Reporting The Grey Corridor: The Killing of Journalist Nemichand Jain

Copyright: source

The murder of a local journalist in Sukma is indicative of the fragility of the fine line local journalists have to work within to survive in the Red Corridor

This piece appears in the Sunday Guardian on the 24th of February, 2013

There has always been a line that has just moved into a downward spiral for the safety and integrity of journalists with the brutal execution of a journalist in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh on the 13^th of February, 2013. Nemi Chand Jain’s body was found on the road, his neck slit, with a note claiming that he was an informant. He was 45 years old and wrote for the Hindi-dailies Haribhoomi and Dainik Bhaskar and had over 20 years of experience in journalism, both as a distributor and as a journalist.

An initial note the police recovered from the site claimed that the Maoists have accused him of working as an informant for the police for the past three years, yet there have been questions regarding the authenticity of the note. It was signed by the ‘Kanker Ghati Darbha Division’ which many observers claim does not exist. Acccording to a report by Ashutosh Bharadwaj in the Indian Express, another note appeared a few days later where the Maoists denied responsibility, which was followed by another one that claims that he was indeed killed as he was an informant. The same report quotes the Superintendent of police Sukma, Abhishek Shandilya, who mentions, ‘Jain was very close to them. Why they would kill him is puzzling.’

Other claims exist that mention he was killed due to personal enmity with someone else in the area or that he was murdered by smugglers. Reports and local journalists have repeatedly indicated that Nemichand Jain had an argument with a group of villagers a few days before his murder.

In his blog, Kanker-based journalist Kamal Shukla has no doubts that the Maoists have been responsible for his killing, indicating that there was a Jan Sabha held a few days ago where Jain was instrumental if freeing the individual the Maoists were trying.

Yet while the question of why he was killed and who killed him is yet to be answered, certain mainstream reports have already blamed the Maoists, without really trying to understand the relationship the local media have with both the state and the rebels.

In the red corridor, there has always been an underlying reality that every local journalist who lives in the area, has to deal with the threats and violence of the police and the Naxalites, and sometimes has no option but to work as informants. A local journalist had once even informed the police of my presence in the area. And there is no way one can blame him for it, for he has to live in the district within a delicate balance, and try to keep his relationship as cordial with the police as well as the Naxalites. So if Nemi Chand Jain was killed for being an informant, then the Naxalites will kill all the local journalists in Bastar.

Another grey area is that a journalist is an informant by default, one simply needs to enter into a police station and find that the police are reading Arundhati Roy’s Gandhians With Guns. They now have photos of the young adivasi girl who liked to watch ‘ambush videos’. Or they can visit a well-known journalist’s facebook page and download his group photo with the rebels which he has as a profile picture. In 2009, when I asked how the police knew the man they gunned down was a Maoist, he showed me a photograph of a man I saw ten minutes ago on a gunny sack outside the police station, bullet holes in his chest, with dead brown eyes, now in a photograph posing with an AK47, looking straight into the camera, alive, once upon a time.

There are too many underlying grey areas in a situation where the burning of the villages of in Pidiya Panchayat in Bijapur District of Chhattisgarh, where 31 homes in over four different hamlets were burnt down by the police on the 21^st – 23^rd of January, 2013, and was never reported in the local press and barely even touched the mainstream media. Bastar is where the art of not writing was perfected, and where the morbid statistical out of context reports of every bus burning, ambush, and IED blast will find national airplay without any of the underlying questions of what the adivasis really want. There are local journalists whose editors have told them not to report on any Maoist-related issue. There are local journalists who can’t write anything negative about mining, as the companies provide them advertising revenue, which they have to acquire themselves, and at times is their sole source of income. There are local journalists who’ve been shot at by angry jawaans, when they were doing their duty and trying to report on another ambush by the Maoists that left two CISF jawaans dead. There have been local journalists who’ve been beaten up repeatedly by the Salwa Judum, and a few years ago, three prominent senior journalists were threatened with ‘a dog’s death’ if they continued to carry Maoist statements by a pro-state vigilante organization calling itself the Danteshwari Adivasi Swabhiman Manch. And yes, there are local journalists who misuse their privilege for profit, by blackmailing individuals with a promise to publish insidious lies in their newspapers, if they don’t pay up.

But whether there are journalists who’re informants, blackmailers, bullshitters, truth-seekers, careerists, philosophers, Arnab Goswamis, Hem Chandra Pandeys, Lingaram Kodopis, stenographers, or downright liars, like the rest of the human race, they don’t deserve to be executed.

Of course holding a presscard doesn’t give one the right to do whatever they please. A journalist can’t go around and blackmail individuals, can’t be party with the Salwa Judum and burn villages down, can’t act as a courier for the Maoists, or go with them while they’re about to ambush the police. The laws of the land apply to journalists as well, and abusing one’s privilege has to be dealt with, through the course of the law.

There are of course more grey areas concerning the neutrality of a journalist in what is also a class conflict. Most local journalists in Dantewada aren’t adivasis, most are outsiders, many are contractors. They are by default against the Maoists, but they’re again, not enemy combatants. But according to the Maoists, contractors have always been enemy combatants, if not their main source of income.

Then how does one work as a journalist in a state like Chhattisgarh when your sympathies are with the people? With the poorest, with the adivasis? Or how does one work as a journalist when your sympathies are with the ruling class? Is writing the truth enough? In Dantewada, it is the senseless loss of life of the police and of the adivasis, the tragedy of endless suffering, that shows there is sometimes no need to be neutral, but simply anti-war, anti-brutality, anti-failed economic policies, anti-structural violence. Journalism, the so-called fourth pillar of democracy, is not beyond the duties of the state towards its people enshrined in the constitution, but a journalist also has those duties towards the people.

To tell them their own myriad truths.

And many local journalists are aware of that, if only their editors, the state and the Maoists allow them to.

Update: Maoists say sorry for killing Bastar journalist