Muslim ‘Terrorists’ Manufactured by the Media

http://www.twocircles.net/2009aug26/muslim_terrorists_manufactured_media.html

Muslim ‘Terrorists’ Manufactured by the Media

Submitted by mumtaz on 26 August 2009 - 6:40pm.

By Yoginder Sikand,

It is not just the ‘loony’ ‘vernacular’ media, as many are given to
believe, but even the ‘respectable’, ‘mainstream’, ‘national’
English-language press in India that have sedulously cultivated the
notion of ‘Islamic terrorism,’ so much so that the image of Muslims in
general being either terrorists or their sympathizers enjoys wide
currency today. While it is true that some of the most dastardly
terror attacks that India has witnessed in recent years have been the
handiwork of some Muslims—and this is something that the vast majority
of the Indian Muslims themselves deplore—it is also undeniable that
Muslims have been unfairly blamed for many other attacks or alleged
‘terror plots’ by the police as well as the media in which they have
had no role to play at all. Many Muslims—and others, too—believe that
these false allegations are not innocent errors, but can be said to
represent a deliberate and concerted effort to defame and demonise an
entire community and the religion with which it is associated.

That, precisely, is what a recently-released report, brought out by a
team of secular, leftist non-Muslim activists from Karnataka argues.
Titled ‘Media on Terror’, and issued by the activist group ‘Column 9’
[so named, the report says, because in a standard newspaper of eight
columns, issues and perspectives that deserve a column of their own
generally go missing), it is a detailed examination of the coverage
and projection of ‘terrorism’ in the state of Karnataka. It is based
on an analysis of the reporting of ‘terrorism’ in the Bangalore
editions of leading Kannada and English newspapers over several months
in 2008, supplemented with in-depth interviews with journalists,
stringers and police officials in Honnali, Davangere, Hubli, Kalghatgi
and Bangalore—places where, the media had reported, ‘terrorists’—all
of them incidentally Muslims—had been apprehended. This was a period
when the media was awash with stories of Muslim ‘terrorists’ allegedly
plotting to ‘take over’ the whole of Karnataka.

A striking finding of the report is that the media in Karnataka, both
Kannada and English, ‘dangerously seemed to pronounce judgments on
those arrested, much before the due process of law was played out’. In
fact, the report says, there was ‘no material basis to most of the
news reports’. The tone of their reporting was sharply ‘jingoistic’,
and ‘none of the standards’ expected of professional journalism
‘seemed to be in evidence’. Alleged terrorists—in many cases innocent
Muslim youths arbitrarily picked up by the police—were subjected to
‘media trials’ based simply on unsubstantiated police claims. The
report speaks of ‘the blurring of lines between police officials and
investigative journalists, who seemed to pre-empt “official”
investigation.’ The language and rhetoric used in the reporting
reflected, the report says, an obvious and deep-rooted bias against
Muslims, and a deliberate effort to create a sense of siege among
Hindus.

Scores of sensational stories of Muslims being picked up for being
‘suspected’ terrorists published in the Karnataka media were based on
information allegedly received from what were routinely called ‘highly
placed police officials’ or ‘intelligence bureau officials’.
Predictably, the report says, the names of these police or
investigating officials were not provided, which meant that these
stories—many of which were patently fabricated—could not be
substantiated by these officials. In numerous instances, the reports
were based on ‘news’ wholly manufactured by reporters and stringers,
as evidenced from the denials that emerged from the police officials
themselves a day after these reports were published, which many papers
chose to ignore. In almost all such cases, the newspapers did not
bother to issue an apology despite irrefutable confirmation of their
falsity. In most instances where the stories about alleged Muslim
terrorists were based on information supplied by the police,
journalists simply asked no questions at all as to the process of
investigation that took place within the police stations despite it
being common knowledge that torture is widely used by the police in
such cases to extract information or else to force detainees to admit
to crimes that they have had no hand in. Consequently, the arrested
Muslims were uncritically presented in the media as ‘hardcore Islamist
terrorists’, even without the courts having made their judgments. By
presenting no version other than that of the police, the report
remarks, the ‘investigative’ aspect of journalism in Karnataka on the
matter of alleged Muslim involvement in ‘terrorism’ has in fact been
reduced to what it calls ‘stenographic reporting’. The report adds
that the few journalists who tried to balance the stories with the
other views about reported incidents about Muslim ‘terrorism’ or
foiled ‘terrorist plots’ rarely found space in the newspapers.

