MEDIA MATTERS
The Kashmir jigsaw
SEVANTI NINAN
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In a State without big industries, the media is a growth industry. But things are done a little differently here…
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Photo: Nissar Ahmad
The news at the doorstep: Kashmiris reading a local newspaper.
The media in Kashmir is relatively immune to the Lok Sabha elections. Varun Gandhi is easily found on the pages of the Jammu press, so is news about the elections in general. Not so in the newspapers in the valley. Not even Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s pronouncements on both issues get the same prominence here. When you are in Jammu you are in India. When you are in Srinagar you are in Kashmir.
If there is an election which journalists here still want to discuss, it is the one which took place last December for the State assembly, not the one that is coming up. The “turnout” continues to be a matter of considerable academic discussion, with dimensions to it which never surface in the national press.
Shared legacy
What both Jammu and Kashmir have in common though is a thriving media. For a State with a population of around 80 lakhs, the media presence is considerable. There are 71 dailies in Srinagar, the only publishing centre in Kashmir, and some 61 in Jammu. Many of these are referred to as lithos, black and white four pagers. In Jammu even some of the four pagers sport colour. In a State with little industry, media, mysteriously, is a growth industry. There is no media recession here. The year has already seen the launch of a weekly newspaper called Kashmir Life, Rising Kashmir’s Urdu daily is on the cards, so is the Urdu edition of The
Kashmir Times which has long been in the offing, and an English and Hindi newspaper are scheduled to come out of a publishing stable in Jammu.
In one to one conversations here, correspondents and editors love doing the math to show you how a paper with a proper editorial set up including reporters, cannot possibly be viable, let alone profitable, on cover price and advertisements alone. The ad flow is more from retail outlets than industry and comes to only a leading handful of publications. The State government has a total annual advertising budget of Rs. 5 crores, which stretches in some years, but is still not adequate to keep some 378 publications in business. And DAVP ads put in by the central government require circulation of an order which less than a handful of publications in the State would have.
Supported by the State
So who patronises the media in Kashmir with exclusive stories, monetary help, advertising, and bank loans? The many arms of the ruling establishment, including the State government and the intelligence agencies, the Jammu and Kashmir Bank, and the militants, though the local ones are not as well endowed today as they were before. Conflict, as you discover from day one, has been a huge fillip to the media here. Before 1990 there were only three Urdu publications including the Congress organ, Khidmat. The only English newspaper, The Kashmir Times, was published out of Jammu. Today the numbers tell the story.
In some ways, it is a cosy place to be a journalist. Government apartments in Press Colony provide office space for many publications. The enterprising do better: an NDTV correspondent here even occupies a ministerial bungalow. This is also a place where working journalists are media owners: at least three representatives of the Delhi press have publications of their own, though their names do not figure on these. Even young reporters are widely travelled, fellowship programmes in the West covet applicants from this conflict hotspot. There was a time not long ago when you risked your life being a journalist in Kashmir, but not so now. Today, it is the Northeast which is the dangerous place to work.
The flip side of all this is a media that is so poorly paid that many journalists do two or three jobs, and some publications are edited and run by government bureaucrats, teachers and lecturers who switch roles after 4 p.m. I met an anchor from the cable TV channel Sen TV who begins his day voicing bulletins for Radio Kashmir, then moves on to a news agency to file five or six stories there, then goes on by evening to the cable channel to help put the evening bulletin in place and anchor it. Local cable channels are meant to give you exposure, not a livelihood. A cameraman gets Rs. 200 a story, a reporter could get Rs. 1500 a month.
Backbone
The real backbone of J&K journalism is the news agencies: KNS, CNS, UNS, API, PBI and several others. These put out dozens of stories which enable all small newspapers to function without their own reporting staff, both in Jammu and in Srinagar. All the power centres in Kashmir feed these agencies stories, some of which get carried the next day under a newspaper staffer’s byline. It also makes getting media coverage across the State easy. You don’t have to contact lots of reporters. You just to have to give, or leak an item to a news agency.
Subscribing to them is not just cheap though in practice it is often free. The editor of an Urdu daily Nida-I-Mashriq says, “I have used one agency for the last four years. I have not paid them anything, and they have not asked for anything till this moment. I have never received a bill.”
When you are trying to figure out the real picture about the media in Kashmir these are all different pieces of a jigsaw that you have to fit together.
(The author is currently undertaking a Hivos-Panos research project on media in conflict areas which pays for her travel.)
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