An Indian court stalling the broadcast of a TV news show has prompted a debate on freedom of speech. Many argue that news media has been increasingly fuelling Islamophobia through content targeting the Muslim minority which forms around 14 percent of country’s 1.36 billion population.
Last week, the 49-seconds promo of a show to be telecast on Hindi news channel Sudarshan News was widely circulated on social media.
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In the promo, Suresh Chavhanke, the channel’s editor-in-chief spoke about a “big expose on Muslims infiltrating civil services.” Chavhanke hinted of possible dangers if the “Jihadis of Jamia” were appointed to crucial government positions—a reference to the coaching academy for civil services aspirants at Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) university in India’s capital New Delhi.
27-year-old Syed Mujtaba, a law scholar at JMI was among thousands of people who saw the promo.
On Friday, August 28, based on Mujtaba’s petition, Delhi High Court stalled the telecast of the show for violating the program code of India’s Cable TV Regulation Act.
“This was urgently required,” Mujtaba told VICE News. “A friend informed me that there was legal recourse and we decided to try that.”
While Indian courts have banned movie releases and the government has taken channels off air, this is a rare occasion when the court stayed the broadcast of a news show.
Critics say that the show, now stalled, is the latest in a string of episodes in which the news media, particularly TV, has been peddling hate speech against Muslims.
“Media organisations always had people in the staff who wanted to set an agenda. Unlike earlier when they were at the margins, now they hold important positions in newsrooms and call the shots,” journalist and writer Mahtab Alam told VICE News. “The taste of the audience has also changed. Sudarshan News programming is despicable but if we judge the channel’s content purely based on ratings, we find that that sensationalism sells.”
This is not the first occasion when Chavhanke’s channel has shown divisive content. In October 2019, the channel attributed the killing of a hard-line Hindu leader to a Muslim parliamentarian. The channel juxtaposed the images of the leader’s dead body with a video clip in which the Muslim politician can be seen dancing. Fact checker AltNews confirmed that the video was not related to the death.
In July 2019, a police report was filed against the channel’s bureau chief in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh for its vitriolic coverage of a land dispute.
Hindi news channels in the country blamed the COVID-19 pandemic on Tablighi Jamaat, one of the largest Islamic missionary organisations in the world.
At the midnight of March 24, India imposed a lockdown in the wake of increasing coronavirus cases. A few days later, the authorities discovered that more than 2,000 Tablighi Jamaat members were staying inside the headquarters in the Nizamuddin area of New Delhi.
The organisation clarified that its members had come to participate in a gathering earlier that month and got stranded because of the lockdown.
In the following weeks, prime-time shows alleged that members of the organisation were involved in a “conspiracy” against the country and were deliberately spreading the virus by spitting and coughing.
News reports regularly associated words like “crime”, “terrorist” and “jihad” with Tablighi Jamaat, found researchers.
“Recently, we have seen multiple gatherings of similar nature across the country even as India is emerging as the virus epicenter. There is not even a whimper on those TV channels,” Pratik Sinha, founder of Alt News, told VICE News.
Independent website Scroll noted that there was a spike in TV programming that promoted communal rifts– real or perceived – during the coverage of the Supreme Court’s decision on the controversial Ayodhya case in November last year. The court allowed the construction of a temple on the disputed land in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya. In 1992, Hindu extremists illegally demolished a 16th century mosque at the site guided by the belief that it was the birthplace of lord Ram and a Hindu temple once stood there.
For the longest time, Indian media has pushed back government interference opting for self regulation through ombudsmen like the News Broadcasters Association and the Broadcasting Content Complaints Council. “We advocate freedom of expression but we cannot encourage hate speech. That is our dilemma,” said Geeta Seshu, senior journalist and member of the Free Speech Collective. “Since self regulation seems to have failed, there is no option other than expecting the state to put a check on such content.”
Among mass media, TV has the largest reach in India, more than a 100 million households.
Vibodh Parthasarathi, associate professor at the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, JMI, said that cost cutting measures at news organisations have led to editorialisation. “There is little live or field reportage in TV news,” he told VICE News. “Most programming during prime time consists of studio based discussions, which offer views not news. Given this trend in programming, it is far easier (than it is in reportage) to spiral into editorial distortions, gross misrepresentations, and emotional appeals,” he said.
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