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Media Censorship
When I sent out
my article on gender issues and my critique of the
feudal/patriarchal society of Hyderabad, the muted response from
the Urdu media in this city eloquently bespoke of the prevailing
mindsets in the city. It was ironic that while Muslims indulged in
their victimhood in India, blaming outside enemies for their
oppression, self-censorship prevents them from seeing the ‘enemy
within,’ the internal lacunae shackling the community. A free
press is one of the pillars of democracy, and the media its
‘fourth estate’, as Edmund Burke called it. It is questionable
whether democracy has truly come to, or been digested by, India,
and what ‘participatory democracy’ meant for women since both the
colonial and feudal yokes were (supposedly) lifted after
Independence. While there was an outpouring of women joining
Gandhi’s freedom struggle against British colonialism, these were
mostly from the educated Hindu middleclass or elites, like the
poet Sarojini Naidu. Muslim women, few and far between, continued
to remain in their ‘harems’ or ‘purdah quarters,’ the seraglios
for women. Women of the nobility of Hyderabad like my own female
ancestry were totally segregated from participating in public
life, sometimes even deprived of a formal education (although some
were tutored privately). One exception was my maternal
grandmother, raised in a royal family in northern India, who
rebelled against her class and became one of the Indian
revolutionaries with Mohandas K. Gandhi. It is a source of pride
for me to strive to follow in her footsteps through my own social
activism and democratic politics. In the broader Indian spectrum,
Hyderabad, with its feudal past, remains a ‘sub-culture’ with
fossilized male traditionalism virtually impervious to change.
Despite the
luminary women who have emerged in public life in post-partition
India, the insidious reality indicates that the legacies of both
colonial policies and feudalistic attitudes are not just thriving,
but worse, holding entire segments of the nation hostage to
exploitative practices masked as ‘tradition’. The new
‘corporatocracy’ of India, and Hyderabad as the hub of the IT
sector, embody the shareholders’ (foreign investors’) paradise
where new forms of ‘despotic capitalism’ and monetarism have
replaced patriarchal power, whose modern face comes as
paternalistic capitalism.
The media
monopoly in Hyderabad, my hometown, is controlled by three major
dailies, namely Siasat (once vocal during the Independence
movement), Etemaad (that has worked for the uplift of certain
constituencies of Muslims in the city) and the Munsif Daily.
However, the first two of these, Siasat and Etemaad, are aligned
with political Parties, Siasat with the Telegu Desam led by former
Chief Minister of Hyderabad, Chandrababu Naidu; and Etemaad is the
mouthpiece of the MIM, the Muslim party allied with the Congress
in power, and headed by a syndicate of the Owaissi family. Due to
this politicization or self-interest of the
media-political-corporate nexus, there are few (and sub-standard)
outlets for Muslims to voice the problems of their community. The
cultural ‘disconnect’ of minority Muslims deepens without a ‘free
press’ to support it, further deepening its political alienation
and disempowerment. My submissions on Muslim women to Urdu
newspapers seemed to be lost in cyberspace. The Urdu media itself
has come under severe criticism for being weak (by pandering to
political interests) and of a low standard. As one critic, AN
Shibli (Ummid.com, July 23, 2010) described it in an article
entitled “Urdu Media: Suffering in Silence,” the Urdu newspapers
in India favored “Nazm and Ghazal” over topics of any relevance or
significance such as informative articles or investigative
stories. This summarizes the dilemma facing the Urdu press. While
statistics show that there is a profusion of Urdu newspapers,
their circulation figures, which are “very poor,” are
“exaggerated.” The author notes “the basic motivation behind most
of the Urdu newspapers is to get political benefits.” Their
survival depends on advertisements; but the nation-wide
marginalization of Urdu in India prevails. “In most cases Urdu
journalists are not invited to press conferences,” he notes.
Additionally, internal problems hamper the Urdu press: “The major
problem with the Urdu media is that they pay a very paltry amount
to their staff. Many take on another job to make ends meet.”
