The pattern of Hindu-Muslim riots following the tumult in Gujarat in 2002 suggests that the new sites of communal violence are now deliberately chosen so as to evade the withering scrutiny of national media, particularly 24x7 TV news channels.
The masterminds of such communal violence have shifted their activities from bustling cities to decaying towns and their rural
Think of the major sites of communal disturbances over the last 12 years, beginning from 2003, the year after the riots. Mau in Uttar Pradesh, Gopalgarh in Rajasthan, Kokrajhar in Assam, Bettiah in Bihar, villages around the west UP towns of Muzaffarnagar, Kanth, Saharanpur and Meerut, to even Mewat, merely miles away from the millennium city of Gurgaon.
All these pockets of conflict lie outside the hub of national media, which are headquartered in Delhi or Mumbai and boast fulltime
This shifting of the site of communal violence is a sharp riposte to those who expounded, in commemorative TV programmes and print editions marking the 10th year of the Gujarat riots, the sheer implausibility of triggering mayhem in the age of mass media.
Describing Gujarat 2002 as the country’s first ‘televised riots’, it was claimed that the coverage spawned revulsion against the Gujarat government’s perceived partisan approach to tackling violence. Regardless of the advantages that accrued to the BJP in Gujarat, 2002 still remains a blot on its history, as dark as 1984 is for the Congress.
It is to offset the disadvantages arising from the national media’s coverage of mass violence that its masterminds have thought it prudent to shift to creaky towns and their sleepy peripheries.
Muzaffarnagar or Moradabad or Saharanpur may just be hours from Delhi, but because journalists are not embedded in the local milieu, with no clue of either festering communal problems or of the deliberate fanning of tension, they often arrive at such places long after the violence has erupted and devastated.
There are no images of murderous mobs on the rampage to telecast, no shocking justifications of violence to record, as had been the case with the coverage of the riots in Gujarat.
Call it the power of moving images, but an expression of mob fury captured live has a more telling impact than a victim describing it in his or her disconsolate voice.
The masterminds of such communal violence have shifted their activities from bustling cities to decaying towns and their rural
Think of the major sites of communal disturbances over the last 12 years, beginning from 2003, the year after the riots. Mau in Uttar Pradesh, Gopalgarh in Rajasthan, Kokrajhar in Assam, Bettiah in Bihar, villages around the west UP towns of Muzaffarnagar, Kanth, Saharanpur and Meerut, to even Mewat, merely miles away from the millennium city of Gurgaon.
All these pockets of conflict lie outside the hub of national media, which are headquartered in Delhi or Mumbai and boast fulltime
This shifting of the site of communal violence is a sharp riposte to those who expounded, in commemorative TV programmes and print editions marking the 10th year of the Gujarat riots, the sheer implausibility of triggering mayhem in the age of mass media.
It is to offset the disadvantages arising from the national media’s coverage of mass violence that its masterminds have thought it prudent to shift to creaky towns and their sleepy peripheries.
Muzaffarnagar or Moradabad or Saharanpur may just be hours from Delhi, but because journalists are not embedded in the local milieu, with no clue of either festering communal problems or of the deliberate fanning of tension, they often arrive at such places long after the violence has erupted and devastated.
There are no images of murderous mobs on the rampage to telecast, no shocking justifications of violence to record, as had been the case with the coverage of the riots in Gujarat.
Call it the power of moving images, but an expression of mob fury captured live has a more telling impact than a victim describing it in his or her disconsolate voice.
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