– Ranjith Thankappan
The demise of Nagaraju, a Dalit journalist and the newspaper management’s attitude towards him has once again brought to the fore the issue of Dalit exclusion and subjugation in Indian media. Not that it has opened the eyes of blatantly caste blind Indian media houses and broken the historical silence of civil society on the Dalit question. But it has paved way for critical debate on the cultural practices of journalism in the Indian milieu.
Can one reduce the apathy shown by the newspaper management towards Nagaraju to a universalizing argument about the corporate capitalist class’s ideological indifference to the working class? Is there a caste pleasure that a non-Dalit editor enjoys while chopping off Dalit news stories, which might deserve a front-page space? Is there a kind of ‘Brahmanical itching’ that one feels when a Dalit applies for an editorial position in the media? Is there a silent caste dictum in media houses that Dalits cannot do journalism in India?
In this essay, I try to briefly address the critical questions raised vis-à-vis Dalits and the institution of journalism in India and seek to suggest the overarching constitutive frame of gendered caste-class praxis of exclusions in it. In other words, I suggest that the politics of representation of Dalits in journalism points towards the exclusionary hegemonic practices in civil society, which, while keeping a proclaimed vigilante distance from the state seems to be shaped out of the same ideological space that nurtures societal inequalities.
The Invisible/Visible Dalit
The paradigm of invisibility/visibility frames the basic mode of representation of Dalits in news media. On the one hand, there is lack of adequate coverage of Dalit issues and on the other, even if there is adequate coverage, it is limited to specific issues which are considered to reproduce the stereotype of ‘Dalit as lesser human’. In the first case, there is an empirical vacuum in the news space. In the second, there is an extension of the first case to a patronized inclusion which silences the assertive political self of the Dalit. Instead, it contains the Dalit self within the nation state’s paradigm of the subject who needs to be civilized through modernist civilizing projects. Let us wade through the debates first.
The existing scholarship shows the lack of representation of Dalits in the Indian national media. The pan-Indian national paradigm that addresses the question of representation of Dalits in journalism has been debated since the time of Ambedkar. Historically, one can trace back to Ambedkar the apathy shown by the nationalist press towards Dalits. Ambedkar contested the claims of Congress and Gandhi that they represent Dalits, by citing the propagandistic nature of the national press. Pointing to the lack of representation of Dalits and their politics in national media, Ambedkar noted:
The first and foremost circumstance for the spread of this view is the propaganda by the Indian press in favour of the Congress… [T]he second circumstance why the world outside believes that the Congress is the only organization which represents India, including even the untouchables, is because of the absence of propaganda on behalf of the untouchables to advertise their case against the Congress claim… [T]hey (Dalits) have no press and the Congress press is closed to them. It is determined not to give them the slightest publicity. They cannot have their own press (Ambedkar 1945).
He carried on with his critique by focusing specifically on the Brahmin domination in the Indian press as:
The staff of the Associated Press of India, which is the main news distributing agency in India, is entirely drawn from Madras Brahmins- indeed the whole of the press in India is in their hands and who for well-known reason are entirely pro-Congress and will not allow any news hostile to the Congress to get publicity. These are reasons beyond the control of untouchables (Ibid).
But it was decades later when Kenneth Cooper, The Washington Post’s Indian correspondent confronted B. N. Uniyal, then the editor of The Pioneer, with the question of Dalit representation in Indian media that it was once again brought back to the fore in the mid 1990s, the period of political and economic upheaval. B.N. Uniyal in a reply to Kenneth Cooper wrote:
Suddenly I realized that in all the thirty years I had worked as a journalist I had never met a fellow journalist who was a Dalit; no not one. And worse still was the thought that … it had never occurred to me that there was something so seriously amiss in the profession (Uniyal 2006).
