Let There Be Warmth!

On November 26, 2008, 9 attackers held the city of Mumbai to hostage using a variety of tactics which included shootings and bombings, killing at least 175 people, and injuring another 300. After the incident, I saw the custom message of a very good friend, “What the Fuck.  Time to Nuke the shit out of Pakistan”. After sometime, he changed it to “Pakistan, Fuck You. No, Nuke You.” Two classmates and friends actually weighed the costs and benefits of attacking Pakistan with after that. Calling it a heated debate would be an understatement.

In the year 2007, South Asia was devastated by multiple floods. The World Bank, Oxfam, The BBC, Reuters, New Scientist, The DFID, all covered the issue extensively. Even the New York Times carried a report. 20 Million people had been displaced, another 30 million ‘affected’. The UNICEF had called it “the worst flooding in living memory.” But did media in South Asia bother?

Out of a total 53 links referenced in the Wiki page, only 2 referenced Indian news sites. Bias of the guy who wrote the wiki entry? Probably. I will be glad if you can point out an South Asian media article which covers the issue in its entirety. I tried searching, but couldn’t find any. I might be accused of being condescending or patronising, but very few of my batchmates even know that something like this happened. I shouldn’t blame them for the faults of the Indian media. There was hardly any systematic or overall coverage of he floods in the south asian press. Whatever coverage was there, was of events – “19 killed in Bihar”. “Floods devastate Patna”. One was about how flights in Delhi airport had been affected and were delayed.

On April 6, 2010, in Dantewada, Southern Chattisgarh, Naxalites killed 76 CRPF Jawans, in what has been the deadliest strike on Indian security forces by the Maoists. After the attack, another very good friend from the state had the custom message: “Fuck the Naxals”. I also saw the BJP’s war cry slogan, “Fight to the Finish” in three custom messages. No, I did not bother asking him why, or the impact on ordinary tribal people of this fight to the finish. It was the hostel nights season, and no-one really had time.

In a class intended for 4th Year students of Development Studies, a very well-respected professor from my department made the statement,

“This 35 Kilograms of Rice through the PDS is just making people lazy. In every village of Orissa, you will find that people just play cards. You see, they don’t have to work anymore, their food is guaranteed.” A batchmate said the same thing two days later: “Dude, I was in Delhi, and I met this guy who is doing his PhD from Oxford. Damn stud guy. He told me that people are not willing to work in Kalahandi in Orissa – precisely because of what our prof said.” (India’s Public Distribution System, in theory, entitles subsidised grain to poor families in India)

The fact is (yes, the fact is) that people die of starvation in Orissa. There is no systematic assessment of the number of deaths per year, except stray media reports, like this one, which reports 50 starvation deaths in just one district, Balangir. Instead of owning up and improving the functioning of the PDS in the Balangir (Balangir lies in the notorious Kalahandi-Balangir-Koraput (KBK) region), the district administration chose to call it deaths caused by Malaria. Two out of 5 poor households do not have a BPL card (the card which gets them the subsidised grain) because of a flawed BPL survey in 2002. Those who do have a card find that Fair Price Shops dont open for weeks (sometimes months), that most of the grain they are entitled to is sold in the open market, that when the shop does open, they cannot get enough money to buy the grain and that by the time they reach the shop, it gets closed. In 2007, 40.9% of the children in Orissa were under-weight (compared to 24.6% in Punjab) and the Infant Mortality Rate was 9.1 per 100 (compare it to Kerala’s 1.6).

Development Economist Jean Dreze did an analysis of articles and reports in the Media on issues of Hunger, nutrition and health. He wrote, “The Hindu, one of the finest English-medium dailies, publishes two opinion articles every day on its editorial page.  In a recent count of these opinion articles over a period of six months (January to June 2000), it was found that health, nutrition, education, poverty, gender, human rights and related social issues combined accounted for barely 30 out of 300 articles.  Among these 300 articles, not one dealt with health or nutrition.” Further, “When I repeated the exercise for the period of January-June 2003, I did find an article dealing with health – it was about the SARS crisis in China!”

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists hijacked 4 commercial Airliners in the United States. Two of them were crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City, killing 2995, and injuring more than 6000. 10 days after this tragedy, the US President George W. Bush gave an address to a Joint Address of the US Congress. “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Also, “Any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

On March 29, 2010, an article appeared in the Outlook Magazine. Written by Arundhati Roy, it was called “Walking with the Comrades.” Indeed, Arundhati had spent a substantial time walking with the comrades, one of the few people to bother doing so. She wrote,

“Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of MoUs with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved. Therefore, this war.”

Arundhati did not bother to explain further, or provide evidence. She might have been true, but I have no way to find out from her article.

Many of us, students of Development Studies, were quite surprised with the findings of the Arjun Sengupta committee that 836 Million Indians lived below Rs 20 a day. “Dude, how is that possible? What is the poverty line set at, then?” After sometime, we came to terms with the fact the finding is probably true (The number of people living below PPP $2 Dollars in India throws up a similar number.) My classmate recently said, “I still find it hard to believe. In fact, I don’t want to believe it.”

My point in posting these instances? I think that when we talk, raise an important point,  discuss issues, we are missing something vital. Warmth. When we say “Fuck The Naxals” or “You are either with us, or against us”, we exhibit some kind of smugness, for we are not concerned about the lives of millions of other citizens of the world, but only with our rage. We generate heat, without either light, or warmth.

On the other hand, it is equally possible to be concerned about certain things (warmth), and be angry about them (heat), without having some kind of a reality check, or without bothering to explain the facts to others, even if you know them. Arundhati Roy writes like that. If I am not acquainted with the issue, I find it extremely difficult to follow what she wants to say.

The Indian Media’s reporting of many pertinent issues that affect the poor, such as hunger, health, or livelihoods leaves much to be desired. They don’t generate light. Indeed, had coverage of such issues been decent, it would have been possible to turn the heat on the government, for instance in the case of floods in 2007. Because media coverage was so wanting, governments could happily ignore this issue.

When we don’t bother about light in the way we discuss and argue about pertinent issues, we patronise. Without warmth, we polarize. And without heat, we often end up defeating our causes. All three are necessary. So let there be warmth, light and heat! Oh, and yes, I think that the order is important. Warmth, then light, and if required, heat.