I
was 20, and I won’t let anyone say those are the best years of my life
–
Paul Nizan, Aden Arabia
On social media platforms,
there has been a new celebration of nostalgia in lockdown: #MeAt20, pictures
when you were in the 20s.
While many discovered old forgotten memories and fresh, open-ended, non-dogmatic, young and idealistic faces from the past, mostly in black & white, the vicious signs of the contemporary times in India came back like a sudden jolt. Masrat Zahra, a Kashmiri photo-journalist in her 20s, was booked under a stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, for uploading “anti-national” posts on social media. The action is repetitive and inevitable, and it seems shocking, surprising, lacking both sanity and humanity, every time it arrives in its bitter ritualism. Why, you ask yet again, knowing so fully well the depressing answer. For God’s sake, why, and that too during a global ‘Mahamari’, amidst death and dying?
However, what do you do
with those who love the sinister and the diabolical like in a compulsive,
obsessive, B-Grade horror movie, constantly looking for ‘potential victims’,
using their constitutional powers like feudal, unaccountable, revengeful
monarchies and dictatorships? And what do you do when the old and the ageing,
in the last phases of their life’s illustrious graph, choose to become so
vindictive and hateful against the young, especially the educated and the professional
young, that they want to hurt them so badly, demonise and dehumanize them,
clamp draconian laws against them, brand them ‘anti-nationals and jehadis’,
among other clichéd ‘badges of honour’, and, finally, lock them up in prisons,
even while the justice system seems so tragically distant and indifferent?
Can parents hate their children?
Can teachers hate their students? Can gurus hate their shishyas? Can a good
coach hate the sportspersons he is teaching the difficult craft of the game?
Can the ageing and the powerful so hate the young, instead of celebrating their
brilliance? Are they not the future of hope, and the hope of the future, the
nation’s scaffoldings?
Yes, it seems, if we look
at contemporary times in India, which is gloomy and foreboding, not because of
the young, but because of the old: the bitter, Hobbesian old.
There are many pictures which
Masrat Zahra has taken in her young career as a photo journalist, including on
women, in places not many journalists would dare to go in a ‘conflict zone’.
Her pictures have been authentic and non-partisan. Homai Vyarawalla was an ace
woman photojournalist during the colonial period, and there have been rare and
few instances of women taking up the camera. Young Masrat’s pictures in Kashmir’s
sublime and difficult terrain are loaded with subliminal depth, sensitivity and
angst; they capture news as much as transcend ‘news as instant history’.
This is no mechanical
reproduction of art or current affairs. This is the craft of story-telling and visual
history, this is time unfolding and recorded with a spontaneous click of the
camera. There is nothing spontaneous in her camera, or her art of photography.
It is built through years of observation, silence and absorption of the unhappy
and uncanny reality in Kashmir, now under a military lockdown since August 5.
As a photo journalist,
surely, she has the right to photograph all she sees: the falling of the leaves
in sad autumn, like Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, the leaves becoming kaleidoscopic;
or, the stillness of the Dal Lake during an entire day’s life, as if life’s
infinite sadness has stopped the ripples of the waters; or, the barbed wires
and the barricades. So, why is she being hounded, a young and brilliant person with
great promise? Instead, India, and its government, should be proud of her.
And why hound Peerzada
Ashiq as well, the credible correspondent of The Hindu in Srinagar? If this is not a direct attack on the freedom
of press, as it was when they tried to hound Siddharth Varadarajan, Editor, The
Wire, then what is it? Siddharth only did his duty as a professional
journalist, he only reported what many others were doing. So why pick and
choose, while all those who run the flourishing hate factories can get away
with fake news, planted stories, character assassinations, doctored videos,
communal and social hatred in full public glare, and again and again, like a
chronicle of a tale foretold?
They have booked some of
the brightest young people in our intellectual horizons without any iota of
evidence. Safoora Zargar, a MPhil scholar in Jamia, significantly also from
Kashmir, Meeran Haider, from Jamia, both doing relief work in difficult
circumstances, Gowher Geelani, a journalist, and, once again, Umar Khalid, who
has done his PhD from JNU, and against whom not one charge has been proved
despite their best efforts to demonise him, including with doctored videos.
Besides, Khalid Saifi of United Against Hate and Ishrat Jahan, both working in
relief operations after the riots in Northeast Delhi, were arrested. Khalid was
allegedly tortured too, with his legs in plaster.
Is it, because, they are
all Muslims?
Fortunately, barring the compulsive sell-outs, the entire journalist fraternity has stood up in protest and in solidarity. Said the Editors Guild of India: “The Editors Guild of India has noted with shock and concern the high-handed manner in which the law enforcement agencies in Jammu & Kashmir have used the prevailing laws to deal with two Srinagar-based journalists, Masrat Zahra, a young freelance photographer, and Peerzada Ashiq, a reporter working for The Hindu.
“Any recourse to such
laws for merely publishing something in the mainstream or social media is a
gross misuse of power. Its only purpose can be to strike terror into
journalists. The Guild also believes that this is an indirect way of
intimidating journalists in the rest of the country as well. The journalists
should be put to no harm or further harassment. If the government has any
grievance against their reporting, there are other ways of dealing with such
issues in the normal course. Mere social media posts of factual pictures can’t
attract the toughest anti-terror laws passed for hardened terrorists. And in
the case of The Hindu reporter, the
correct course was to escalate the complaint to the newspaper’s editor. The
Guild demands that the Union Territory administration of Jammu & Kashmir
withdraw the charges forthwith.”
Meanwhile, the Indian
Women’s Press Corps (IWPC) said that it is shocked at the manner in which the
law enforcement authorities in Jammu & Kashmir, over the last few days,
have invoked laws to clamp down on freedom of speech and expression that violate
fundamental rights laid down in the Constitution. The IWPC notes that the
intentions of the authorities in J&K is to strike fear in the hearts of
journalists who are simply doing their job. This is a clear message that the
Union Territory will not tolerate dissent.”
Several civil society
organisations and collective bodies of journalists, including the Committee for
the Protection of Journalists and the Network of Women in Media, India, have
protested against the intimidation of journalists. The international media is
also reporting on the gasping breath of the largest democracy.
Indeed, if this
government wants only a puppet media, a loyalist intellectual community, and a
youth which should only toe its line, then Indian democracy is in serious danger.
Perhaps, we have already crossed the line of control. And that is bad news.
