The Indian Media has responded to the Mumbai Massacre as if it were another 9/11, adding to the dangerous pressures put on the Government of India by the BJP. By Rajan Alexander, Development Consultancy Group.
Almost right from the time the story broke, the Indian media, almost in concert, repeatedly used the allegory of World Trade Centre. News anchors further unabashedly equated the Mumbai attack as India’s own 9/11. In fact just two months after September 11th, India’s parliament was attacked by Pakistani sponsored Islamic Jehadi group – Jaish-e-Mohammed. This brazen attack left 5 terrorists and 6 policemen dead and 12 injured. Fortunately the terrorist attack failed. But had they pulled it of, this would have been even more catastrophic than in 1984 – wiping our entire political leadership at one go, plunging the country into total political chaos. 29/11 attack on the other hand would have at the most demolished just two hotels patronized by the affluent and foreign tourists. And yet because of repeated comparisons to WTC and 9/11 and by dubiously side stepping the historical context to terrorism in India, the media succeeded in portraying the recent 29/11 Mumbai terror attack as India’s worst.
Amitav Ghosh, the author of the award winning fiction – Sea of Poppies, writing in the New York Times argues: “As a metaphor “9/11” is invested not just with the memory of what happened in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in 2001, but also with the penumbra of emotions that surround the events: the feeling that “the world will never be the same,” the notion that this was “the day the world woke up” and so on. In this sense 9/11 refers not just to the attacks but also to its aftermath, in particular to an utterly misconceived military and judicial response, one that has had disastrous consequences around the world.”
The Indian media thus began to mimic the role as the U.S. media did in 2001. Indian news channels adorned their newsrooms with the Indian Tricolor, newsreaders pinned Indian flags to their blazers or sarees, played patriotic songs and the newsroom was invaded by retired generals and admirals. Vinod Mehta, editor of Outlook magazine observed in a television discussion that the Indian media lost its professionalism when they accepted everything that our security agencies were leaking without validation. Quality and factual reporting became a casualty.
Indian TV news channels sadly forgot the need to let television do what it does best -let the images tell the story. Instead what was dished out was endless hyperbole and outright speculation. B.G. Verghese, columnist and a former editor of the Hindustan Times and The Indian Express, said pressures of competition may have led to some misreporting. “In the race for competitive edge, reporters sometimes said rather more than what may have been necessary. Something’s are not done—rushing to get bytes from just rescued hostages, for instance.”
Through the repeated use of the metaphor of 9/11, TV channels pushed for a response similar as the US did at that time. Politicians of all shades added their contribution to this jingoistic bandwagon. For instance, Arun Jaitley, General Secretary of the Hindu fundamentalist party, the BJP, not only reiterated the comparison to 9/11 but also insisted that the response should be similar to the US after 9/11 though most Indians at that time had been critical of Bush’s response (Iraq) – now admitted as a misadventure by Bush himself last week.