Backstory: 2020 Will End, but the Anxieties and Trepidations It Has Brought Won't A fortnightly column from The Wire's public editor.

Backstory: 2020 Will End, but the Anxieties and Trepidations It Has Brought Won't

A woman walks past by a graffiti depicting Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro adjusting his protective face mask and viruses, amid the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil July 2, 2020. Photo: Reuters

Pamela Philipose, The Wire : Most years come with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. As T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘Little Gidding’:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

And next year’s words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

But the year 2020 may make an end, but doesn’t seem to give rise to beginnings. A year bookended by two major, pan-national protests – one involving equality of citizenship for 195 million Indian Muslims; the other, about a fair and sustainable livelihood for 50% of the country’s population who live off the land – may be drawing to a close in terms of the calendar, but the anxieties and trepidations it has brought continue to infuse the air and look set to spill into the new year.

There has been no closure to any of the challenges we witnessed over the last 12 months. The pandemic continues to cull human lives. The new vocabulary of contagion we have acquired – unfamiliar words like ‘contact tracing’, ‘social distancing’, ‘self-quarantining’, ‘super-spreader’, ‘co-morbidities’, ‘aerosols’, ‘antibodies’, ‘flattening the curve’ or the alphabet soup of acronyms like SARS-CoV2, PPE, ARI, N-95, IARD – will mark next year’s conversations as well. There will also be the verbal baggage that vaccinations have brought with them, from ‘adverse drug reactions’ and ‘herd immunity’, to ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and ‘universal immunisation’.

The various crises wrought by the pandemic have also not gone away. The impacts of a COVID-induced mass migration disrupted and demolished life and livelihood for those inhabiting the lowest tiers of society. They continue to wreak havoc. A demolished schooling system now rejigged through distance learning and the virtual classroom is unlikely to find full restoration in the immediate future and could mean a doubling of the estimated 32 million Indian children out-of-school.

The spike in domestic violence that occurred within the char diwari of the home, now turned into a torture chamber, signal serious abnormalities in sexual and marital relationships – an unspoken crisis unlikely to dissipate in the near future. The shadow of COVID-19 fell over a poorly provisioned public health delivery system in 2020 and things are unlikely to change in 2021. New priorities like the delivery of COVID-19 vaccine could greatly strain our already creaking health infrastructure.

It was a year that had a majoritarian state, presided over by an authoritarian leader, displaying a streak of calculated cruelty that would have condemned as abominable in more normal times. An announcement of a lockdown with a four-hour notice amidst the suspension of public transport, left those suddenly bereft of jobs, kitchen fires and roofs, scrambling to find a way back to the distant places they called home, with their sacks of belongings and babes in arms. This, while the highly-risen residents of gated communities lit lamps on balconies in deference to the prime minister’s instructions, believing that the virus would indeed be defeated in 21 days under his dynamic leadership. Yet the disease raged on for the rest of the year taking away 1.45 lakh lives. COVID-19 provided cover for the Modi government to render null and void the gains of decades of social reform and trade union activism, with even something as basic as an eight-hour work-day no longer guaranteed. An iPhone factory in Bengaluru, with 8,500 temporary workers, that erupted in a fireball of worker rage a few days ago symbolise the potential dangers inherent in such policies.

The pandemic provided a capacious space for the state to hasten the expropriation of people’s commons – whether on land or sea. Forests vanished overnight, mines mushroomed, stretches of the coast, re-assigned to captains of industry. Unsurprisingly, a year that saw the visible immiseration of large numbers of people also saw Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani add $19.1 billion and $16.4 billion to their respective kitties. We will never know whether any of this flowed into the ruling party’s treasury, given the firewalls of opacity built around the party and its election funding, but expressing gratitude we know is part of our culture. Mukesh Ambani’s abject display of appreciation to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in a recent conversation for investing $5.7 billion (Rs 43,574 crore) in Jio Platforms was especially telling, when he revealed with disarming frankness that the COVID-19 crisis is “too precious to be wasted”. Facebook did not waste it either. The year revealed – notably through the investigations of the Wall Street Journal – how deeply imbricated it is in the country’s socio-political scene, and how it has deliberately, systematically helped BJP draw political power out of information technology, often through expediting hate speech. The big prize in 2021 is the rollout of 5G, and one can expect a lot of market consolidation accompanying this process.

