By Ammu Joseph

The large-scale, widespread and brutal crimes against women committed during the sectarian violence in the Indian state of Gujarat in February and March 2002 were the focus of a press release from Amnesty International on the occasion of the International Women’s Day this year. Many of these crimes continue to be officially denied and have certainly gone unpunished so far, even though they were reported in the Indian media, and women’s groups and other civil society organizations in the country have been attempting to help the survivors secure justice.

The media were surprisingly slow to report the rapes and other forms of sexual attack that characterized the violence, although the intense and prolonged conflagration in Gujarat was widely and critically covered in the mainstream, nationwide media, including live television news. This is despite the fact that women journalists were actively involved in covering the worst episode of Hindu-Muslim violence in the country since independence.

The first comprehensive reports of the gender violence came from fact-finding teams made up of women activists: an independent panel of women whose report is titled The Survivors Speak and a team sent by the All India Democratic Women’s Association, which produced another hard-hitting report. Unfortunately, the belated report of the officially appointed National Commission for Women fell far short of the many civil society reports, including one by a team of senior editors representing the Editors’ Guild and another by the National Commission for Human Rights.

The Survivors Speak report, released in April 2002, includes a revealing section on sexual violence and the media. “In many ways women have been the central characters in the Gujarat carnage, and their bodies the battleground. The Gujarati vernacular press [Gujarati language press] has been the agent provocateur,” it begins.

According to this report as well as many others, a major Gujarati daily deliberately set out to inflame passions after the tragic torching of a train compartment in which 58 passengers, including 26 women and 14 children, all believed to be Hindu, were burned to death on February 27, 2002. It did so by publishing reports about the alleged rape and mutilation of Hindu women by Muslim men, which were subsequently investigated and proved false by the police. But by then the damage had been done. Violence against Muslims began the very next day, raged almost unchecked for a few days, and then kept erupting sporadically in different places in the state over several weeks.

“Ironically,” continued the report, “while false stories about the rape of Hindu women have done the rounds, there has been virtual silence in the media, including in the English language papers, about the real stories of sexual violence against Muslim women. … When members of the fact-finding team spoke to senior journalists in Ahmedabad, their explanation was that rape stories are provocative, and that in the early days of the violence, they had to play a socially responsible role, and not incite more violence. But in the weeks that followed, the press has continued to do self-censorship about rape stories.” According to the report, “…Yet again Muslim women are being victimized twice over. They have suffered the most unimaginable forms of sexual abuse during the Gujarat carnage. And yet, there is no one willing to tell their stories to the world. Women’s bodies have been employed as weapons in this war – either through grotesque image-making or as the site through which to dishonor men, and yet women are being asked to bear all this silently. Women do not want more communal violence. But peace cannot be bought at the expense of the truth, or at the expense of women’s right to tell the world what they have suffered in Gujarat.”

Mainstream media coverage of these crimes against women appears to have been catalyzed by independent reports such as these. They blew the whistle on what academic Anuradha M. Chenoy refers to as a “gendered pogrom” in her essay in Terror, Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out, (Kali for Women, India & Zed Books, UK, 2003). Once the national media overcame its apparent initial reluctance to open the Pandora’s box of communal violence against women, both the print press and television featured hard-hitting reports and analyses. Many of these were by women journalists. The nascent Network of Women in Media, an informal network of Indian women journalists launched in January 2002, contributed to the debate on media coverage of Gujarat. Over the past couple of years, local networks, which decide their own priorities and organize their own activities, have often initiated events focusing on critiquing media practice, to which both men and women are invited. The Network of Women in Media, Bangalore, organised a two-day media seminar entitled Covering Communal Conflict: Lessons from Gujarat 2002 last year in collaboration with the Centre for Casteism, Communalism and Law of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Editors and other senior journalists from different parts of the country, including some who had direct experience of reporting on the violence in Gujarat, were among the speakers. Participants included journalists of both sexes working in different media and languages in both urban and rural areas.

The primary aim of the seminar was to learn from media coverage of the violence in Gujarat in order to improve media response to similar situations in the future. Since accurate information is critical to this process, the findings of separate surveys conducted by the Network of Women in Media groups in Mumbai (Bombay) and Bangalore, documenting and analyzing press coverage in the two cities during the first fortnight of the violence, were presented. Summaries of the discussions and surveys were published in a recent edition of Voice for Change, the journal of Voices, a Bangalore-based communications non-governmental organization.

In retrospect, the fact that even the NWMB seminar did not specifically or fully deal with the media’s tardy and inadequate response to the gender aspects of the communal violence in Gujarat could be seen as significant. As one of the organisers I could plead that we did try in vain to get some of the speakers to address the issue. But the fact is that we did not succeed in ensuring a full-fledged discussion on the specific forms of violence experienced by women in Gujarat and the media’s coverage or non-coverage of this significant and ominous development.

One explanation – not an excuse – for this is that at the time our plans were taking shape the reality of what had happened to women in Gujarat was still unclear and contested. However, it is also possible that our gender concerns were eclipsed by our more general anxiety – and trauma -- over the nature, intensity and longevity of the violence that took place in Gujarat, the role of the state in dealing with it, the role of the media in reporting and analysing it, and the implications of all of the above for the future of Indian society.

The weaknesses in the initial response of the Indian media and media professionals, including women, to the gender aspects of the violence in Gujarat clearly hold many lessons for improved performance in the future.

June 2003

Ammu Joseph is a freelance journalist and media-watcher based in Bangalore, India. Among her publications are three books: Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues, (co-authored/edited with Kalpana Sharma, Sage, 1994), Women in Journalism: Making News (The Media Foundation/Konark, 2000), and Terror, Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out (co-edited with Kalpana Sharma, Kali/Zed,2003).