MASS MEDIA

Muhammad Ikhlas On Communal Tendencies in Mass Media

In the fight against communal forces, journalists can play a major role. They can keep their readers and the Government informed about the activities of communal forces and by impartial and just reporting can help in dousing communal flames. But if we analyse the role of the press, we find that a big majority of journalists are aligned with the communal forces and are helping them by spreading lies, half-truths and totally baseless and unfounded stories.

The role of the press has come under scrutiny many a time and the Press Council of India has censured newspapers for printing baseless and unfounded news about communal riots.

The role of the Hindi press in particular on the firing at kar sevaks in October 1990, is still fresh in the nation's memory. The highly exaggerated toll in the police firing at Ayodhya, the character assassination of then Chief Minister of UP, Mulayam Singh Yadav and the baseless reports about the killing of Hindus in Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College of Aligarh Muslim University, are just a few examples of the role journalists play nowadays.

The venom of communalism is spreading unfortunately very fast in the journalist community. In the past it was the Hindi Press or the regional language press, which was afflicted with the communal poison. But during the last 20 years the English press has also slowly gone communal.

These days English newspapers are publishing news and views, which some years back were unimaginable.  It is not that the whole press has gone communal. There are journalists who are truly secular in thought and expression. They are fighting against  communalism. But these are very few and their tribe is vanishing fast!                                                     

 (Source: The Radiance Viewsweekly, 13- July, 97)

Mohammad Tariq Ghazi on Muslims and Mass Media

Muslim reaction is spontaneous, never a calculated response. More than 30 years ago K.M. Munshi, an Indian National Congress leader, and one of the pioneers of Hindu revivalist movement, published Religious Leaders with unacceptable language for the Prophet of Islam (PBUH). Muslims of India came out in streets and were greeted with bullets, several of them dying.

The book was subsequently banned but did not stop others in India and elsewhere from indulging in similar pseudo-intellectual activity. This is already resulting in a new fatigue. And that seems to be ultimate media goal -make something bad acceptable as 'unavoidable', even if evil. The deluge is so great that Muslims practically cannot monitor every worthless piece of paper or celluloid or magnetic tape to cry foul. Some persons and organisations are engaged in monitoring this on a small scale, but due to lack of resources as well as vision, they don't go beyond sharing their photocopied clippings with a few others. It doesn't help.

(They need) a comprehensive media policy. (This) requires a modernistic attitude that must decide the approach to the problem.

That is where the role of their own media emerges. However, the success depends on accepting the fact that their media will need both a degree of independence and an army of imaginative people who know exactly how the media organs work. In short, they have to accept the western approach to information, discarding its social irresponsibility.

This is the sum total of the concept of modernism that the Muslim modernists talks about  Their aim is not to ape the West, but to help the Muslims profit from what is good there and live in today's world respectably, with their heads held high.                                             (Source: The Nation and the World)

Mahendra Ved's Views on the Film Border

As a people while we pay lip service to the 1971 war, we are almost apologetic and even fearful. The silver jubilee celebrations last year were virtually extracted from the government after an outcry by the press and pressures from the armed forces.

This squeamishness has surfaced again over Border, a film centring around the battle of Longewala, but claiming no authenticity. It is being planned for being jingoistic, communal and anti-people in that it could reopen wounds that are supposed to have healed. It is said to be perpetuating male chauvinism in soldiers'  neglect (of) their women back at home for the sake of the mythical Bharatmata.

Some retired officers, who were part or the action, feel that the film has ignored the role of the Indian Air Force and that the Army has run away with all the glory. The film has been accused of distorting truth and attempting to rewrite history.

It is true that at Longewala, where Major (now retired brigadier) Kuldip Singh Chandpuri and his men were besieged by a massive Pakistani force, the decisive role was played by the IAF. The Hunters flying from Jaisalmer reduced a tank regiment of Pakistani army to rubble and smoke after sending them scurrying in circles (making it) the biggest graveyard for tanks since the battle of Al Alamein in the World War II.

The IAF is the Vijeta at Longewala. But how can that take away the credit from Chandpuri and his men, just 120 of them, against 55 tanks and 2000 infantrymen? They had won in an entirely unequal confrontation.

Longewala is important because it was won Border movie a good quarter of a century later at a time when India and Pakistan are in a conciliatory mood. As we move towards the end of the century, it is time to determine our own borders, our own parameters as a people.,

The world elsewhere is integrating and political barriers are coming down, at a pace faster than we can match. If only we South Asian, carrying our multi-ethnic, multi-cultural baggage over the centuries, could skip this evolutionary process and catch up with the world?

(Source: The Times of India, 7 July, 1997)