Anand Teltumbde

Image Courtesy: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

To,
Mr Mukund Padmanabhan,
The Hindu,
Chennai.

Dear Sir,
A friend whatsapped me a clip of a news item published in The Hindu of today instant under the heading “Activist held meets abroad: police” in which in reference to me the following lines are written:

“The arrested accused claimed they needed to stoke violence and tension and maximize the death of a Dalit youth during the Bhima Koregaon riots, Mr Singh claimed, while reading out from a purported letter written by Mr. Anand Teltumbde to Mr Wilson in January this year. According to Mr. Singh the letter said, “It is time we carried out a big strike as is being suggested by VV (Varavara Rao) and Surendra,” referring to 80 vehicles burnt on the instruction of Mr Rao.

I am stunned to see such white lies being spread by the police to malign me. I state that while I know Rona since his JNU days and thereafter off and on as an activist, but never had I written to him even an email, leave apart letter. It is distressing that the state stoops to such lows to malign a defenceless citizen like me, who even in the face of it could not be connected with such bizarre activities. I have been an alumnus of IIM Ahmadabad, and had my entire career in corporate world ending with Managing Director and CEO of a holding company. Even, thereafter, when IIT Kharagpur invited me to join its faculty, I taught Business management for over five years. This year I launched India’s first Big Data Analytics programme in management. Can any sane person link up this background of mine with the bizarre stories police is churning out through so called letters.

Already, in having a raid on my house in the campus they have ruined my image before my students and jeopardized their careers as they in some way are linked with my own reputation.  My family, my vast friend circle, my corporate contacts, everything is devastated with this false campaign the police launched for whatever intension.

I heard from some journalists that the police spokesman in his press conference yesterday referred to my foreign visits that I collected money. I am a reputed scholar and go on invitations of universities abroad, and all these tours are well documented. Such kind of deliberate falsehood and fabrication by the state agent is dangerous for this country’s future to say the least.

May I request you not to give space to such unsubstantiated and bizarre police stories in the paper like The Hindu, which readers still see as getting them the truth.

Best regards,
Dr Anand Teltumbde
Senior Professor and Chair- Big Data Analytics

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

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Sabrang India spoke to Bagchi who sees clear signs of a new communal equation emerging in West Bengal.

Representational Picture. Image credit: India.com

SabrangIndia (SI): How many places were affected by recent communal tension?

Suvojit Bagchi (SB): Difficult to say. Received phone calls from many towns and villages and seen many reports on social media and video blogging sites. But I will refrain from naming the places as I have not visited the areas. However, I spoke to people who could be trusted and they have confirmed severe communal tension in four places– Chandannagore from Hooghly district, Kharagpaur in West Medinipur,  Hazinagar in North 24 Paraganas and Chachal in Malda districts .

SI: What is the scale and nature of damage?

SB: Again I will not conjecture on the nature and scale of damage as long as I have not visited or met the people in the area. It is particularly important as the state government has said that a section of the media is publishing “distorted reports.” So we need to visit these places. Two weeks after the flare up from October 11-15, I have managed to visit only one of the places twice – Hazinagar in North 24 Paraganas.

SI: What have you witnessed there?

SB: Much of it is published in The Hindu. But there are many angles to it which can be explored in further detail as you know a communal clash cannot occur suddenly, like a road accident. It takes time, it takes planning. It has multiple reasons – which unfold over weeks, months and years. Individuals with specific interests work as a catalyst, while political parties use such individuals. However, political parties may also fan tension between communities for very particular political requirements. So multiple issues come to play and you can only touch the surface in a two-day visit.

One factor was interesting in Hazinagar. The list of rioters provided to me by the leaders of Trinamool Congress features many local level leaders or even municipal councillors of the TMC. They are TMC in the morning and organise programmes for the Viswa Hindu Parishad (VHP) at night. Prabhat Khabar – a leading Hindi daily – published a small story in its October 3 edition naming many such local leaders and councillors of TMC who organised Hanuman Chalisa distribution programme for the VHP recently. This tiny information says a lot about today’s Bengal… that the civic body councillors are overtly engaging with an outfit which has a very clear agenda. This perhaps tells us how the politics of Bengal is changing and (changing) fast.

SI: You named one such person… Pradeep Pashi.

