Backstory: The Quality of Empathy Is What Makes Journalism

"What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?" I was recently reminded of that classic line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which refers to the way an actor in a Greek play was able to recreate the heart-wrenching grief of Hecuba on hearing of her husband’s death, despite the actor himself having no personal relationship with Hecuba, the character.

The capacity to convey what another person is experiencing is certainly central to the dramatic arts. It is also one that is crucial for journalism and can potentially irradiate it, taking it to another level. I was reminded of this line from Hamlet, after a careful reader sent me a piece on the recent building collapse in Dongri, Mumbai, which he said had pierced his heart and made him cry.

As I read the piece myself, I realised what he meant: the unending trauma, utter desperation and subsequent inestimable loss, of a mother trapped under the house collapse, literally “hearing” her two young children under the rubble dying bit by bit, came through with every word. The experience was almost a rerun of the experiences of the Kanojia family captured in The Wire report, ‘Death by Apathy: The Aftermath of the Malad Wall Collapse’ (July 16). Here a child was swept away as water gushed into their room. Her distraught father was quoted as saying, “Jahnavi was sleeping next to me but she was gone before I could reach out for her hand.”

This is not an argument for tear-jerking journalism. This is a plea for journalism that reminds us that no matter who we are and where we are located, we are ultimately human. A journalism that is centred on this principle is critical in today’s world where successful political mobilisation is becoming increasingly dependent on stripping people of their humanity, identity and statehood, where elections are won on the crushing of sections of the larger community, often through names left out in a register.

The citizen is visible, the non-citizen is the shadow; the citizen is articulate, the non-citizen is forced into silence and otherness. As the National Register of Citizens process draws closer to its deadline of July 31, let us – the rest of us in this country – also hear the pendulum of time beat against our skulls like it must surely do for the millions who now face the erasure of their Indian citizenship. Can our journalism do what the poet Maulana Bande Ali did, when he wrote in 1939 (‘Miyah Poetry Weaves a World of Suffering and Humiliation in Contemporary Assam’, July 3):

“Neither charuwa, nor pamua
I am an Asomiya.
Of Assam’s earth and air
I am an equal claimant.”

The challenge today before Indian journalists is two-fold: the aggressive drive to normalise the erasure of people belonging to the wrong box of a register and the oceanic apathy of those who certainly observe what is going on but say nothing, do nothing. Long before Donald Trump articulated a raw xenophobia by telling four Congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came” a few days ago, we have had politicians like a Giriraj Singh telling citizens of this country to “go back to Pakistan” (‘You May Think You Are an Indian Citizen, but Can You Convince the State?’, July 18) or an Amit Shah reducing human beings to termites.

All these politicians are playing to their base, and gaining huge political support in the process, but neither Singh nor Shah have not been subjected in the same degree to angry denunciation within the mainstream media, as has Trump. The collective failure is right here. It is in this context that one asks the question: Can journalism through its capacities for creating public empathy, provide form and voice to those threatened with non-citizenship, bring the lost ‘Other’ into its ambit?

This country, argues an article in The Wire, “knows the trauma of refugees, knows it intimately, and on many fronts. If the 1947 Partition, and the 1971 Bangladesh war of liberation produced one kind of refugees, the displacement of tribals by massive economic projects produced another mass of landless people” (‘Floods and NRC: A Toss up Between Life and Citizenship’, July 18). Fact is that the lessons of a refugee past are being re-learnt in disturbing new ways.

There is a whiff of Buchenwald in the growing detention camps for “foreigners” in Assam, and the promise of the pattern being replicated in other states is being made – not just through electoral perorations but within the sanctity of Parliament. One of the first moves made by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, under its new minister – Amit Shah – was to expand the scope the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964, so that it could be made applicable in all Indian states and Union territories (‘Expanding Foreigners Tribunals May Be Amit Shah's First Step to Pushing NRC Across India’, June 12).

The architecture of New India is all about expanding the sites of repression and shrinking of spaces for freedoms and dissent. The assault on the Right to Information Act has begun in right earnest and journalists, who benefit professionally from this law, would need to be aware of the repercussions of the Government of India’s latest move to curtail the autonomy of the  information commissioners (‘Amid Protests, RTI Amendment Bill Introduced in the Lok Sabha’, July 19).

The Modi government in its earlier avatar had successfully undermined the independence of several institutions crucial for the country’s democratic functioning. One of the ways this was done was by destroying the autonomy and authority of those who headed it. Who can forget the unceremonious ouster accorded to Alok Verma, head of CBI, the moment he appeared to mildly threaten the political status quo? The Central government  had tried to amend the RTI law last year as well, but backed off in the face of a growing public backlash at a time when a general election was drawing near. This time, as Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, put it to The Wire, the government, “emboldened by the big majority” this time, has promptly revived the earlier Bill.

