By  RONALD   L.  REBELLO

Yoursfrankly@rediffmail.com
JUNE 28, 2005.
 

Public opinion is everything.  With public sentiments nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.   Consequently, he who moulds public opinion goes deeper than he who enacts statues or pronounces decisions.

- Abraham Lincoln
 

Times of India recently carried a newsitem, “Striptease catches Jharkhand forest officials off guard” (TOI – June 21, 2005) where it reported only the version of the forest officials that village women in a particular forest area are stripping themselves in front of the forest officials to embarrass and scare them away in an attempt to save their menfolk from being punished after being “caught felling trees”.
 

Clearly a newspaper that tom tom’s itself as “The Leader that guards the Reader” in this case gave the version of the Forest conservator only, just like after every police encounter newspapers routinely publish press statements doled out by the Police PRO on the “gangster”.  The TOI report doesn’t speak of any investigation done by the reporter, no contact even with one of the women or any inclination towards it is seen.  Probably over a cup of tea the reporter must have also gulped down the version of the forest official.
 

Since the matter is sensitive due to the imbroglio and hullabaloo created over “impact on forests and environment due to the Tribal bill” presently pending in Parliament, the TOI report merits critical analysis without which it tends to create a bias against forest dwelling communities.
 

Reading the TOI report between the lines, coupled with my experience of working with communities living in and around forests, I feel that it may have been that the forest dwelling men were rounded up on trumped up charges by the forest officials to extract money and in frustration or as a novel protest the women must have stripped themselves enmasse.  Conscious citizens may recall, a year ago around this time, women in Manipur had stripped themselves as a mark of protest against the Armed forces (Assam and Manipur) Special Powers Act after the rape of Manorama Devi by military personnel.  I see a parallel in the same.
 

Deep down in the Jungles, where the TOI reporter may dread walking a few kilometers to talk about the same with the village women, the ground reality is that forest officials are in the habit of forcing forest dwelling and dependent communities to provide them with liquor, chickens, ghee, besides forcing the communities to do forced labour like cleaning up the houses of forest rangers.  Communities that refuse to do so are routinely booked on exaggerated charges of felling trees. One hears innumerable such cases. Forest officials see a chance to extort money, even when villagers bring logs to build their homes.  Ridiculous as it may sound, in some cases they have even gone to the extent of impounding the wood from old houses of villagers (after villagers build cement houses as per the Indira Awas Yojna) to make sofas out of these  as a dowry offer in their daughters’ wedding.
 

Even assuming the local communities are cutting the trees to sell as alleged by the forest officials, they may be doing it for survival and as claimed by the Conservator of Forest in the report, they are not connected with any timber mafia.  What about the many forest officials who indulge in mass scale timber smuggling who go uncaught and then blame the poor communities for this damage?
 

TOI report on Jharkhand forest dwellers is a classic case of one-sided reporting and easygoing journalism. The TOI journo (many in other papers as well) could have gone beyond the ordinary and verified the incidents and the dynamics involved by at least interviewing the women engaging in the striptease.  With no attempt shown to contact the women, the report can be termed partisan.
 

The above one-sided report is not an isolated example. It is becoming more rampant nowadays. Unfortunately, a lazy, irresponsible brand of journalism is on the rise. The only consolation is that the tribe of development writers and rural reporters is increasing day by day.  I and many activists, whose struggles receive a bang every time a journalist writes irresponsibly in relation to marginalized groups (the clipping which is happily documented and cited by opponents such as bureaucrats, politicians), have to remind ourselves of Abraham Lincoln’s famous sentence: “that for every scoundrel there is a hero: that for every politician, there is a dedicated leader” and adding to that:  for every insensitive, lazy, irresponsible, bigoted journalist, there is a sensitive, responsible, dedicated and honest one !
 

Published :
Web: www.thehoot.org  and www.indymedia.org

Print : "People’s reporter", Kerala (August 10, 2005) and "The Pen", Bulletin of All India Letter Writer's Association, Mumbai. (July 2005)