Mayank Jain - 'We don't want a media trial': JNU students angered by TV reportage of campus crisis
For many first-year students of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru
University, Sunday was an evening like nothing they'd seen before. More than a
thousand people gathered on the campus to form a massive human chain to protest
the arrest last week of JNU Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar on charges
of criminal conspiracy and sedition.
“Free our President” was one slogan that went up. Shouted
another group: “Save JNU from fascism.” Volunteers moved down the length of the
chain to inform students of the university strike on Monday in Kumar’s support. Kumar was arrested on Friday after reports that some
students had chanted allegedly anti-national slogans at an event on Tuesday
organised to discuss the execution of 2001 Parliament attack-convict Afzal
Guru, and the right to self-determination for the people of Kashmir.
The police also raided a number of hostels on the JNU campus
as they searched for students who were seen chanting allegedly seditious
slogans in footage of Tuesday’s event. The agitation at the police action was evident in the
slogans being chanted as the human chain began to take shape. But as OB vans
arrived at the gates of the university and photojournalists pulled out their
cameras, the slogans changed. “We won’t tolerate media trial,” was the cry
started at one end of the chain, that soon rippled down the line.
It was clear that the protestors were angry with sections of
the media ‒ mainly some opinionated television anchors such as Arnab Goswami of
Times Now ‒who have questioned the student union's claims of innocence
regarding the controversial Kashmir event. “We don’t want the media on campus if they can’t report
factually,” said Mansi Kumar, a JNU student who was part of the human chain. “I
have joined a protest for the first time today because terrible things have
been happening to students of this campus and television media has ostracised
us and turned this issue into a political game where all actors show up on
debates and score points.”
“Arnab Goswami go back!” shouted another student. An M.Phil
candidate in sociology, the student explained why she believed that the TV
reporting of the recent incidents have been “overtly anti-student”. “The media is supposed to be the watchdog but some channels
have just distorted the narrative and turned us into anti-nationals already
even though there’s no credible evidence for their claims,” she said. A senior member of the faculty, who spoke to Scroll.in on
condition of anonymity, said that the slanted coverage had resulted in several
problems for the students.
“Some popular news anchors have made it their bread and
butter to paint all of this university as anti-national when most of our
students are not even part of any political outfit,” she said. “The government
wants to shut down the university and media trial is only making things worse
for these students who are facing disapproval from their families who are
following the news and soon they might even face discrimination in professional
lives.”
A leader of the All India Students’ Association, which holds
two of the four union seats, added that the television media is hostile to the
students because the media has adopted a hyper nationalistic approach. “The narrative of some of the TV channels has been the same
belligerent nationalism for sometime now," he said. "They just find
new targets. Now, students are government’s enemies just because there’s an
anti-national angle attached to it. Two days before this, they were calling
someone else anti-national.”
Only the previous day, reporters had been booed on campus.
On Saturday, a huge public meeting saw thousands of people in attendance,
including Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sitaram Yechury and
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi. But TV reporters were heckled as the
journalists began to jostle for space. “The TV crew kept disrupting the public meeting because they
wanted 100 kinds of shots like it’s some political rally,” said a student. Soon
enough, the audience began to chant, “Media go back.”
Swati, a senior research scholar at the university, has been
writing about the perils of the alleged media trial on social media sites. “An entire university has been labelled ‘anti-national’ by
the conscience-keeper of the nation, and the media does not seem to care how
damaging this rhetoric is to higher education in India ‒ all it cares about is
drama,” she said. “What we are is frustrated, and can you blame us? Report the
truth, is all we ask. Report why a young man is now in jail, charged with a
colonial-era law. Report why our hostels were searched without warrants.”
http://scroll.in/article/803589/we-dont-want-a-media-trial-jnu-students-angered-by-tv-reportage-of-campus-crisis