On Wednesday, in Delhi, a student rally faced water cannons, tear gas, lathi charge and mass detention. This happened in broad daylight, at 5pm. The students were protesting the University Grants Commission's (UGC) decision to scrap fellowships to MPhil and PhD students who have not taken the National Eligibility Test (NET). By 7pm, there were shocking photographs popping up on social media.
Eyewitness accounts say the police action was brutal and unprovoked. Women have said they were groped and manhandled. There are video clips that show policemen beating protesters viciously. The Delhi police detained reportedly 150 students at the Parliament Street police station.
Take a look at this morning's newspapers. There is no mention of this incident on the front pages of any major Indian newspaper in English.
If this protest and the way it was handled had taken place in an obscure part of the country, one could perhaps forgive the newspapers their blinkered perspective. But these young men and women were assaulted in the national capital, where every newspaper has a bureau. More than 100 students were held in a police station in the heart of New Delhi. There are claims that the police is refusing to file FIRs that will put their brutality on record. This, according to the mainstream print media, isn't news apparently.
Had the crackdown on the Occupy UGC protest happened late at night yesterday, there would have been some excuse to not have managed a proper report on these violations in today's newspaper. But all this happened at 5pm, well before the deadline hour for newspapers. There would have been more than enough time to gather a report of what happened at the protest and what was happening at the police station — particularly since all this was unfolding in Delhi — before the newspaper was readied for printing. There are articles taken from the Press Trust of India wire service available online on a few respected news sites, like NDTV.
The Indian Express website has a report that has particularly disquieting details.
"The protesters said Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) activists who had kept away from the protest showed up at at about 12.45 am and stayed put outside the UGC office. They were not touched by the paramilitary or police forces, the protesters alleged.
...'There was absolutely no provocation from students. Several students were severely injured, but the police did not stop. We then decided to block roads at the ITO crossing, following which the UGC decided to meet a delegation of students,' said Pratim Ghosal of DSF.
De said, 'After two hours of violence, the police put forth a condition before our fellow protesters, telling them to disperse if they wanted us (picked up from UGC office) to be released. They were forced to agree.'"
Look at the print editions of the major newspapers in English, and you'd never guess that any of this has taken place. If a researcher goes through these newspaper's print archives for December 9, 2015, they will find practically no mention of any of this. It's as though nothing happened.
If students being assaulted in the national capital isn't newsworthy enough to be on the front page or (in the case of some newspapers) even be reported, what is? Does Occupy UGC need to trend on Twitter and Facebook before mainstream media considers it worthy of Page 1 and printer's ink?
Yesterday's violence is not the first time the Occupy UGC protesters have been targeted by Delhi police. The UGC announced its decision to slash non-NET fellowships on October 7. Since then, there have been at least two occasions when the protesters have taken to the streets and faced state-backed violence. They faced lathi charge and 100 of them were detained in October and in November, 40 students were detained.
Backed by students from different universities from all over the country, Occupy UGC has snowballed quickly. No one denies that the UGC has a point when it claims the fellowship funds have been mismanaged. However, the solution to that problem isn't scrapping the scholarship programme, argue students.
In addition to this original issue, there's now an additional fear that the government will follow in the previous regime's footsteps and welcome WTO’s 160 member nations to establish educational institutions as commercial ventures in the country. Nandita Narain, president, Delhi University Teachers’ Association, explained, “The UGC’s decision [to discontinue non-NET fellowships] is linked to the government’s decision to open higher education to market forces, which is why it doesn’t want to invest any money in its institutions."
Would foreign players in the educational arena really be a bad thing? Champions of this plan would argue that a little competition may well force state-backed institutions and colleges to improve their syllabi and teaching systems. Narain points out that there is a significant adverse effect to privatising education: "There will come a time when only the rich will get teacher taught education in India and the rest will have to opt for cheaper, low quality, online courses. It means most of our young people will be denied quality education. This is intellectual colonisation.”
The Delhi police, HRD Minister Smriti Irani, the AAP-led local government and the powers that the Delhi Police reports to may or may not agree with Narain and the student unions that are taking to the streets. They're welcome to their opinion and in fact, some reasonable debate on the state of education in India would be very welcome. However, water cannons and cracked skulls are not hallmarks of a conversation. Neither are tear gas, assault and detention.
Worse yet is the complete silence on this topic in mainstream media, which is currently facing a serious crisis. The readership figures for print publications are inching downwards instead of going up. With the internet providing news (validated and unvalidated) faster, conventional media outlets are struggling to prove their relevance. Ignoring incidents like the Occupy NGC doesn't help the newspaper and news channels' cause. If anything, it just confirms their irrelevance.
Among many readers and viewers, there's a growing sense of contempt at journalism and journalists. Those on social media face it consistently. Catchphrases like "paid media" are flung venomously at journalists and readers regularly question a journalist's biases, ethics and reporting ability. If journalists and editors keep ignoring issues like student protests, "paid media" is going to end up being a compliment instead of invective. It implies someone is willing to spend money on them, which no one will bother to do — whether it's a salary or a bribe that's being paid — if they don't bring out the news.
To misquote a famous slogan, ask not what your readers do for you, but what you're doing for your readers. And look at that front page. Because at the moment, there's more to be gleaned on the state of the nation by what doesn't make it to page one than what does.