Mark Zuckerberg and Mukesh Ambani. Photos: Twitter

The year 2020 saw a great deal of hate speech, with a minister of the Narendra Modi government, no less, raising the murderous slogan, “Desh ke gaddaron ko/goli maro s….n ko” at a public meeting. But this was just an outcome of ruling politics of deliberate and targeted cruelty. The manner in which the voices of farmer protestors at Delhi’s borders is presently being ignored in a season of near-zero temperatures and a raging pandemic, testifies to this. The government in its wisdom believes that arrogance and an adamantine resolve not to rollback its repressive policies – first manifested during the anti-CAA-NPR-NRC agitation – are signs of its political unassailability now centralised in the figure of one man.

The appetite of the police to deploy repressive laws to jail people – who ranged from young idealistic students dreaming of a better India to some of the country’s best known public intellectuals – was insatiable. The malicious viciousness of the security establishment came into plain view when elderly prisoners on the point of physical collapse were denied hospital care; when even a sipper and a straw for hands affected by Parkinson’s or a pair of spectacles for eyes rendered near-blind, were denied to those incarcerated. There was a determined stripping away of human rights carried out by the state throughout 2020, as the extra-judicial detentions and torturous interrogations in secret cells in Kashmir indicated. In Uttar Pradesh, summary executions of those deemed gangsters, and the medieval practice of publicly posting the identities of dissidents framed as “enemies of the state”, are now the norm. Will 2021 see further “refinements” to existing models of carceral governance? Very likely.

The corporate media in a year that demanded their closest attention, remained faithful to a model honed over the last six years of amplifying the government’s narrative and iconising the prime minister, while pulverising the opposition, framing dissidents as anti-nationals and stigmatising minorities – most notoriously in their contorted, communalised reporting of the Tablighi Jamaat and its attendees as “super spreaders” of the virus. It was a year that saw some of the country’s most influential television channels devote three months of non-stop coverage to the death by suicide of an actor at a time when the pandemic was at its height, and a major confrontation between China and India had broken out on the border.

The sole moment of glory for the corporate media this year was when the solicitor general of India defined journalists as “vultures” in the Supreme Court for their coverage of the distress of migrants in the immediate aftermath of lockdown. Sustained reportage on this and related themes were, however, quickly snuffed out by a government determined to ensure that only its script on the pandemic would prevail. A year that saw the haemorrhaging of the media sector with the pandemic cited as the reason for extensive closures of establishments and job terminations – conservatively, at least a thousand staffers lost their jobs this year – also saw rising state repression against mediapersons  (‘55 Indian Journalists Arrested, Booked, Threatened For Reporting on COVID-19: Report’, June 16).

With so much that needs to change, it would be profoundly distressing if 2021 proves to be a mere extension of 2020. Next year’s words so desperately await another voice.

Farmers’ protests

One of the metrics by which to measure the callousness of the government towards the protesting farmers is of course the deaths that are steadily growing in number. Among the protesters, we saw women poignantly bearing the portraits of their husbands, sons and brothers, who died by suicide because of the agrarian crisis. In an ironic replay of this death tableau, the protests have seen over 20 death (Protesting Farmer Passes Away at Singhu Border, Allegedly Due to the Cold’; ‘Farmers’ Protest: Sikh Cleric Dies By Suicide’, December 17) apart from those lives lost in accidents. This comes as a reminder that there were no less than 10,281 farmers’ suicides in 2019 according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

Journalists reporting on the agitation have also had their brushes with death. IBN24 journalist Akarshan Uppal, who courageously reported some days ago from an area in Haryana close to where Gautam Adani is said to have acquired vast stretches of land, ostensibly to build warehouses for agro-products, was a few days later severely attacked by goons. He is now left with severe head and body injuries in a Karnal hospital. Uppal, in one of his reports, had in fact alluded to the threat for journalists seeking to report on this story from company hirelings keeping a vigil over the area.

