On
the evening of December 16, 2012 a 23-year-old woman and her male companion
boarded one of the private buses which often ply the roads of Delhi, the
bustling metropolis and capital of India .
These buses charge travelers a nominal amount to take them short
distances.
The
detail of the events which followed have been covered extensively by the Indian
and international media. The woman, a physiotherapy intern, was raped by a
group of men inside the moving bus; she was beaten and mutilated with an iron
rod to the point that she was disemboweled. Battered, naked and bleeding
profusely, the two were dumped near an expressway in Delhi, where they were
found by a passer-by. The woman died from her injuries thirteen days later
while undergoing emergency treatment in Singapore.
Six men
were charged in connection with the assault and were arrested. Police claim
that the main accused, the driver of the bus, Ram Singh, has since committed
suicide in prison; the rest of the men await trial in Delhi’s Tihar jail.
What was
new about this news story?
Delhi, after all, had frequently been referred to as the rape
capital of the world with 706 rapes reported in 2012, and a city where,
activists believe, the majority of rapes go unreported. Conviction rates
are near zero; one person was convicted of rape in Delhi in the year 2012 and
he received a prison sentence of three years, light by Western standards. Most
rapists are simply ticketed and let go. With more than 24,000 reported cases in
2011, rape in India registered a 9.2% rise over the previous year. More than
half (54.7%) of the victims were aged between 18 and 30 and Delhi accounted for
over 17% of the total number of rape cases in the country. Research by economists Siwan
Anderson and Debraj Ray estimates that in India, more than two
million women go missing every year, starting in utero (with sex-selective
abortion), followed by a life of violence, inadequate healthcare, inequality,
neglect, bad diet, and lack of attention to personal health and
well-being.
“MEDIA HAS GIVEN THE MIDDLE-CLASS A
VOICE”
“This case has jolted the consciousness of middle-class India
like never before,” says Vipul Mudgal, renowned journalist and media scholar at
the Delhi-based think-tank, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Denying that
the coverage in the media was only about rape, Mudgal suggests, “What’s
different [about this story] is that the media has given the middle-class a
voice.”
Like the
rest of the economy, media in India have undergone enormous changes in the past
two decades. Post economic liberalization, Indian television has grown
exponentially with more than 800 channels, out of which roughly 300 are
round-the-clock all-news channels available in multiple languages. There are
330 million newspapers sold daily in the country. Second only to China, a
staggering 900,000 million, about 75% of the population, has access to mobile
phones. And there are 65 million Facebook users and an estimated 35 million
Twitter accounts.
“For years,
the political elites had side-stepped the middle-class since their numbers were
relatively small and they were not seen as critical voters,” says Mudgal.
The Indian middle class today accounts for about 270 million
people; this number is expected to rise by 40% in the next decade. There is a
clear and palpable shift in the way politicians view middle-class citizens as they become economically
stronger and technologically savvy.
In the last decade, India has experienced citizen activism
among middle-class, upwardly
mobile young men and women, especially against police corruption and the
failure of the judiciary to act in gender-based crimes. This follows the growth
of the neoliberal economy which has led to a generation of newly empowered
young women who are going out to work in larger numbers than ever before.
Changes came with the extensive media coverage following the murders of two
young women, Priyadarshini Mattoo and Jessica Lal.
Priyadarshini Matoo was a 25-year-old law student who was
found
raped and strangled at her house in
Delhiin January 1996. The main accused, Santosh Kumar Singh,
the son of a high-level police Inspector General, was acquitted by a trial
court in 1999. Wall-to-wall coverage by the media led to the reversal of the
decision in 2006 by the Delhi High Court which awarded Singh the death penalty
–
a sentence commuted in 2010 to
life in prison.
Jessica Lal was a fashion model in Delhi who was working as a bartender at a
high-end party when she wasshot dead in April 1999.
The accused, Manu Sharma, was the son of a wealthy and influential Member of Parliament.
Several news channels and newspapers took up Lal family’s cause and started a
campaign focusing on justice for Jessica. After first being acquitted in a
lower court, Sharma was eventually retried and found guilty and sentenced to
life in prison.
“This is a highly informed middle-class,” says
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, journalist
and social commentator, “they are speaking up against the apathy of the
political elites and absence of efficient governance and media is articulating
this anger.”
Guha
Thaukrta, who has written about social movements and ethics in Indian media,
believes that this case is a historic turning point. “This not a movement
against a single case of rape but against government corruption, lack of
security, failing public transportation, and the entire political class,” he
argues.
Guha
Thakurta is referring to the large anti-rape protests which followed the
initial assault in December. University students, labor unions, NGOs,
housewives, and working men and women came to Delhi’s major public landmarks,
India Gate and Jantar Mantar, to protest. The initial response of the
government to these protests was brutal and immediate. They deployed large
police force which used water cannons, lathi charge (baton charge), and tear
gas to disperse the crowds; the underground public transport system was shut
down and certain city spaces became out of bounds.
