Any messenger who doesn’t serve will be shot, will be torn limb to limb. The bullet is his food. His own blood his drink. No evidence can exculpate him. The party is infallible. What it does has to have a universal positive acceptance. Not only accept the news-stock, though, digest it like cabbages. Moreover party doesn’t want to reform the enemy, but destruct him. This graffiti is on the board outside the New Delhi chamber. Be on alert.
News, in our parts, is not collected of the event that has happened. News is invented here about the thing that hasn’t happened at all. Such is the credible journalism here. Oxygen is extracted out of vacuum.
Anybody dealing with facts has no space of survival. Because his survival contradicts the political bedrock of the party ruling. Take famous female Indian journalist, Swati Chaturvedi, an author of ‘I am a troll’. She says as a journalist she deals with facts, she deals with legally defendable facts. All here life she has reported them. She is willing to go to jail or in a court to defend the story. For this veracious activism & attitude, she is called over phone constantly, or abused on social media by cyber warriors & troll hosts, threatened of killing, lynching & raping. This is what furor, the destructive magma real story creates. This country is politically hyper-allergic to realities. Some places need realities to survive, but some lie.
Fake news menace seems never to drop. It escalates. It is believed to serve the huge purpose to new Delhi on the Kashmir matter. Elementary analysis & ground search is only done by mainstream media till it favors New Delhi. Once the bitter truth comes out, it is either distorted and morphed into an effectual lie. There is a selective presentation of news. Every news can’t be narrated, media says. It is a hazardous risk.
The news crafted by mainstream media on Kashmir is always wrapped in the jingoistic fanaticism. Sin of the powerful is not a sin, media believes. Edward S.Herman and Noam Chomsky in their co-authored essay ‘ Propaganda model’ argue in contrast to the liberal theories that emphasize that media is adversarial to the established power. The ‘propaganda model’ prognosticates that corporate-owned news media will always produce news contents that serve the interests of the established power. When such glut of news contents regarding kashmir narrative is seen or heard by Kashmiris, they turn hypersensitive. Some break the T.V sets. Some radios. Because what mainstream media yields is always dismissive to the realities on ground.
Indian news is a depository of nonsensical sound bites, blatant voice-overs & invented heap of lies & prejudices. Fake news & ‘alternative facts’ stay the feedstock of our ruling politics. We don’t have to believe in what mainstream media tells or writes, but in the diametric contradiction of this reportage. For in this world contradictions are realities. We are living in the Orwellian dystopia where ministry of peace is actually the ministry of war. There is a deep political paradox at the bottom of everything here. One of such paradoxes is told by Indian academic Pratap bhanu Mehta in one of his fine speech ” Law, as Hobbes puts, is meant to liberate men from fear, but in India law produces its own fear”. Period.
Objective journalism, as American journalist T.D Allman writes, is a journalism that not only gets the facts right, but also the meaning of events. Tragically in our South-Asian subcontinent, famous for its large propaganda Mills, neither the fact is covered nor the meaning of events. Facts are destroyed by the troll army or otherwise known as BJP IT cell in their crude course of ‘reality-persecution’ to serve the interests of dominant political elites.
Kashmir identity, in today’s post-truth age, has become a mound of clay which is liable to any shape & change at state’s doorstep. It relies upon the state how they brief media to shape & sculpt this mound. Kashmir, as a disputed zone, is already in the crux of underestimation & through state-sponsored propagandistic project it lapses into black pot of misinterpretation. As someone puts it ” Knots are tied without rope”. If army man shoots the civilian, it is no news to be televised. The matter is put this way over ” Kashmiri extremist civilian has stone-pelted the army man. Kashmir is at the peak bullshit of extremism”. This is news, twisted news. Serving news.
Noam Chomsky in his famous book, Media control, on page 9, argues that state propaganda when supported by educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. This is what we learn from the contemporary condition, as to how the pedagogy of propaganda against Kashmiris has deepened into the nerve of educated class in the mainland India. In the conditions, such as these, Kashmir identity not only remains disparaged, but misinterpreted at large on the political plain. Kashmir has become a place of tangled myths woven by the strangers that drag the wounded paradise in an endless jeopardy.
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