SB: I did. I was very keen to meet him as well but could not so far. This gentleman was close to CPI-M at one point of time. Now he is publicly with the TMC and he led the riots. Everybody in the area confirmed that Pashi led the scuffle in many areas. Now all the parties – especially CPI-M and TMC – tell me that he is an “anti social.” But Pashi was always an anti-social who engaged with the ruling parties whenever it suited him. Actually there is nothing surprising as that is how it works in the country. Now he realises that it suits him to be with TMC in the day and to lead a riot at night for right-wing outfits… he is doing that. His name, however, was not mentioned in the report of the Hindi daily.

SI: Are you suggesting that TMC led the riots?

SB: I won’t say that. TMC means Mamata Banerjee and it also means that they do have a secular credential. They have addressed many issues which have given some relief to the minorities. Many boys and girls of the Muslim community told me that they felt “empowered” as they are not unnecessarily hounded by the state and experience small pleasures like visiting shopping malls. I’m not saying that it did not happen in CPI-M’s time – but a section of the Muslims, if not the entire community, loves the chief minister, which is not a bad thing in today’s India.

Perhaps they also liked Jyoti Basu and often say – especially these days – that they did not have any communal tension during Basu’s time. TMC is aware that they have a solid Muslim vote base and thus they can’t afford to antagonise them either.

But TMC also did things which gave confusing signals. For example, one may ask why it is so important for the top leadership to so actively engage with anything that is religious – for all the communities – constantly mixing religion with affairs of State or politics. Why is that important? Now, if the State continuously engages with everything that is religious then the people perhaps start thinking that they can do anything in the name of religion and get away with it.

In Bengal the State perhaps needs to de-link itself with all religion a bit while ensuring law and order especially during the time of festivals. But it is challenging because the rise of BJP at the national level has changed many things in Bengal.

SI: How?

SB: I was talking to Piyush Ghosal. He was CPI-M’s zonal committee member, worked in the same area – Hazinagar – for many years and knows the area very well. He said something interesting. He said – which I quoted in The Hindu – that there was communal tension earlier too, during their time. In fact, in the 1990s a Koran was set on fire in Hazinagar and it was a very difficult time. But CPI-M could diffuse it as the organisation was remarkably powerful. All the MPs and MLAs and councillors belonged to them. Much like it is now for the TMC – they have 22 of the 23-member board in the local municipality. But many of them – as I said earlier – work for VHP or other Hindu outfits. CPI-M had an organisation, which did not have leaders with dual identity, and thus they could control sensitive situations quickly. TMC has an issue with its organisation.

But the other advantage (of CPI-M) is also significant. Historically they did not ever experience a buoyant BJP in the state, in the backdrop of a very strong BJP at the national level. This rise of BJP has impressed millions in India and there is no reason to think that the Bengali middle-class is not part of it. There is another issue.

There are many in the state who have come from East Pakistan and later Bangladesh. Like my family during Partition. Many of these people are covertly communal. They are Bengalis, they were part of CPI-M and even their top leaders, but they never publicly expressed any anti-Muslim bias. Because they knew that the party does not approve it. So the Bengalis, especially those who came from Bangladesh, had two opposing identities. They were communists and they were the people directly affected by Partition. The size of this population is huge. I do not know the percentage but I will not be surprised if these people (with roots in East Pakistan/Bangladesh) make up 35-40 percent of all Bengal’s electors, three to four out of nearly 10 crore people. I’m not saying majority have an issue with the minority but perhaps the majority has a problem.

The post “A new communal Equation is evolving in West Bengal, TMC Cadre during the Day are VHP Activists at Night” appeared first on SabrangIndia.

It is an unfortunate fact that both on television and in print the national media seems to show an increasing tendency to ignore the problems of working people, especially the peasantry and working class, and the poor in general. Coverage, when it occurs, is superficial and episodic. But what accounts for this bias? I think there are several distinct but interrelated factors.
 

First, is the effect so-called market forces have on the media. In general, the economics of the Indian media is driven by advertising revenues. This, in turn, means that editorial content must yield space to advertising because it is the latter which pays the bills! So there is a problem of real physical space – column inches or minutes on prime time – for all kinds of news. But excessive dependence on advertisers also means that advertisers get to have a say in both the content of specific news items (especially at particular moments of controversy) and also in terms of whether the overall ambience created by the news helps sell a product or not. And within this it is clear that an advertiser would not like to have a commercial for his or her product sandwiched by news of starvation, poverty, disease.
 

Second, the composition of the newsroom, particularly of the English national news media and even the electronic vernacular channels, leans heavily towards higher socio-economic demographic strata. So there is also a sense in which the sensibility of the average journalist may not really be attuned to the problems of the poor and marginalised.
 

