Earlier the media was expected to speak the truth to the power that be but now it also needs to speak the truth about that power.
Magsaysay award-winning journalist-author P. Sainath said this while delivering the second Father Stan Swamy memorial lecture on “Governance by gagging and the moral universe of media” at XISS auditorium in Ranchi on Sunday afternoon.
The process of governance by gagging adopts various strategies, he said whiledelivering the memorial lecture organised by the Jharkhand branch of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL).
“Institutionalisaton of injustice” had become the order of the day, he said, adding the injustice was being done in socio-religious and economic spheres where fundamentalism, market economy and even corporate media play roles.
Sainath further said that governance by gagging often resort to extra-legal means and considers dissent as a crime and added the government was not only reviving certain century-old laws but was also strengthening those by adding more rules related to those for suppressing dissent.
He also deplored therole played by the corporate media that was far from expectation.
“Mainstream media is a misnomer as it ignores the majority of the population living in the countryside,” he said, adding field reporting from rural areas was negligible in such media.
“Though about 69 per cent of our population live in rural areas, news coverage from those areas is a dismal 0.67 per cent of the total coverage in the media,” he elaborated.
Inequality, be it economic, social or gender, was the biggest problem in the country and it would get worse in future, he added.
“I interviewed over 20 living freedom fighters of the country before writing my book, The last heroes: Foot soldiers of Indian freedom, and one of them said they fought for the country’s independence and people’s freedom but got only independence,” Sainath said, adding there lay the actual problem.
“Everything is not lost, there is still a space called ‘hope’ between fake optimism and cynical pessimism,” he replied when a member of the audience asked if all hopes were lost.
It’s fake optimism when someone claims that that the country’s GDP will grow many fold within a short period and cynical pessimism is when one says everything is over, Sainath explained, adding all, including the media, should uphold morality and act accordingly.
PUCL instituted the lecture in memory of Father Stan Swamy, a defender of tribal rights who was picked up by the National Investigation Agency in 2020 for his alleged involvement in Bhima Koregaon case that the Jesuit priest vehemently denied saying he had never visited that area. Despite being sick, Father Stan was denied bail and died in a Mumbai hospital on July 5 in 2021.
The first Stan memorial lecture was derived by eminent legal expert Faizan Mustafa, then vice-chancellor of National Academy of Legal Studies and Research, Hyderabad.