Language & politics
Is the language of a newspaper or television station an indicator of its political or religious orientation? The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) seems to think so. According to a report in ‘The Economic Times’, a shadowy workshop was held exclusively ‘by invitation only’ yesterday in Goa by the VHP, for those who it feels are ‘Hindutva-oriented journalists’. One Prashant Hartalkar, the Maharashtra region organising secretary of the VHP, who conducted the workshop, said that the forces of Hindutva now need to focus more on the regional media and local cable television networks, over the ‘secular’ national media.
For the VHP and the RSS, the word ‘secular’ is an item of abuse or, at very least, contempt. Mr Hartalkar apparently told the assembled journalists and others: “The national media (both print and electronic) is important, but it has now become the arm of the government. They are killing our news. Their point of view is so-called secular and anti-Hindu. We must focus on the regional [language] media to put forth our point of view.” He said the local media was hungry for news, had greater reach and understood the pulse of the people in small towns better than the national media.
The object of the workshop, it appears, was to motivate the journalists attending – who apparently are already oriented towards Hindutva and work in regional language media – to write more about the Ram Janmabhoomi issue. The Allahabad High Court is likely to deliver its verdict on the contentious Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue shortly. Having spectacularly crashlanded in the last election after having adopted a more aggressive ‘Hindutva-vadi’ plank, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has decided to put the temple issue firmly on the backburner for the time being. This, it seems, has pushed its more aggressive cousin, the VHP, into overdrive on the issue.
Among the suggestions made at the workshop was that pro-Hindutva journalists should go online, get into the blogosphere and onto social networking media like Facebook and Twitter, to spread the message of the Ram Janmabhoomi among the younger generation. Mr Hartalkar urged the journalists present to attract the Cafe Coffee Day crowd who, he said, had been cut adrift from the pulse of Hindutva. These new media forums, he felt, were the most useful to cultivate public opinion on the Ram Mandir issue. He was apparently concerned that youngsters are completely ignorant of the Ram Janmabhoomi issue. “India is a young country and we cannot afford to alienate youngsters in this movement,” Hartalkar told his audience, disclosing that the VHP itself has 86 active blogs linked to its official website.
Why the secrecy? The VHP’s position on most of these issues is well known, and the online skills of the Sangh Parivar are not to be scoffed at. For example, the Sanatan Sanstha, some of whose ‘sadhaks’ are facing terrorist charges in the Margao bomb blast case, maintains an absolutely up-to-the-minute website in the name of its associate organisation, the Hindu JanJagriti Samiti. But for some reason, the VHP felt that the issues he was discussing on the Ram Janmabhoomi movement could not be spoken in front of all journalists and, therefore, had to be discussed only with journalists with a “Hindu base”.
Journalism is not supposed to have religious bases or biases, especially where news is concerned. A newspaper has a news section (most of the paper) and a ‘views’ or ‘comment’ section (the edit page and, sometimes, the page facing it). As the old adage goes: “Comment is free, but news is sacred.” The VHP’s efforts to split the country’s media into ‘secular’ and ‘pro-Hindutva’ cannot be good for the profession, or even for society at large. The journalists’ unions, editors’ guilds and maybe even the Press Council needs to combat this surreptitious bid to divide journalists on the basis of their religious beliefs.