There is the issue of standard as well: “The standard of Urdu
journalism and the journalist is very low”. Often the editors
themselves are computer-illiterate, and the news is re-cycled from
official press outlets or newspapers in other languages. Due to
these factors the writer concludes, “Urdu journalism needs a
change of style, contents and standards.”
Minority Women’s Voices
As a tool of
political power or private interests, the media cannot remedy what
may become a dysfunctional society maladjusted to the mainstream
Indian culture. One critic described the Indian democracy as a
‘functioning anarchy’. In the prevailing socio-political climate
is it surprising, that women’s voices are lost or drowned, and
Muslim women’s presence confined to invisibility, shrouded behind
‘burkhas’ where they are virtually a faceless non-entity? This is
the stereotype of Muslim minority women inevitably projected in a
largely Islamophobic mainstream Indian media, even the English
language press; and from the absence of Muslim women in the
political sphere, as television anchor-persons or in other visible
jobs, their marginalization is flagrant. The Muslim women who have
succeeded in academia or the political sector are generally
connected to elites. Open any newspaper in English in India and
the long roster of awards or public appointments indicates a
staggering absenteeism of Muslim women. Then, there is the broader
national context, the pervasive (albeit subtle) male chauvinism in
the Indian political establishment: the Reservations Bill for
Women, passed in the Rajya Sabha, was not even tabled in the Lok
Sabha (the Lower House of Parliament). It will be presented for
the third time in Parliament and remains blocked, due to some
chauvinistic politicians. Without the collusion of Muslim men,
politicians, media or opinion-makers, the backward status and
isolation of Muslim women remains unchanged. The gag-rule is
imposed on them from the media itself, from the outside as well as
from within. The average Indian Muslim woman, without access to
external support, might well ask: where do I go for help? Who do I
turn to, without the economic means to get legal advice, or know
my rights? What happens in the case of divorce, domestic abuse?
Without aid from their families, must Muslim women roam
homelessly? Will they be driven to marry non-Muslims, Hindus or
others, for security (which is already happening). Three young
women in my own family have married Hindus, but the old news
blackout hides these ‘transgressions’ (as ‘conventional’ society
views them).Criticism is forthcoming, but where are the solutions?
Women are scapegoated, stigmatized, punished or pilloried, but not
the social ills that are the root-cause of their predicament. What
about raising children in the Islamic faith? What about forced
conversions of Muslim women and children to the majority Hinduism?
One common feature in Hyderabad today is the proliferation of
burkha-clad Muslim women with babies begging in streets, a sight
rarely visible under former Muslim rulers. Will Muslim girls of
the minority be forced into prostitution, to support their
families? In the seventies many minor girls were married off to
Arab sheiks, much older, causing a scandal in India until Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi stopped the practice among poor Muslim
families. With the breakdown of traditional families themselves as
Muslim youth are forced to go abroad to seek employment, even the
family barely provides an adequate support system. The media
circus over the divorce of the Pakistan cricket-player, Shoaib
Malik, from one Muslim woman and remarriage to the Indian tennis
star, Sania Mirza, in Hyderabad, shows the total lack of social
organization in such cases. In traditional Muslim societies the
issues might be quietly resolved within the Muslim community or
family, but without the infrastructure available, Hyderabad was
left with the embarrassment of an ugly divorce battle that turned
into a national and international ‘tamasha’ show ridiculing
Muslims in the Indian and Western media. This is the “new”
Hyderabad, the ‘Page-3’ technocratic city of a celebrity-obsessed
culture. The cultural dichotomy for Muslim women is an ongoing
challenge, a battle for survival.