Kenneth Cooper’s journalistic quest and Uniyal’s explorations on the question of one of the missing links in India’s newsrooms – Dalit journalists- expounds this dominant nature of journalism culture in India. Later, Dalit writer and activist Chandrabhan Prasad and S. Bachchan have taken the initiative in demanding affirmative action for Dalits in Indian media, which was articulated through the famous Bhopal Declaration.1 Later, in a path-breaking seminal work on the revolutionary surge of Indian newspaper industry, Robin Jeffrey argued:
In more than ten years of studying Indian-language newspapers, including twenty weeks of travel in which I stayed in twenty towns, visited dozens of newspapers and interviewed more than 250 people, I did not – so far as I know – meet a Dalit journalist working for a mainstream publication, much less a Dalit editor or proprietor (Jeffrey 2003, 160).
Jeffrey met journalists from across the country and one of the questions he raised was about the absence of Dalits in Indian media. Indian journalists’ responses to Jeffrey throw light on the apathy shown by Indian national media towards Dalits. The following section describes some of these responses
The Meritocracy of Caste Exclusion
The liberal Indian journalists answered this fundamental question of Dalit representation with an implicit casteist response hidden under the garb of meritocracy. Below are some of their responses quoted in Robin Jeffrey’s seminal work India’s Newspaper Revolution.
1) Balwant Shah, senior Editor, Sandesh: “We have not looked at that [the presence of Dalits on the editorial side of the newspaper]. We don’t really bother what caste he [a journalist] is. We like to give opportunity to a deserving person.”
2) D. S. Ravi Doss, one of the very few Dalit journalists Jeffrey met during his exploratory research, explained: “Even if there are some Scheduled Caste journalists, they won’t expose themselves because they will be treated separately [and] identified as Scheduled Caste. Even though they are all educated and progressive people, some journalists have in their mind communal feelings. […] Practically no newspaper is against Scheduled Castes. But at the same time they are not bothering about their life also. They don’t take any special care for the treatment of Scheduled Castes. […] Only Dalits can have the full feelings of their sufferings. They are the people who suffer. That cannot be experienced by others. […] If a particular journalist is a Scheduled Caste, he can write more than other journalists because he is the person involved in the problem.”
3) Jose Panachipuram, Malayala Manorama; “We never treat them [Dalits] separately, but they are not in a very big position of course.”
4) Jose T. Thomas, Former News Editor, Deepika; “They [Dalits] are not present in the newsrooms, they are not present in press clubs, they are not present in journalism departments. Their issues are not reported or published in the dailies.”
The empirical reality of ‘Dalit invisibility’ points to the peculiar feature of Indian media: the exclusion of Dalits from the media spaces i.e., newsrooms and news holes/slots. This empirical fact has been proven by a study conducted among accredited journalists in Delhi, India’s national capital by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (C.S.D.S.), New Delhi.2 The study has pointed towards not only the mere absence of Dalits, but also the domination of one particular community- the Brahmans-in the Indian English language national media. The absence of Dalit related issues in media not only reflects the absence or almost negligible presence of Dalits as professional journalists, but also Dalits as a community of potential consumers of media. Robin Jeffrey observes:
The fact that almost no Dalit men or women worked even in minor editorial jobs on Indian language dailies meant that aspects of the life of Dalits were neglected. And the fact that no sizeable daily in India was owned or edited by Dalits meant that stories about them were unlikely to receive the constant, sympathetic coverage of stories about, for example, the urban, consuming middle class (Jeffrey 2003, 178).
The historical reality of the exclusion of Dalits in national press has occurred at the juncture of the Brahmanical monopoly over Indian media. Historicising this aspect of Brahmanical cultural monopoly in Indian national media, Thirumal observes:
Other outstanding Dalit individuals early on took up the task of cultural production to attack Hindu nationalism and colonialism, including Iyothee Thass in the south and Swami Achhutananda in the north, both of whom launched newspapers of importance to the Dalit community from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. However, these efforts were not comparable to the near-absolute monopoly of the press by the Brahmans (Thirumal 2008, 99).
