There is a well-thought-out reason for naming the community, faith, or gender of a victim for certain stories in The Hindu . Some readers, especially students, have written to us asking why some headlines mention the words “Dalit”, “Muslim”, and “Dalit woman” in the case of violent acts, while others do not. For instance, Prashant Kumar from Patna took objection to the headline “ 15-year-old Dalit girl raped in moving car in Haryana ” (August 1). He asked if the newspaper would have said, “General caste girl raped”, if the girl had happened to be from another caste. Kratin Shastri, a class 12 student from Indore, asked a similar question.
On reports on the lynching of Muslims, another student, P.V. Ramana, from Visakhapatnam, invoked the national pledge “all Indians are my brothers and sisters”, and said that caste and religious identities in news reports should be avoided as they are fundamentally divisive in nature. There were e-mails from readers questioning another headline, “ Temple purified in U.P. after visit by Dalit woman MLA ” (August 1), on the basis that the story was essentially about gender discrimination rather than caste discrimination, and so mentioning the caste of the woman in the headline was inappropriate. In most of these letters, readers said that mentioning the identity of the victim undermined uniformity in the reports because newspaper reports generally refrain from pointing out the identity of victims if they are caste Hindus.
Equality and uniformity
I would like to point out to these readers that a newspaper which scrupulously follows its values and is committed to an egalitarian world makes a distinction between equality and uniformity. The idea of uniformity does not take into account the widespread inequalities in society. In the case of caste, B.R. Ambedkar had explained how caste is a form of graded inequality, where the fight for dignity gets more difficult as one goes down the caste pyramid. The Hindu would be failing in its journalistic duty if it does not point out a hate crime where the motive of the perpetrator is either caste or communal prejudice.
It is important to understand the complex relationship between those wielding power flowing from privilege — privilege that can be based on caste, class, clan, gender or faith — and those who are subjugated and humiliated by them for not having that privilege. Academic Sanjay Palshikar, in an insightful essay in the Economic and Political Weekly , “ Understanding humiliation ” (December 17, 2005), talked about the corrosive power of humiliation. He wrote: “Humiliation is a critical point in a power relationship, the cusp region as it were, something that brings sharpness to the exercise of power and helps reproduce those relations of power.” He had effectively argued that the vocabulary of humiliation demands a certain clarity.
Kinds of crimes
For a responsible journalist, any affront to human dignity is a story worth telling because the bedrock of journalism is the belief that it can reduce harm. In the cases of excesses — be it lynching or expulsion from a public space — the journalistic team, which comprises the reporter and the desk, gives due consideration to human dignity in reporting, editing and providing headlines. Identities of victims are mentioned only when the victim’s dignity is trampled upon because of her identity. The team makes a fundamental difference between a crime and a crime that is driven by hate and bigotry.
Which brings us to the question, what is news? It is a combination of truth, accuracy, balance and context. It would be a dereliction of duty if a crime based on hate and prejudice is not differentiated from other crimes. If someone pays a huge price for her birth and identity by being subjected to violence or being killed, this violates the law. This is the context which needs to be mentioned in reports and, as far as possible, in headlines too.
It would be inhuman to indulge in whataboutery by conflating any other crime with a hate crime. By erasing the crucial distinction, we would not only be divisive but create an environment that is conducive for identity-based violence that corrodes our social fabric.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