Third, the established political parties, the government and those who wield economic and social influence play a very big role in defining what constitutes "news". What the prime minister says or does, for example, is always considered news. The same goes for statements and decisions by captains of industry. But news of people’s struggles and problems get dismissed as "activism", "NGOs" etc. We saw how farmers’ suicides were not considered news (except in The Hindu and a few other papers) but when the prime minister travelled to Maharashtra there was quite a bit of coverage. But as soon as the PM moved to other things, so too did the news coverage. Hardly anyone took note of the fact that farmers’ suicides actually increased after the visit.

As an institution, the media has bought into the myth that big business and the security forces can do no wrong, and that in any case, the protest of some poor folk being displaced in some “remote” part of the country is not news
 

So within the constraints of the market and of the social demographics of the media there is also bias and lack of professionalism. And I think these are the factors that account for vast aspects of the lived experience of the majority of Indians being considered irrelevant as far as "news" is concerned.
 

As far as your questions on page three kind of journalism is concerned, I am not at all against media coverage for "society" events, fashion shows, religious festivals and the like. Supplements exist precisely to cater to sectional interests and as society becomes more prosperous and variegated this is only to be expected.
 

Sadly, however, our supplements, instead of catering to the diversity of tastes which we know exists, have become homogenised around a shallow "golden mean" of celebrity news, gossip, astrology, vastu and other obscurantist cults, and a certain kind of film writing that has nothing to do with paying Bollywood the due it deserves. The same is true for what passes as "spiritual" writing, which is more akin to pop psychology than the exploration of philosophical issues and concerns.
 

And unfortunately, many of these kinds of things have begun to invade mainstream news spaces, further marginalising the problems and concerns of the majority of Indians.
 

The Kalinganagar struggle (in Orissa) is an interesting one and I’m glad you brought it up. Not only was the horror of the massacre of the protesting tribals played down – there was no live coverage, no breathless commentary of the type even the smallest terrorist incident provokes – and even though what followed was especially gruesome (the mutilation of the bodies of the dead tribals by the police) there was virtually no coverage. The reason I think Kalinganagar became a no-go area was because it came at the intersection of three media blind spots – first, the protest of poor marginalised people is not considered news; second, allegations of wrongdoing by the security forces are almost always ignored or played down whether they occur in Kashmir, the North-east or against the tribals in Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and elsewhere; third, the target of public opposition was an industrial project which the media sees as India’s passport to economic development. So as an institution, we have bought into the myth that big business and the security forces can do no wrong, and that in any case, the protest of some poor folk being displaced in some "remote" part of the country is not news.
 

I don’t think global finance has played a role in the Indian print media scene since other than on a very limited basis there is no foreign capital in newspapers. As for television, I am not sure our channels are so bad because of global finance. Star News is linked to Murdoch and CNN-IBN and Channel 7 to the AOL-Time Warner, I suppose. But the coverage of all channels is uniformly bad. But certainly, as the role of domestic monopolies and global finance increase, I think all these negative trends that I have spoken about will get magnified.
 

Can the Kherlanji case become a Jessica Lal or Priyadarshini Mattoo case for the media? You know, I doubt it will. The Jessica Lal and Priyadarshini Mattoo cases became middle class cause célèbres not just because the men involved in the crime were powerful and influential but also because we as a middle class society could identify with the victims. She was one of us, is what every right-thinking person in Delhi would have thought when they heard the shocking news of the acquittals of the killers of Priyadarshini and Jessica. But when it comes to Kalinganagar or Kherlanji, there is not just a remoteness of physical distance but also of caste and class that kicks in.
 

Or even the BMW case. Had the Nanda boy killed "one of us", I don’t think the case would have gone the shocking way it did. At least not without the media kicking up a fuss. At the same time, I want to clarify that being a middle class victim of a crime committed by a powerful person does not now mean justice will be done. In our social hierarchy, the politician and the policeman are still top of the pile. But the Jessica and Priyadarshini cases have stripped them of a certain amount of immunity enjoyed. This is a good thing. But as in these two cases I would like to see our justified concerns being converted to all cases where powerful offenders target the weak and defenceless, the Dalits, Muslims and tribals. No doubt the media, including my paper, The Hindu, have a big role to play in sensitising public opinion on this point.
 

(As told to Teesta Setalvad/ Communalism Combat.)

Archived from Communalism Combat, November 2006. Year 13, No.120, Cover Story 2
 

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