Meanwhile we need to note how hard the ruling party and government, along with their media, are working to define this agitation. The social template used to crush the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protest is constantly being refashioned to suit new conditions, which is why The Wire did well to publish the piece, ‘How the BJP Tried to Manipulate Public Opinion on Social Media in Favour of the CAA’ (December 17, 2020).

Farmers arrive in a tractor to attend a protest against the newly passed farm bills at Singhu border near New Delhi, India, December 14, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

The Mirror cracked

Rarely has a demise of a city newspaper created national consternation as did the departure of the daily edition of Mumbai Mirror. This had a great deal to do with the courage and derring-do of its editor, Meenal Baghel. She was once a colleague in the Indian Express and even at that early stage had demonstrated a yen for city news and an understanding that being local does not mean sealing oneself off from national conversations. As the piece, ‘With the Death of Mumbai Mirror, a Connection With the City Is Lost’ (December 7) indexed, Mumbai Mirror was unafraid to showcase an Amartya Sen quote at a point when Sen was not exactly in the Modi government’s good books. It also found it pertinent to narrate the tragedy of 16 migrant workers, footing it from Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh and getting run over by a goods train in May, in the boldest, in-your-face way possible. But perhaps the most important reason why this newspaper had made a mark was because, it “remained its independent self, doing stories that were often critical of the state and Central government, in a completely professional way.”

This indicates that as journalistic platforms get compromised under a hectoring, anti-media regime, there is a growing desire in readers for independent, meaningful journalism.

When PARI takes wing

It is this search for media content that is independent and relevant that also keeps the People’s Archive of Rural India – which describes itself as “A journalism website reporting the stories of 833 million rural Indians, an archive of the living past, a journal of the present, a textbook of the future” – going. Over the last few days, PARI added two more awards to its kitty. Its writer, 25-year-old Jigyasa Mishra, was bestowed the Press Institute of India-International Committee of the Red Cross journalism award 2020. The Silver prize of WAN-IFRA’s South Asian Digital Media Awards, 2020, also came its way in the category, ‘Best Special Project for Covid-19’. Notching 27 awards in a short span of existence is not bad at all. PARI celebrates its sixth anniversary this December.

Support Assange!

As 2020 ends, the call for the release of Julian Assange goes out again. Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on torture, in a public statement noted: “Mr. Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.” A decade has passed since Assange has been detained. The maximum-security UK prison in Belmarsh, where he is now lodged in near-solitary conditions, has seen 65 of its 160 inmates contract COVID-19. Melzer noted, “First and foremost, alternative non-custodial measures should be extended to those with specific vulnerabilities, such as Mr. Assange, who suffers from a pre-existing respiratory health condition.” He also reiterated his call to the British authorities not to allow his extradition to the US due to serious human rights concerns.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen as he leaves a police station in London, Britain April 11, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Peter Nicholls

Readers’ reponses

Media apathy

Inderjit Singh Jaijee from village Chural Kalan, Sangrur: “I read your piece ‘Backstory: Farmers’ Protest and Callousness – as the Media Sows, So Will They Reap’ (December 5) with great interest.  To be brutally frank, I read it with a sense of ‘been there, done that’. My home is Village Chural Kalan, District Sangrur, Punjab. For the past many 30 years I have kept track of suicide deaths in the 135 villages within about a 20 km radius of my village: in 2019,107 farmers took their own lives. In 2018 the number dipped to 85; 2017 figure was 90; 2016 it was 92; 2015 the figure was back up to 107 and in 2014 it was 80. I am not concocting figures — I have proof of every single case; if anyone wants to meet the widows, orphans, elderly parents of these suicide victims I can personally take them to the affected family. You write that the media is disinterested in events/trends pertaining to rural India.  You are completely correct. I am not a celebrity, able to command attention, but neither am I uneducated. I present the situation clearly and moreover, I ask reporters not to believe me but to see for themselves. I have invited reporters, I have written articles myself.  I have tried relentlessly to place the problem of Punjab’s rural suicides before the media. I would estimate my success rate at about 1 hit in 50 misses.  Such is the rarity of journalists interested in rural distress and ready to put in the effort to report it.  Maybe the fault lies with their editors. Maybe the fault lies with the idea that newspapers have an urban readership, turned off by everything except film stars and fashion trends.”