The RTI, the government has to be emphatically reminded, has emerged from a people’s movement and many ordinary men and women have come to understand its value and power. A study conducted in 2016, estimated that 4,800 applications are filed every day, and that in the ten years since the RTI Act came into force in 2006,  a total of 1.75 crore applications have been filed. As Aruna Roy wrote in her introduction to ‘The RTI Story - Power to the People’, “The RTI narrative is a celebration of ordinary people and their immense contribution to strengthening the pillars of democratic justice in modern India.” Those pillars, it appears, are under grave assault.

Look who came to dinner

The last fortnight threw up so many developments related to the media, that it is difficult to keep up! There was, for one, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman declaring the North Block as “verboten” to journalists, even senior ones who have had a long and easy relationship with policy makers located in the building. Sitharaman followed this up sweetly with an invitation to the customary post-budget dinner for the media, leaving her invitees in confusion. Some found in themselves the stomach to dine with the Minister even though they were still smarting under the restrictions imposed on them, but they had to face the ire – spoken and unspoken – of their colleagues who had stayed away on principle. NDA 2:0 has learnt well the tactics of our colonial rulers: divide and rule is the way to go.

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Such restrictions notwithstanding, India is a bastion for media freedoms, argued three government-friendly representatives of the community – Dr A. Surya Prakash, chairperson of Prasar Bharati; Dr Swapan Dasgupta, Rajya Sabha MP and columnist, and Kanchan Gupta, former director of the Maulana Azad Centre for Indian Couture in Cairo under the Vajpayee regime – at a global conference for media freedom in London.

They also expressed their vexation over the rank of 140 given to India in the World Press Freedom Index. Pointing to the “media boom” in India over the last two decades, Surya Prakash believed that it would not have been possible without “a healthy and happy democracy". Dasgupta attributed this attack on India’s media freedom record to the usual suspects and their “activist-driven agenda”. Oh well, at least some in the Indian media community are content with the current state of play, unlike us professional whingers!

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Meanwhile, news comes in that the government publicity organ, the Press Information Bureau, is thinking of coming out with its own “fact-checking” unit to counter fake news – in order to keep India “a healthy and happy democracy” no doubt. Question is, who will fact check, the government’s fact-checkers?

When the government and its gendarmes seek to control media content, there is an inherent and dangerous conflict of interest. Which was what former guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, was signalling when he tore into Metropolitan Police of the UK for daring to tell newspaper editors not to publish material that could be classified as secret. As he put it in a recent column, “What, you wonder, do they teach them in police college these days? Gangs, cyber crime, forensics, public safety, drugs – there’s doubtless a lot to learn. But I would like to suggest a new and compulsory course, let’s call it The Basics Of Free Speech.” Lesson number 1? The police do not tell newspaper editors what to write.

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“Such a wonderful article!” That is the way The Wire reader, Arulsaravanan, described the piece, ‘Why Do Dravidian Intellectuals Admire a Man as Prickly as Periyar?’ (September 29, 2017), “such a wonderful article”. But there is a detail in it that seems wrong to him: “It's about the CM of Madras Presidency in 1927. The CM did not belong to Swarajya Party or Justice Party. In the Assembly elections which took place on 8 November 1926, no party was able to get a clean majority. The Swaraj Party won 41 of the 98 seats and emerged as the single largest party while the Justice Party won 21. It was a setback for the Justice Party and its incumbent Chief Minister, the Raja of Panagal. However, none of the parties could form the Government as they did not have a clean majority. The Governor invited the Swarajya Party to take the lead in forming a coalition government but the latter refused. The Justice Party did not have enough seats. Hence, the Governor chose Subbarayan Gounder, who was not affiliated to either of these parties, to form the Government and nominated 34 new members to the Madras Legislative Council to support him. An independent ministry was formed with A. Ranganatha Mudaliar and R. N. Arogyaswamy Mudaliar as the second and third ministers. The Justice Party took the place of an opposition."

Thank you for that bit of history, Arulsaravanan. Although it comes almost two years after this article was first published, it’s never too late when it comes to history!

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I was particularly touched by mail from a reader who is 93 years of age and terribly saddened by the rising incidents of hate crimes in the country. R.C. Modi writes: “The country is passing through an agonising period of values changing irrevocably. For those who grew up in the India of Gandhi-Nehru (please note, it’s not Nehru Gandhi), it is painful to witness, in the closing years of their lives, developments they had never anticipated would ever happen.”

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