
“Muslim journalists who are critical of the ruling party and ultranationalism have been silenced in various ways or had their work tokenised by largely upper-caste newsrooms,” said Kayyalakkath. “Journalists at leading publications have expressed their experiences of Islamophobia in those companies. Their social media posts have been scrutinised like nothing on earth.”
“Newsrooms can re-create Islamophobia when they refuse to promote qualified Muslim reporters, dismiss their story ideas and pigeonhole them as only fit to report so-called ‘Muslim’ stories’,” he said.
Some journalists said there has always been discrimination against Muslims in Indian newsrooms, reflecting biases that predate the BJP winning power eight years ago. But all of them found the advent of muscular majoritarianism, in tandem with the submission of media organisations to the BJP government and its right-wing ecosystem, to have made newsrooms far more toxic than before.
B*, 38, a non-Muslim reporter working with an English-language newspaper in Lucknow, said he was “disgusted” by how his colleagues behaved, and his heart went out to the Muslim journalists in their newsroom.
Recalling the day when UP election results were reported in March 2017, and the BJP was barreling towards an unprecedented victory, B said his colleagues were congratulating each other and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”.
“I wondered if I was in a newsroom or the BJP’s office,” he said.
In January 2020, Muslims in Bhopal burned copies of the Hindi daily, Dainik Bhaskar, headquartered in the city, alleging the newspaper was giving communal colour to every incident and trying to defame Muslims.
They raised slogans, ‘Dainik Bhaskar murdabad’ (death to Dainik Bhaskar) and ‘Bhaskar teri gunda gardi, nahi chalegi, nahi chalegi’ (Dainik Bhaskar, your hooliganism is not going to work). (A year and a half later, when income tax officials raided offices of the Bhaskar media group, the group said it was for their aggressive coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic highlighting government failure in controlling the pandemic).
In addition to the humiliation Muslim journalists are subjected to in Indian newsrooms and the resentment Muslims feel at the coverage, Muslim journalists have become more vulnerable to online and offline attacks.
Kunal Majumder, the India representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a US-based non-governmental organisation, said that over the last few years, “We have observed some disturbing trends that show an increase in incidents where Muslim journalists have been targeted for their faith.”
“We saw this during the northeast Delhi and Jahangirpuri riots, where Muslim journalists were identified and chased,” said Majumder. “In an incident, a journalist had to give a Hindu name to escape a mob. In subsequent coverage of sectarian gatherings, Muslim journalists have again been targeted by attendees.”
Since 2021, scores of Muslim women, including journalists, were targeted through two apps, Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai, that doxxed their information from their social media accounts and tried to humiliate them by “auctioning” them. Of the journalists arrested in the past few years, many are Muslim.
Maktoob Media’s Kayyalakkath said how Indian newsrooms covered Indian Muslims was also problematic.
“We have this idea that covering Muslim stories means covering violence, trauma, and Islamophobia, which in and of itself is not only taxing but a limited way to look at the totality of what it means to be a Muslim in India,” he said. “We need more stories that centre us without having to constantly cater to or explain ourselves to a Hindutva or even liberal gaze. We are more than just our pain. We wish to do more stories on the Muslims’ political, economic and cultural.”
“An Attempt Is Being Made To Demonise Muslims”
Before he spoke of the bigotry in newsrooms today, A said he believed that Muslim journalists have always faced discrimination in Hindi-language newspapers, accusing them of employing “one token Muslim journalist” to cover “Eid, mushairas (poetry recitations) and madrassas”. No Muslim journalist in his city was assigned beats like politics, government and crime.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, A recalled that as the Muslim graveyard ran out of space in his city, he was told not to highlight Covid-19 deaths. But, when the state government started distributing free rations, he was told to write a story about how Muslims were also getting it.
Lamenting what he called “an attempt to divide society on religious lines”, A said that reports of communal flare-ups were routinely highlighted in the newspaper. At the same time, any story that countered the polarising narrative or showed Muslims in good light was relegated to the back pages.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here