MEDIA MATTERS
Colourful mosaic
SEVANTI NINAN
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Bureaucrats, politicians, former militants, litterateurs are all a part of the media scene in Assam.
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It is a State with a fair amount of commercial media, despite a low level of business activity
PHOTO: RITU RAJ KONWAR
Many competing stories in Assam…
The further you travel from Delhi the more unpredictable the notion of media becomes.
Regional media is increasingly a colourful mosaic in terms of who owns it or runs it, be it TV or newspapers, or periodicals. And a State which runs the gamut of possibilities is Assam. Congressmen, ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom) sympathisers, former militants, former bureaucrats and police officers, litterateurs and novelists: the State’s proprietors and editors are drawn from all these categories. If Orissa gives it strong competition in the number of politician media owners it can boast of, media in Assam is charmingly multifarious.
Multiple facets
At one level it is a conflict-ridden State, with four or five major groups and their factions operating. There are different independence movements here. There is militancy, counter insurgency, and infiltration of migrants across from Bangaldesh. There is a restless population whose middle class until recently used to empathise with what the ULFA represented. At another level, it is a State with a lot of political activity and a fair amount of commercial media, despite a low level of business activity. And then it is a State with literary inclinations where Assam Sahitya Sabha meetings can draw crowds of a lakh and more.
What mere journalist could do justice to reporting on such a State? What you get, then, is more editors with lived experience than in other parts of the country.
An editor of the Asomiya Pratidin, the largest circulated newspaper in the State, is happy to tell you how many times he has been in and out of jail (three.) Ajit Bhuyan was jailed under the National Security Act, and has been accused of burning the national flag. His arrests have helped the circulation of publications he edited, he says affably. He and the paper’s chief editor, Haider Hussain, have in the past been nominated by ULFA to a committee to negotiate with the Government of India. But that does not mean that they don’t criticise ULFA, he says, or that ULFA does not criticise him.
Mr. Bhuyan is nothing if not self critical. There is no serious journalism in Assam, he says cheerfully. “Everywhere there is degradation, papers cannot help. They are all depending on government ads so they cannot be outspoken. We are the highest circulation daily but they do not give us ads. Because we are critical of the government, nothing more.” His paper, which has an ABC circulation figure of 1.59 lakh, is described by everybody in Guwahati as sensational. “What can we do if the news is sensational?” he smiles.
The world’s press freedom organisations would list two cases from this State in their roll call of media martyrs over a decade and a half. One, Parag Das, was an executive editor of Asomiya Pratidin at the time of his killing, and it is fairly open knowledge that he was an ULFA ideologue. The second editor killed earlier this year was the owner of a newspaper known to be a mouthpiece of the ULFA when he bought it. Says the current chief editor of Pratidin, Haider Hussain sagely, “ULFA is not untouchable in Assam.” Nor is it distant. Its chairman Paresh Barua is known to call up editors and speak with them. He has also taken to writing in newspapers.
With so many different urges to communicate, how can media ownership be limited to family-owned media businesses? At the upper end of the spectrum are a clutch of politician-owners. The Health Minister has ownership stakes in a TV channel called “News Live”, a dissident Congressman owns a clutch of satellite channels including NE TV, the newspaper Dainik Janasadharan from Jorhat has also been acquired by a Congress minister, and yet another newspaper is owned by a former minister. “With so much Congress media Doordarshan becomes irrelevant,” says University of Gauhati professor Noni Gopal Mahanta.
Just news
But Zarir Hussain, who heads News Live, had a straight take on what drives his channel. “We are simply bothered about TRPs. Our TRP would have plummeted if we were a Congress channel.” The TV ratings organisation TAM only began to cover Assam in November last year, and Hussain says they top TAM charts for news.
At a humbler level of ownership, in the districts, former militants have started their own newspapers. Journalist Teresa Rehman recently interviewed Prabin Kumar Deka, who, at one time, was Assistant Publicity Secretary in the Central Committee of ULFA. He likes to think that the experience helps him in his current venture, a weekly called Saptahik Natun Prabah, which he founded on October 19, 2001. “I have seen both sides of the coin from close quarters. In fact, I can be harsher in my criticism now. Now, it gives me a sense of power as I can even criticise the ULFA. Earlier it was only a public relation exercise I was doing for them,” he says. Apart from him, there are half a dozen other militant-turned-journalists in this State.
There is also another, very different kind of lived experience that a former bureaucrat who is the chief editor of Dainik Asom brings to his current job. The paper belongs to the Assam Tribune group, and Mr. J.P. Saikia retired a few years ago as Commissioner, Personnel. “When I was with government I was also commissioner of information department. I know the other side. I am in an enviable position that way. My experience is that it gives me an advantage. I can make out what the government is all about. When we get a press release, I can make out who has done it and why.”
His former colleague in government service, former Director General of Police, Harekrishna Deka, who is also a poet, critic, columnist and playwright, was part of the Assam Tribune group earlier this year. And a major literary figure in the State, Homen Borgohain is chief editor of Amar Asom. From militants to bureaucrats to litterateurs, editors run the gamut of experience in Assam.
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