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A fortnightly column from The Wire's ombudsperson.

A great deal is happening in the BJP-ruled state of Assam, presided over by a chief minister HimantaBiswaSarma, who has publicly declared that he is above the constitution. On the basis of petitions filed by three “complainants”, at least two of whom are members of the BJP, the Assam police filed FIRs against The Wire’s Siddharth Varadarajan and Karan Thapar in early May for “provoking unrest, undermining national security, and spreading narratives aligned with hostile interests” – or, in other words, for just doing their job of analysing, commenting and publishing documentation of the communally slanted ways in which the state of Assam is being run. 

Coincidentally or, more likely intentionally, the FIRs were filed at a time when the chief minister was in the process of launching a campaign in multiple border districts of his state to dispossess and evict a category of people now given the nomenclature of ‘Miya’. 

The term has come to be a useful place holder for Muslims who may have been living in these parts for decades but who are now viewed through a miasma of suspicion by the ruling party. They can then easily be termed as “foreigners” or even “ghuspaithiya” (infiltrators), and removed from the land where they had settled, sometimes for over generations. The methods used to do this are both barbaric and lawless in the extreme. Public announcements are made and bulldozers arrive without notice, reducing their abodes to dust within a few hours. Topography has also not been kind to them, with the swiftly shifting river waters crisscrossing the state often carrying away the soil on which they once had homes, hanging on to family documents in these circumstances also becomes near impossible. 

Forced to move to higher reaches for the survival of their families, they sometimes have no recourse but to settle on government land, leaving them particularly vulnerable to state action. Despite the multiple challenges facing an already vulnerable community, no opportunity has been provided by the state of Assam for terror-striken people to represent their cases before being pushed across the border with Bangladesh, which often results in their being pushed back by Bangladeshi forces to the patch of no-man’s land that lies between the two countries.

Intriguingly, the FIRs against Varadarajan and Thapar were filed in May but served to them only on August 12, with the name of yet another senior journalist and YouTuber, Abhisar Sharma, added to the list. It is disturbing that while the Supreme Court has given relief to Varadarajan and Thapar, Abhisar Sharma – while given interim protection from arrest for four weeks – will have to approach the Assam high court for similar respite. 

This amounts to viewing journalism, which bears the hallmark of credibility and public engagement, through a patina of distrust. 

The distinguished retired Supreme Court judge, Madan B. Lokur, described it as “the dangerous wiring together of a ‘conspiracy’” in an article he wrote for The Hindu recently: “The attitude of the Assam police is quite obvious – harass the journalists and make the process the punishment for a non-existent offence,” he said.  

By the time the FIRs were served, at least two major eviction drives had taken place in the state with more than 3,300 families removed during the months of June and July alone.  First they come for the truth-tellers and then they go after the voiceless — that in essence is the Assam model.

We need to take a step back and consider the corporate media’s treatment of this unconstitutional, brutal Assam model. At a time when the very web of life of hundreds of thousands of Assam’s most marginalised are being torn asunder, the Assamese media have chosen to amplify the irrational cry, unfounded by data, that the state is being swamped by thousands of Muslim infiltrators from Bangladesh. For politicians like Sarma, who have built their careers by feeding off this communal polarisation and cultural anxiety over the imminent destruction of the Asomiya language and culture, nothing could be more welcome, especially with state elections looming large.

 But he is also hard at work parceling out land, some of it belonging to the local tribal population, to corporates and friendly interests: a thermal power plant here, a township there; a food park here, an oil seed plantation there: nice chunks to Adani, with even Patanjali getting slices. The corporate media is extremely reticent about reporting on these birthday cake ceremonies.

HimantaSarma’s great friend and mentor is editor-in-chief of Republic Media Network, who has made it his mission to glorify the chief minister on his channel. Sarma has consequently emerged as something of a mascot for Republic Television, constantly quoted (“in 12 to 13 districts in Assam, according to the CM, Hindus have become minorities”) and interviewed.

Earlier this week, word went around amongst the Godi media faithful that their next task was to attack former Planning Commission member, Syeda Hameed, for daring to state in Assam, where she had gone as part of fact-finding delegation, that every human being in India, regardless of being a citizen, enjoys the right to life – this incidentally is a principle inherent in Article 21 of the constitution. 

When Hameed was slated to speak on August 26 at the ‘People’s Tribunal on Assam Evictions, Detentions & the Right to Belong’, hosted by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights and Karwaan-e-Mohabbat at Delhi’s Constitution Club, she had to face screaming hordes of young reporters wanting to know why she was supporting “ghuspaithiyas”. She shared with the audience how she felt when this lot held their microphones like daggers to her face, demanding that she explain herself forthwith. 

Later that evening, as the prime time chat shows unspooled, it became clearer that these young men and women were mere puppets in the hands of their channels and anchors. The supreme puppet master of the evening was, you guessed it, Arnab Goswami, who took it upon himself to flay the “lobby” – whatever that was, presumably anyone not on his side and that of his buddy in Guwahati. The ticker tape said it all: ‘Why is the lobby desperate to defend infiltrators?’, ‘Woke Lobby Exposed’, ‘Is there a conspiracy to ignite chaos?’, ‘Syeda Hameed seeks to realise Jinnah’s dream’, the screaming crawlers literally crawled up one’s skin. 

“There are people in this country who want it to be run over by Bangladeshis …for their votebank politics,” pronounced the puppet-master, amidst ads that sold shiny cars like the Grand Vitara and the Hyundai Creta.

 This, ultimately, was all about consumption – the audience was urged to consume material goods even as they were made to swallow large amounts of communal bilge. 

Pamela Philipose is an Indian journalist and researcher. 

This article was originally published on The Wire.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.