While the statist welfare policies binds Dalits to the modernist civilizing projects, civil society with its predominant Brahmanical domination masquerades as liberal leftist rhetoric, loops it to the spiral of silence over caste and caste based inequalities. The state has ensured the political and bureaucratic representation of Dalits as part of constitutional legality. But the civil society and media have yet to realize it as one of the basic tenets of democratic polity. Noted Tamil political thinker and writer Ravikumar argues:
Running a magazine is not similar to owning a factory. Since the press is regarded as one of the pillars of democracy, it plays a significant role in shaping a country’s polity. So demanding the inclusion of dalits in the media should not be merely regarded as a plea for jobs. It is a demand for democracy, like the demand for representation in the Assembly, Parliament and Judiciary. Is it ethical on the part of the owners of Indian and Tamil newspapers to ignore such a demand for so long? (Ravikumar 2007, 30).
However, it needs to be seen not merely as an empirical question as the careful inclusion has resulted in the stereotyping of Dalit as the problematic caste self of the Indian ‘Other’. Over the years the Brahman has become the ‘nation’ and the ‘national’, whereas the Dalit has been relegated to the margins as a space of anti-national identitarian caste politics. The Brahman has become invisible as the epitome of secular liberal space and therefore, seen less as a caste self, whereas Dalit that resists such hegemonising politics is projected as ‘casteist’. Hinting towards this modern secular self of the media, S. Anand writes:
Coverage of caste in the Indian media has been equated with reporting on issues that concern the ‘lower castes’ – the dalits and other backward classes (shudras). The mostly urbanised media reflects the common sense of the brahminical upper middle class that caste has always something to do with others and not the dwija (twice-born’, non-Dalit, non-shudra) (Anand 2005, 172-173).
The anti-reservation campaigns of the ilk of ‘Youth for Equality’, the liberal euphoria created by the Aam Admi Party and such like, and Marxist radical politics are all based on similar thinking. Media owners and journalists seem to be ‘frogs in the well’ unleashing modern forms of caste violence on the prospective Dalit journalists. Nagaraju is only the living victim of the same ideological caste violence of Indian national media.
Conclusion
The ‘Dalit-less’ newsrooms in effect erase Dalit writing and silence the Dalit voice in the field of journalism. The question, “Where are the Dalits?” is not only as an empirical one but also an ideological one pointing to the cultural void that structurally makes invisible/silences Dalits in the public domain (Thankappan 2006). The social positioning of Dalit as outcaste gets embedded in the cultural realm of journalism as the latter weaves it into its ideological fabric. The empirical reality of ‘Dalit-less’ or ‘Dalit-silent’ newsrooms defines the cultural space of the Indian national media. This empirical reality of absence/silence/invisibility becomes the nationalist grand narrative of mainstream journalism vis-à-vis the question of Dalit. The regional variation of the same transforms specific cultural modes of narration through which the framing of the Dalit in the journalistic culture takes shape.
Ranjith Thankappan teaches at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
ranjit.ranjit@gmail.com
References:
Ajaz Ashraf. 2013. ‘The untold story of Dalit journalists’, The Hoot, August 13, http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=6956&mod=1&pg= §ionId=19&valid=true (accessed on 6th July 2015)
Ambedkar, B. R. 1945(1991). ‘Plea to the foreigner’ (What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables), in Vasant Moon. Ed. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writing and Speeches, Vol. 9. Bombay: Department of Education, Government of Maharashtra.
Anand, S. 2005. ‘Covering caste: visible Dalit, invisible Brahmin’, in Nalini Rajan. ed. Practising Journalism: Values, Constraints, Implications, pp.172-197. New Delhi: Sage Publications
Jeffrey, Robin. 2003. India’s newspaper Revolution Capitalism, Politics and the Indian Language Press. New Delhi: Oxford University Press
Thankappan, Ranjith.2006. ‘Invisible Dalits’, The Hoot, October 26, http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=2348&mod=1& pg=1§ionId=1&valid=true accessed on July 19, 2015
Thirumal.2008. ‘Situating the New Media: Reformulating the Dalit Question’, in South Asian Technospaces, ed. Gajjala, Radhika and Gajjala, Venkataramana, pp.99-122, New York: Peter Lang
Uniyal, B.N. 1996. ‘In search of a Dalit journalist’, The Pioneer, November 16