In this regard, it is significant to note that, as the report says, it
was mainly at the lower-rungs of the police that journalists depended
for their ‘stories’ (often, for a price it suggests). The journalists
interviewed by the team that commissioned the report confirmed that to
sustain their relations with police constables they needed to ‘keep
them happy’ and desist from ‘undertaking any steps to antagonize
them’. This, the report points out, greatly affected the credibility
of their reports since they assumed the police version as valid and
often failed to critique or to ask any questions about that version.
The report adds:

‘Across the board, journalists specifically mentioned lower rung
police officials, including constables and head constables within the
concerned police stations, as sources of information. The journalists’
access to these police officials was determined entirely on the basis
of their personal rapport and connections staked out within the police
stations. It was fairly obvious that the journalists nurtured these
relationships with the officials very carefully since the
relationships were the base for a potential “exclusive” story”[…]
Despite the team’s repeated questions seeking names of police
officials who acted as sources of information, not a single reporter
was willing to share these details.’

Another alarming finding of the report was the arbitrary branding by
both the police and the media of literature and CDs allegedly seized
by the police from the Muslims who had been arrested as ‘jihadi
materials’. These were presented as ‘proof’ of those arrested as being
behind acts of terror or even as would-be terrorists. In many cases,
the police officials simply refused to share the material with
journalists, at most showing them only photos of the covers of books
seized from the arrested Muslims. Amazingly, the report relates,
according to the journalists they interviewed, ‘evidence of the books
indeed being jihadi materials lay in the fact that most were books
written in Urdu.’ In one location where alleged Muslim terrorists had
been arrested and so-called jihadi material recovered from them,
journalists interviewed by the team mentioned that the police had
produced a panel of Urdu experts at a press briefing to confirm that
the seized materials were indeed ‘jihadi’. Strikingly, none of the
journalists had any clue about the identity of these so-called Urdu
‘experts’. A journalist in Honnali spoke about a particular CD that
was seized by the police from an arrested Muslim, whom the police and
the media had alleged was a ‘terrorist’. Far from being incendiary
material, as was alleged, the CD, it turned out, was actually about an
orphanage. Another journalist provided the team that had prepared the
report a photograph taken on a mobile phone, where they could read the
titles of two books since they were printed in English—one of these
was ‘The Spirit of Islam’ and the other was the ‘Holy Quran’, books
that, needless to say, are not proscribed and are readily available in
the market. In this regard, the report rightly asks, ‘How can
possession of the Holy Koran be presented as proof that the people
owning them are suspected terrorists? Why weren’t any questions or
objections raised about this new tendency of the Indian police who
chose to present the possession of the Holy Koran as proof of possible
terrorism?’. Thus, the report argues, ‘It was very clear that the
journalists had labeled books and other seized materials primarily on
the basis of their interactions with the police and, to some extent,
on the basis of internalized personal prejudice’.

Yet another striking finding of the report is that not a single
journalist whom the team met and who had reported on the arrest of
alleged Muslim terrorists had received clear instructions or editorial
guidelines pertaining to coverage of sensitive issues such as
terrorism from their respective editorial chiefs. Many journalists
spoke of the pressure to meet the evening deadlines for daily reports,
and so, they admitted, there were several occasions when they did not
have the time to verify the claims of police officials in cases of
real or alleged terrorist attacks or plots, and merely carried police
version without cross-checking. Equally distressingly, the report
unveiled, reporters located in regions that usually received no print
space or attention in the press found themselves catapulted to
attention through the sensationalist, and often false, reports that
they filed during the time of the arrests’ and got front page
coverage. The reporters also mentioned the pressure exerted on them by
the state bureau chiefs to file reports that were “exclusive” to the
organisation. This conduced, the report says, to sensationalism and
even to the fabrication of reports. As the report puts it, ‘In the
consequent one-upmanship created by the pressure to perform within the
confines of a profit-driven industry, the journalists admitted to
several compromises on the articles’ authenticity and their contents.’
Some journalists interviewed unanimously admitted that the reports
they had filed were intentionally sensationalist in nature. According
to them, what was of paramount importance was for them to ‘prove’ that
the arrested persons were in fact guilty, that they were in fact
members of ‘Islamist terrorist’ organisations, even much before the
courts were given the chance to lay down their verdicts. Sadly, as the
report says, these reporters saw their ‘sensationalist reporting’, not
as a crime, but, rather, as ‘a service that they were rendering to the
nation’—they claimed that in this way they were exposing ‘hardened
criminals’ and potential terrorists who were capable of inflicting
much harm to society.

