NL Hafta

On this podcast of Reporters Without Orders, we have Ramnath Goenka award-winner Rahul Kotiyal joining the panel. Currently a freelancer, he has earlier been with Scroll.in's Hindi website Satyagraha and Tehelka. The panel discusses the issues of death penalty, the Dainik Jagran article on Kathua rape, Judge Loya verdict and more. Rahul describes the story that won him the Ramnath Goenka award for Hindi reporting under the print category. “It was a two-part series on organisations in north India that are running an anti-jihad campaign called Beti Bachao, Bahu Lao. This campaign stops girls from having an inter-caste marriage. I reported this from Dehradun,” he says. Nidhi Suresh, our in-house reporter on the ground in Kashmir, elaborates on her story about a 16-year-old minor girl from Kulgam who went missing and the chargesheet was filed a few days ago. Disappointed by the preliminary chargesheet, she says, “The girl said she was drugged. To establish that, they should have conducted a medical examination. It has to be done within 24 hours.” Abhinandan feels that the whole excitement about the death penalty for child rapists is “such a dumb celebration by dumb people for dumb policy and intervention by dumb policymakers.” Amit adds that the incidents that were in the news last week deserved to be covered. They include the sacking of Atishi Marlena, Judge Loya verdict and the impeachment process. On the other hand, “Swati Maliwal’s indefinite hunger strike was not covered by the mainstream media,” he says. On the issue of death penalty, Rahul points out that the media didn't take it the way it should have been taken. It took it as a welcome step. “It was brought in as an ordinance but an ordinance should come in emergency situations; this will bring a regressive change in our legal system.” Furthermore, he discusses that the Dainik Jagran front page article was a culmination of baseless allegations. The article claimed that the Kathua rape never happened. No evidence substantiated the claim. “They claim there were two post-mortem reports but they haven’t presented the reports anywhere. The major and only difference they found is that one had seven injuries and the other one six injuries.” Nidhi calls this as “reflective of our lack of understanding of rape.” The Loya case, Abhinandan believes, deserved more coverage. He points out that the reporting wasn’t dissecting the judgment page-by-page. “On one hand in the same order, they said a judge cannot lie. On the other hand in the same report, there is another judge who says the ECG machine was not working, so he was mistaken.” In the case of death penalty, Rohin argues that when the state cannot give life, how can it take life away? “Nobody is a rapist by birth. Social conditioning contributes to it largely. Even if you give death penalty to the rapist, whom will you blame for social conditioning?” he questions. He further points out that in remote areas, organisations such as Newslaundry, Boom Live, Alt News find it difficult to reach the masses. Hence, publications such as Dainik Jagran circulated a narrative in those areas. Now they feel people are unnecessarily blaming Modi in the Kathua case. While working on the Kulgam case, Nidhi shares that she was disappointed to see that there is interest in the case as long as there is a politician involved. “Let’s face it, Kathua caught fire only because two BJP leaders were involved.” Abhinandan adds: “From the news point of view, there are certain mechanisms that are outcomes of civilisation, governance, democracy, bureaucracy. When that process becomes a perpetrator of the crime, from a macro point of view, it is a failure of the system as opposed to a crime which like Anand Vardhan once said is ‘the banality of crime’.” All this and more on this week’s podcast.