The One That Got Away

Had private TV news channels been around while Jyotibabu ran Bengal, his misgovernance would have been exposed much earlier.

Had private TV news channels been around while Jyotibabu ran Bengal, his misgovernance would have been exposed much earlier.

Many, many hapless and poor settlers—all refugees from Bangladesh—in Marichjhapi, an island in the Sunderbans, are raped, maimed and killed by police and CPM cadres. The marauders loot the settlers’ shanties, set them afire, rape and throw women and children into the river and kill fleeing men. An estimated 300 die. The mind-numbing brutality, the likes of which have not been witnessed in independent India, barely evokes any outrage and doesn’t elicit even a regret or comment from Chief Minister Jyoti Basu.

Police and CPM goons fire on villagers protesting the acquisition of their land in Nandigram, killing 14 of them, before going on a rampage, looting houses, raping women and abducting children. A nationwide outrage followed, forcing Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to repeatedly offer apologies; the massacre forced his party and his government on the backfoot and extracted a heavy political price.

The stark difference between the outcomes of the two carnages is due to just one factor: in 1979, there was no electronic media, no intrepid reporters of news channels to bring the savagery to light, and no haranguing anchors to shame the CM or his administration. In 2007, repeat airing on TV of the Nandigram bloodbath provoked the public fury that singed Bhattacharjee and cost the CPM dearly in the various polls that have followed. Marichjhapi wasn’t the only bloodbath that West Bengal witnessed during Basu’s long tenure; he turned a blind eye to the murders of thousands of political opponents and even ordinary people by his party’s fiendish cadres. Yet, he remained unscathed. Imagine, for instance, an incident like the murder and torching of 17 monks and nuns of Ananda Marg (a Hindu religious order) by CPM cadres in Kolkata in broad daylight happening now instead of on 30 April 1982. “The fallout would have been terrible. Basu would have faced a lot of flak and his image would have taken a terrible beating,” says senior journalist Anirban Choudhury, who was news coordinator at ETV Bangla and is now coordinating editor at Hindustan Times’ Kolkata edition. He adds that it would have been unimaginable for the state government not to have acted after the massacre of Ananda Margis (no enquiry was held and not a single person arrested, though the bestiality was witnessed by hundreds) had TV news channels been around. “Even in Singur, where police only lathi charged protesting land-losers, the impact of the police action among viewers was tremendous. There is a difference between reading about a lathi charge and witnessing it live or otherwise on TV,” says Choudhury.

Basu, says political commentator Rudranil Bose, was lucky that no TV channels were around to record the brutalities under his watch. “Would Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee dare to dismiss the rape of three government officers by CPM cadres (as had happened at Bantala on the outskirts of Kolkata on 30 May 1990) with ‘these things happen’ as Basu had so insensitively done? Had TV cameras been around, Basu would have been torn to shreds live on air by anchors and TV panellists. Basu was fortunate to have ruled in the pre-electronic media age, or he’d definitely not be as deified as he’s today,” says Bose.

So too with Nandigram. “Repeat telecasts and vivid descriptions with visuals of an event have an instant and huge impact on viewers. In the print media’s case, there’s the reporter between the incident and the reader, with the reporter describing the event with words and offering his own analysis. With the electronic media, the connection between the viewer and the incident is direct, the viewer sees the incident with his own eyes and analyses it himself,” explains Anjan Bandyopadhyay, editor (input) of 24 Ghanta, a leading Bengali news channel. Monideepa Banerjie, resident editor of NDTV 24×7, says the “immediacy of the electronic media” and “the impact that images have” on viewers is instant and magnified. “The images of police firing at the villagers (in Nandigram) provoked an instant reaction that was anti-establishment. Had the electronic media not been around, the public reaction would not have been as such,” she adds.

Technology has given information an urgency. And cameras are everywhere. “Now, it isn’t necessary for a TV crew to record an incident. A villager can record clips of an incident in a remote area on his mobile camera and simply MMS the clips to news channels. This happens very often. Thus, politicians and the administration are under constant watch and any wrongdoing or excess on their part is not only immediately exposed, but provokes an instant backlash. This was not so during Jyoti Basu’s time,” says Ajoy Roy of AP Television News. He talks of ordinary people wanting to learn how to operate low-cost hidden cameras. “Had all these gadgets and TV news channels been around during Marichjhapi and the many other incidents that followed, Basu would have had to pay a very heavy price,” Roy adds. Also, says Roy, TV doesn’t distinguish between the literate and illiterate. Everyone sees it.

But it isn’t TV exposure alone that led to the groundswell of resentment against the CPM. “TV advertisements of consumer goods and soaps depicting an affluent lifestyle have raised the aspiration levels of the poor, and the government’s inability to meet these has led to disaffection,” observes NDTV’s Banerjie. The telecast of rural Bengal’s hunger and poverty, adds Anirban Choudhury, evokes far greater voter revulsion than prosaic accounts in newspapers can. “The rising aspirations of the poor, along with the depiction of their poverty, have led to a huge erosion of support for the CPM and Left. There’s no doubt that the decline of popular support for the CPM has been accelerated by the electronic media and would have occurred much earlier, during Basu’s chief ministership itself, had TV channels proliferated then,” says Bose.

Says Amitava Chattopadhyay, professor of sociology at Calcutta University, “The CPM and the Left Front it headed had always kept the aspiration levels of the poor very low and at manageable levels through the party’s rigid control over the masses. The electronic media changed the game. The exposure to the outside world, to consumerism, through television led to awareness and the rise of a sense of deprivation among the poor in Bengal. They started blaming the CPM for their economic plight, and, along with a few other factors, this snowballed into waves of discontent that swept the CPM out of power in the panchayat, municipality and Lok Sabha polls and the Assembly bypolls over the last few years.”

Today, there’s unanimity with the view that Jyoti Basu was fortunate that the TV boom didn’t occur during his time. Or else, his misdeeds, or those of his comrades and officials, would have blown up in his face. And he may not have got that place on the pedestal that he now occupies.

governanceJyoti BasumediamisgovernanceTV