One of the persons interviewed by the team, the reporter for the
Kannada Prabha in Hubli, openly admitted that ‘60% of the reports that
he had filed were false and inaccurate’. Similarly, the Hubli reporter
for the Times of India admitted to using a photograph of an unrelated
dargah with his report about an alleged Muslim terrorist camp, and and
falsely described the flag near the dargah as a Pakistani one. In
fact, it so turned out, the correspondent himself had never been to
the location. In an incident in coastal Karnataka, after two Muslim
men were paraded naked and brutally assaulted in public by Hindu Yuva
Sena activists for transporting cows, a Muslim protest rally was taken
out in Udipi. Kannada papers falsely alleged that the demonstrators
had unfurled a Pakistani flag and raised pro-Pakistan slogans and,
without any evidence, accused them of being linked to Al-Qaeda and the
Lashkar-e Tayyeba. Although the police denied these claims, the papers
pressed on with their accusations. In another bizarre case, a Muslim
man from Bangalore associated with the Muslim IT Association was
wrongly accused by the Times of India of being linked to a terrorist
organization. Despite these blatant falsehoods, the report notes with
distress, in the overwhelming majority of cases the newspapers did not
issue any apologies or acknowledge their (possibly deliberate) errors.

The team also met with senior police officials in Bangalore and
Davangere. It found that ‘they appeared to be less concerned and
engaged with the prevention of biased media reporting and
introspection into the role of the police.’ They argued that it was
not the responsibility of the police to challenge inaccurate reports
filed by journalists, and that this was also time-consuming. The SP of
Davangere, the report says, ‘readily acknowledged the leakage of
information to the press through the lower rung officials though they
were expressly forbidden from doing so.’ She admitted its continuance
despite the issuing of a whip asking all police officials below the
rank of SP to refrain from interactions with journalists, and
suggested that journalists should depend on official press communiqués
released by SPs.

Among the many cases of false framing of Muslims as ‘terrorists’ in
Karnataka that the report highlights, one deserves special mention to
indicate the deep-rootedness of anti-Muslim prejudices in the state
machinery, particularly since the BJP emerged as such a powerful force
in Karnataka. The team met with judicial officer Jinaralkar at the
judicial magistrate’s first class court at Honnali, where two Muslim
youths, Abdullah and Nasir, had been arrested on grounds of allegedly
being terrorists. Jinaralkar defended his awarding of the two to
police custody, although they were initially arrested and presented as
bike thieves, a decision the media highlighted and lauded, crediting
the judge with foresight in identifying the arrested duo as ‘suspected
terrorists’. The judge explained his decision by stating that the
material seized from them when they were arrested indicated that they
might in fact have been terrorists, rather than bike-robbers as was
initially claimed: duplicate identity cards, a dagger, a map of south
India with red marks against Udupi and Goa, an American dollar, two
pieces of paper, with the phrase www.com written on one and ‘Jungle
King Behind Back Me’ on another.

The judge told the team, ‘When I looked at these materials in their
entirety, several things were clear to me. I felt that these were
definitely not just bike thieves—why would bike thieves carry around
duplicate identity cards and a map of south India? The fact that they
had an American dollar seemed to indicate their international links,
while the paper with www.com indicated that they were tech-savvy […]
Definitely enough grounds in my opinion to grant the police their
custody to facilitate their further investigations’ .

The report indicates that journalists in Karnataka (and this probably
holds true for the rest of the country) typically see terrorism as a
specifically Muslim phenomenon, and do not even consider the
possibility of Hindu ‘terrorists’, although, as the report points out,
in Karnataka today, particularly with the rise of the BJP, scores of
incidents of terror against Muslims (as well as Dalits) by Hindu
groups have been recorded. Predictably, the media does not describe
these as instances of ‘Hindu terrorism’. This points to what the
report terms as the dangerously marked ‘internalisation of Hindu
nationalism’ by media professionals in Karnataka, and the projection
by the media of the Hindutva lobby as the presumed ‘sole
representative’ of the Hindus.

‘Media on Terror’ can be procured from Column 9, No. 51, 29th Cross,
9th Main, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560070. Price: Rs. 25.

--
Dr.A.Mohamed Ajmal
ajmal.doc@gmail.com
ajmal017@yahoo.co.in
+91 9843505035