There was a time, at least in print media, when reporters were encouraged to find what were called “good news” stories. These days, if you find one, it is entirely accidental. Even so, it is a relief to read something other than stories of political shenanigans, murders and rapes and the spread of communal poison.
The story of how a seven-year-old girl, who went missing in Mumbai in 2013, was finally found early this month is one that was a most welcome change.
In 2013, Mumbai newspapers had reported that on January 22, Pooja left home with her brother to go to school but never came back. She was the 166th girl to go missing as recorded in just one police station. By 2015, 165 had been located. But one remained, as reported in this detailed feature in Indian Express by Smita Nair.
After nine years and seven months, Pooja, now 16 years old, was reunited with her family. She had been lured and kidnapped by a childless couple living in the same area. After they had their own child, the couple sent her away to work with a family just 500 metres from her home, confident that in this period people would have forgotten about her.
In May, Deccan Herald reported on the number of missing children in India. The official figures are probably an underestimate given that reporting is not universal. But they are worrying nonetheless. According to this report: “As per the latest figures of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 59,262 children went missing in India in 2020. With 48,972 children remaining untraced from the previous years, the total number of missing children has gone up to 1,08,234.”
Every story around a missing child contains drama and pathos, more so if the child is a girl. There is always the fear that she could have been kidnapped and trafficked. She could be lost. She might have been taken in by some kind strangers who then decided to adopt her. One reads many such stories.
Yet this story of Pooja has another angle, about a policeman who wouldn’t give up. Rajendra Dhondy Bhosale – a former assistant sub-inspector from Mumbai’s DN Nagar police station, where Pooja’s case was registered – made it his personal mission to try and find her. He did this while he was still in the force, and then continued even after he retired in 2015.
It is also a story about journalism and persistence. What we would not have known is the fact that Bhosale persisted and never gave up. And the reporter, Smita Nair, who with difficulty won his confidence after he retired and persuaded him to talk to her for the 2015 article, kept in touch with him all these years, as she narrates in this podcast. As a result, she was in a position to tell the backstory of this indefatigable ex-policeman.
I mention this particular story because it is a reminder of the many aspects of journalism that are being forgotten in a time of “breaking news” and the push for exclusives.
Good stories require patience. They also need journalists to persist, and to learn to listen, even if what they are being told appears irrelevant to the story they are working on. It is often some irrelevant detail, or the behaviour of a person not central to a story, that leads you to something important.
Unfortunately, few media organisations grant reporters the time to do this. Often, reporters have to pursue stories without any assurance that they will be able to write them for the publications for which they work. For independent journalists, without the backing of a media house, it is even more challenging. Yet the most memorable stories are most often those done by journalists who have these qualities.
These are the journalists who “document the unseen”, a phrase used in a recent talk by Supreme Court Justice DY Chandrachud. Speaking at the Convocation of the OP Jindal Global University, he said, “In the age of fake news and disinformation, we need journalists more than ever to document the unseen and expose the fault lines in our society.”
One of the stories that mainstream media continues not to see is that of Kashmir, or rather only to see and report it partially. By and large, we only read what the government wants us to know about Kashmir such as encounters with militants, or the many apparent achievements of the administration. But is that all there is to report from this region?
Much has been written, including in this column, about how the media has been hollowed out in Kashmir, reducing its once independent media to a virtual cut-and-paste job of government handouts. Forcing independent journalists to either leave the region, or report only for publications outside India and that too at considerable risk. Placing many journalists on a no-fly list without informing them, thereby denying them the right to travel for work. And continuing to imprison journalists whose crime is that they were reporting what the authorities would prefer remain unrecorded.
One could not avoid noticing that on August 5, the third anniversary of the abrogation of Article 370, there was precious little in the print media on Kashmir barring a couple of edit page articles. Most surprising was the Indian Express running a comment piece by the Lt Governor of Kashmir Manoj Sinha as its lead article, with nothing else to balance it. If anything tells us how far mainstream media has travelled in these last years, it is this. Indian Express used to have one of the best bureaus in Kashmir with journalists like Muzamil Jaleel writing incisive reports on developments there. Such reporting has practically disappeared from its pages and is also missing in the rest of mainstream media.
Let me end with this quote from an acerbic piece by Sankarshan Thakur in the Telegraph. He writes about why journalists want access to those in power but what it has to come to mean these days:
“On the face of it, access to those who wield power, those who take the big decisions that impact the people this way or that, is what most good journalists should aspire to. Information, remember, is ammunition. But that is not how access has come to work. It is an invitation to the charmed circle of power, but dog-collared with the omerta pledge, non-compliance to silence will bring consequences...Access no longer allows a journalist information, quite the contrary. Access purchases a journalist’s silence. It’s not remotely an exaggeration to suggest that the journalist is now being accessed by the power establishment than the other way around.”
In fact, the coverage of Kashmir, or the lack of it, is a reflection of precisely this. Thakur argues that Kashmir, or issues to do with minorities are “a handy litmus test” to determine whether media is “anti-national”. On Kashmir, mainstream media passes with flying colours because it has chosen not to “document the unseen”.
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