The PM should listen

Akansha writes: “There is no denying the fact that the farmers’ protests going on in various parts of India and on the borders of the national capital have a larger representation of farmers from Punjab. The television media has sought to divert the attention of the viewers from farmer’s protests to the Sikh community by maligning them as Khalistanis and the like. Meanwhile, the PMO is trying to reach out to Sikhs by releasing an e-booklet entitled, ‘PM Modi And His Government’s Special Relationship With Sikhs’. Its cover bears an image of Narendra Modi wearing a saffron turban to impress the Sikh community, with whom he claims to have a special relationship. Even if Sikhs fall for this PR stunt, the fact is that the farmers’ protest will continue if their demands are not heard. The protest provides the prime minister with a chance to listen to the farmers’ voice and understand their needs.”

The PM has spoken

Shridhar Alurkar: “This is with reference to ‘Why Won’t PM Modi Speak With India’s Farmers When He Has Time for Everything Else? I Farm Law’ (December 8).In this video, your reporter has compared PM Modi with former prime minister Manmohan Singh, claiming that PM Modi has not said a word about the Kisan Andolan. Your platform is opposed to the prime minister without any doubt, and our constitution gives you freedom of speech and thought. But as a human being and journalist, you also have a sacred responsibility to be true and fair. PM Modi has time and again publicly stated that the three farm laws are in the interests of the farming community. Therefore to claim that “PM Modi has not said a word on it……..”  is a total lie. I am sure you will not agree with my mail, but it is my democratic right to disagree with you.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: PTI

Why the silence?

Jayant Shetty: “During the Anna Hazare movement and the Nirbhaya case the media did back-to-back coverage on the protests. Why are they now silent on the farmers’ anguish? The nation certainly wants to know.”

Spare us this nonsense!

Muralidhara H.B. from Mumbai: “I really enjoy all that is published on The Wire and look forward to reading it every morning. Having said that, I wondered why you stooped so slow as to publish some rubbish interview of Pragya Thakur done by ANI? (‘Shudras ‘Feel Bad’ About Being Called Shudras Because They Are ‘Ignorant’: BJP’s Pragya Thakur’, December 14). She is known for uttering nonsense and yet the media goes behind her for cheap bites. They may have a readership but you must leave that readership to the ‘godi media’. Moreover, ANI itself is known to spread dubious news. Please stop publishing such stories.”

Release these scholarships

V.P. Sanu, president, and Mayukh Biswas, general secretary, Students Federation of India (SFI): “SFI condemns the JKPMSS (Jammu and Kashmir Prime Minister Special Scholarship) department of AICTE (All India Council of Technical Education) for not releasing full scholarship of the odd semesters to the students hailing from Jammu and Kashmir. While the college fees have been processed by the JKPMSS Department, the maintenance fee remains pending. JKPMSS office bearers have made it known that according to ministry orders, maintenance charges will not be released as long as the colleges remain shut. The argument is that there was no need for maintenance charges as the students were not present in the colleges physically since they were studying from home, and therefore they were not incurring expenses. This is illogical. The inaccessibility of 4G internet in the valley has made it difficult for students to attend online classes. Online education, downloading study materials, research and project preparation is very difficult with 2G connectivity. The students have to incur additional charges to buy extra data packs for the extended online classes and for the installation of broadband services. Procurement of a feasible device for online education (phone/laptop) to cope up with online classes becomes essential too. These students have only access to college and university libraries, so they depend solely on physical books. The students who are in their final years of graduation also need to acquire materials and books to prepare for their post-graduate entrance examinations. All this costs money. Maintenance charges should have been disbursed urgently so that students can cope in these difficult conditions. These scholarships are given on the basis of need and merit. Every year, students from lower economic background depend entirely on scholarships for their higher studies and if full scholarships are denied to them they may be forced to drop-out. SFI demands the release of full scholarships to these students as soon as possible.”

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