The news media not only covered the
brutality of the attack and the protests, it provided round-the-clock space for
the protestors to voice their anger. News specials, with provocative titles
such as “
Speak
Up Delhi“, “Enough is Enough” and “Why India is no place for Women?”
were broadcast daily;
reporters were shown frequently interviewing protestors who were referred to as
“aam janta” (regular folks). Newspapers captured the social media zeitgeist in
reporting the case of 19-year-old Sambhavi Saxena arrested during one such protest.
On her journey to and at the police station, the
19-year-old
Tweeted to India
and the world highlighting her plight. Her tweet, “Illegally being held here at
Parliament St Police Station Delhi w/ 15 other women. Terrified, pls RT” led to
more than 1700 people re-tweeting her original tweet. According to Favstar, the
social media analytics site, her tweets reached over 200,000 people within
hours. All this resulted in the galvanizing of civil society where lawyers and
activists arrived at the police station to offer help and advice.
New
Delhi Television (NDTV), an all-news cable channel, ran an hour-long
special program titled, “Young India Rising” about Saxena’s arrest.
Within days
the government began backtracking. The Prime Minister announced revisions in
laws on sexual assault and government committees were quickly set up to review
safety for girls and women.
“Government
was using old-style policing on the street but ultra-modern spin doctoring in
the media,” says Mudgal. To counter the protests and criticisms, the Home
Secretary of India, R. K. Singh, and Delhi Police Commissioner, Neeraj Kumar,
quickly held a press conference on December 21 to announce how the police had
reached the victims in “six minutes and apprehended the criminals in 24 hours.”
“But
media,” says Mudgal, “continued to legitimize the protests by the young,
educated, urban population and to give a voice to their pent-up frustration at
the inefficiency and corruption of the system and not simply to view this as a
‘law and order’ problem.”
ETHICS OF RAPE REPORTAGE
On January 8,
Zee News, a 24-hour news and current affairs
channel, broadcast an interview of the male companion of the victim who himself
was badly beaten during the assault. Alternately referred to as “Deepak” and
“Abhimanyu”, the interviewer did not reveal his real name. The man provided
details of the attack and its aftermath, one in which the assailants had laid a
carefully planned trap and neither citizens nor police rushed to help the
injured couple.
Delhi police immediately announced that they planned to
file
a case against Zee News for
broadcasting the interview. The case was to be filed under Section 228 (A) of
the Indian Penal Code, which deals with the disclosure of identity of victims
of certain crimes, including rape (as of the writing of this article, no such
case had been filed).
Ironically,
journalists at Zee News confirm that senior news producers at Zee had sent an
email to all the journalists in the organization reminding them that Zee was
not to name the rape victim or the witness.
“I think Zee News did us all a service by holding the mirror
up to society and to the police,” says S. Jaganathan, a reporter for
Lok
Sabha TV. “They may have broken the law by revealing the
witness’ identity, but they have done their duty as citizens. Zee did not name
the witness or the victim. They only interviewed the witness.”
The victim
was given fictitious names such as “Damini”, “Amanat” and “Nirbhaya” by
different media outlets. The names were carefully chosen, laden with the values
of sisterhood, courage, and trust. “Every family in India felt, oh my god this
could happen to my daughter,” says Hari Kumar, New York Times reporter for
India who has covered this case extensively for the Times, “the connect was
instant.”
“The
reporting was not sensational,” continues Kumar, “Nobody disclosed the name of
the girl or published her photographs. Mainstream media, both print and
television did not jump the gun. Media was very restrained.”
MEDIA RESPONDS TO AUDIENCES
“There is a
significant technological and generational gap between the governing and the
governed in India,” says veteran journalist and journalism professor, Prasun
Sonwalkar, “70% of India is below the age of 35 and most of our politicians are
septuagenarians.”
For
Sonwalkar, the coverage also exemplified media’s incessant focus on the
emerging middle class which is the main consumer of media products.
“The rape
happened in South Delhi where most of the political and financial elites live,
the victim represented ‘us’, she was a medical student and an aspiring member
of the middle class,” says Sonwalkar, “There was practically a ‘media scrum’ or
mob reporting.”
“Covering corruption is more abstract,” says V.V.P. Sharma,
Senior Editor with
Headlines Today Channel,
“Violation of the body is real.”
Both
Sharma and Sonwalkar suggest that the “media scrum” about this particular rape
case was to get as much ratings for the news channels as possible. Many of
these news stations depend on advertising revenues which can only be generated
by high TRP (Ratings) and in a television market that is one of the most
competitive in the world. While they acknowledge that the intensity of the
public debate around police corruption and judiciary has grown, the emphasis
and dependency on ratings still overrides other ethical goals.
Amidst this
frenzied coverage, for instance, the focus appeared to be disproportionately on
retribution in the form of harsher sentencing, for example from the current
seven years for a rape conviction to life imprisonment and possibly a death
penalty. The danger in reflecting audience anger, especially following a
horrific event such as this, is that people tend to seek revenge and politicians
look for expediency to quell public dissent.
No doubt
this case of rape has created a critical space for the discourse of social
justice in the media and has forever changed the way Indian journalists cover
crime, policing and corruption.
And for
that a young woman had to give her life.