Gender Divide
Even the
so-called liberal factions of the English mainstream press are
corrupted by ‘saffronization’ again often covert. One can only
surmise what has happened to the Indian media as a whole, not
merely the Urdu media! With saffronization on one side, the walls
of bigotry or tokenism to mollify the minority in the English
press, there are few outlets for free expression vocalizing
minority issues. Without access to funding or employment, Muslim
women are powerless to create their own media, as American women
have a profusion of journals, magazines and television outlets
focusing on women’s issues. When I was invited to the Islamic
Republic of Iran in 2004 to deliver a lecture on international
human rights, I was highly impressed by the Ministry for Women,
entirely run by women, with state-of-the-art high tech services,
computers and access to information on the internet (and open
debate on gender issues, abortion, AIDs, healthcare etc.) Even in
Pakistan, from televised interviews, one sees Muslim women
occupying prominent positions in the government. The prevailing
‘Brahminic’ orthodoxy of the Indian political establishment
marginalizes Muslim minority women from attaining leadership
positions in government, with competition from Muslim men who
occupy the few seats available. In this way, the state maintains a
state of tension and backwardness in the minority community, an
incentive to violence or radicalization. The mainstream media
reports focus on negative Muslim stereotypes, showing a frustrated
community such as the barriers of gender discrimination in
male-dominant Muslim societies themselves, with regressive
self-proclaimed “leaders” sometimes appearing on television to
denounce the education or emancipation of their own women in the
public sector. A divide between the “moderate,” “secular” or
“liberal-minded” Muslims and so-called “traditionalists” widens
the split in the minority community, and factions of Muslim women
themselves may be recruited to isolate or intimidate opposition
voices from their own gender. Such retrogressive mindsets
underline the compelling need for an attitudinal change, without
which the community remains both stagnant and reactionary. It
continues to show knee-jerk or reflexive reactions to
majoritarianism, without substantive solutions within. The Muslim
media remains in bondage to this chain reaction, or reactionary
mode. During a press conference in Delhi, I heard the
international author and activist, Tariq Aziz, state that he had
noted an alarming degeneration in the Indian media as a whole in a
single decade since the early nineties. This confirms the
isolation felt by minority women, which is two-pronged: the Hindu
mainstream media is a dead-end for these women to voice their
needs. With Islam-bashing and anti-Islamic articles vilifying
Indian Muslims as “terrorists,” in-depth insights into the social
dysfunctions of the marginalized community are lacking in the
mainstream, while bigotry and Islamophobia keep the cauldron of
communalism burning. Sensationalism, demonization of minorities,
terror all “sell” stories, and the media is a marketing commodity.
The role of
editorial boards themselves, as part of the male phalanx or
self-interest, reflects the sycophancy and cronyism of the former
feudal system lingering on in our city. Public speeches on issues
concerning the minority community often look like boys’ football
rallies or cricket matches, with countless (male) VIPs crowding
the stage and hogging the microphone for endless insipid speeches.
It is not surprising that few women attend these gatherings. In a
publicity-hungry culture, the image (people eager to be seen)
bypasses the message, the vital issues that reflect community
needs and deprivations. In vote-bank politics or political
opportunism by leaders the real issues of concern to the public,
or women, are rarely addressed. One frustrated Muslim woman at a
conference in the city which I attended some years back stood up
and said outright, “Who are these bearded men of the Muslim ‘Wakhf
Board? What gives them the right to speak for us, or to assume the
leadership of the Muslims in India?” Such attitudes merely reflect
a fraction of the internal tensions among Muslims themselves. My
own article on the decay of a culture and its Urdu language lifted
some of the taboos, such as the breakdown of intra-personal
relationships in old feudal families like ours. But ancient walls
of repression revealed the dilemma of Muslims in India, and women
in particular. The disconnect between a society and its culture is
symptomatic of the deeper identity crisis simmering within, that
explodes sporadically under communal pressures through agitation
or violence, then subsides into apathy once more. Such reflexive,
and extremist, attitudes merely serve the interests of
anti-Islamic forces. The lack of a concerted and cohesive
action-plan, of solidarity and support groups promoting
development among Muslims, in addition to the poverty in
government support programs, are some of the underlying causes for
their failure to address the need for changing mindsets. But this
is only one tip of the iceberg, the cultural identity crisis that
afflicts dying minorities and the assault on the Urdu language.
Fatima Shahnaz, Ph.D. Sorbonne University, Paris, France, (frmly)
visiting professor (political science) at the Jamia Millia Islamia
University, Delhi, and Hyderabad Central University, is a writer
and President of the India Peace Organization, an international
human rights advocacy. She can be reached at: fashahnaz@yahoo.com
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