the 'Daily' Newspapers and yarns of Power

Borders are strengthened not only through tangible force(s), but ideas as well. In order to distinguish a territory as a unique nation and intensify borders between nations, the project of homogeneity within a nation is constantly reinforced. The stronger the national identity, the more united the front against other countries. 

What is the cost of homogeneity? Homogeneity, as history has shown us, often involves erasure. Imagine a messy ball of yarn wound together. It initially has strings of saffron, blue and green twirling together, strands here and there, some meeting and some falling away. Now. imagine we are told that it needs to be organized and made "neat". Separate the yarn by colours- saffron alone, blue alone, green alone. But now we have other yarn balls coming in, and we want to look perfect for them- uniform, put together, recognizable. So we throw away the blue, we throw away the green. Discarded and denied, but still there in the brightness of their colours, what happens to them? Where are there identities hidden? How are they threatened? How does this nationalist project meet in tangent with an increasingly globalized world? 

'The Walls of Delhi' by Uday Prakash narrates a semi-fictitious tale of these hidden identities and persons who are written off. Persons who are trying to subvert their own narratives and battle globalization and nationalization at the same time. Persons who try to claim their own spaces which are constantly under threat for disrupting "neatness" and "organization". Slum dwellers, cart movers, sex workers or as Prakash describes it "the poor, the sick, the street corner prophets, the lowly, the unexceptional". For an urban area to thrive in a globalized world, identities have to be fringed. These fringes are written off our larger narratives and constantly marginalized. Prakash points to one such enforcement of invisibilization in the daily newspapers that we read with low consideration for actual realities: 

"If you read any of the Hindi or English newspapers that come out in Delhi – say, Indian News Express, Times of Metro India, or Shatabdi Sanchar Times – and opened the June 27 2001 edition to page three, where they stick the local news, you’d see a tiny photograph two columns wide on the right side of the page. Below the photo, in twenty point boldface, the headline of the capsule news item reads: Robbers Killed In Encounter, and below that, in sixteen point font, the subheader: Police Recover Big Money From Car. 

The three-line capsule was written by the local crime reporter, according to whom, the night before, near Buddha Jayanti Park, the police stopped a Suzuki Esteem that bore no licence plates, and was travelling on Ridge Road from Dhaula Kuan to Rajendra Nagar and Karol Bagh. Instead of stopping, the people inside the car opened fire. The police returned fire, and two of the criminals were killed on the spot, while three others successfully fled in the dark of night." 

While the above extract forms a larger part of the plot, a pertinent reality is demonstrated here. Certain identities are spatially located, even in newspapers, at the fringe. They are there, but unnoticeable. They are systematically silenced. This extract from 'The Walls of Delhi' reminds me of another book. Saidiya Hartman's 'Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals', which is a resurrection of the revolutionary lives of black womxn and queer folx in urban New York; also speaks about newspapers, and how black girls are imagined in newspapers: 

"The newspaper article confuses her with another girl, gets her name wrong. Photographs of the tenement where she lives regularly appear in the police briefs and the charity reports, but you can barely see her, peering out of the third-floor window. The caption makes no mention of her, noting only the moral hazard of the one-room kitchenette, the foul condition of the toilets, and the noise of the airshaft."

The familiarity is eerie. Urban borders are hardened in this way, by focusing on what it creates as being "ideal" and necessarily otherizing those who it refuses to be recognized with- be it in New York or New Delhi. 

Urban fringes have their own genesis, their own geo-political meanings. Spatially and recognizably, there is the concept of rural-urban fringes. Essentially, any space which is considered to be on the brink of urban development, where a rural area is nearly urbanized would be considered a rural-urban fringe. For example, O.P. Jindal Global University's land would have once been a rural-urban fringe, and perhaps, parts of it still are. When a "global" university with urban features is being constructed in a village after displacing multiple people from their own native land, an area which is begging to be urbanized would be a rural-urban fringe. An adivasi land which is evacuated by deforestation and displacement to build a dam would be a rural-urban fringe. Just for a second- let us consider the idea that the word gives us, and the imagination that the word invokes. Let us sit with this idea for a minute. The idea of "change". The idea of "progress". The idea of "urbanization". How does this idea make us feel? How are we located to benefit from this idea? What do we live on? What do we study on? Most importantly, whom do we consider while thinking about this idea? 

I want to recall two other ideas here- that of the 'daily' newspaper and that of the newspaper which tells us about the "times". The New York Times, The Times of India, The Daily Pioneer, New York Daily News- what do these titles mean? The "times" described in these papers make us wonder whose times we really talk about. The headlines we see are catered for certain people and certain urban aspirations alone. That which is meant to be sidelined remains in the 3rd page, lower right bottom. They include photographs without names and people without identities. Whose daily lives are we thinking about? Whose daily lives do we frequent? The lives of those who are "too" anarchous, "too" free, breaking from the reigns of the state, the subversive and the revolutionaries are not the daily lives the newspapers choose to record. They want to display order, control and regulation. Their power changes when they fail to do so. 

This is not an isolated method of thought. That which is vernacular, is considered to be a threat because it is a symbol of nativity, that which embraces the plural, the old, the "rural", the ones that remain without the taints of progress. The news reporting extends to our now increasingly virtual world and thereby, virtual consumption of news. Any news reporting website which flouts these unwritten guidelines which require that we do not embrace the vernacular and submit to the power structures is usually banned. One such news portal was "naanugauri.com", a Kannada news portal whose English version is gaurilankeshnews.com. The vernacular news portal had released critical views of the government in power, state controlling- Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Soon after, and interestingly, Facebook banned the newsportal. Another similar portal was also banned by Facebook, which was another vernacular news blog called Vartha Bharati. Naanu Gauri which means 'I am Gauri' was a newspaper which was launched six months after the murder of the revolutionary journalist, Gauri Lankesh, who was also attacked for being critical of the government and strongly standing up against it when it affected the people. The demise of news reportage when it subverts state power by corporate houses, especially vernacular news reportage, is the demise of our revolutions, our freedoms, our thoughts. This is the tale of our globalized, urban regimes. 

The law is an equal player in this game. It is an autonomous institution in itself which works in cahoots with the state, institutions, mainstream media and corporate houses to further hierarchize and create power structures that are intrinsically made to police us. Kashmir is a contested, violated land by no-one more than by the same (Indian) government which consistently places its claim on it, and unsurprisingly, the voices of Kashmiris are silenced in order to ensure they do not gain autonomy or create any "chaos". The New Media Policy of 2020 in Jammu & Kashmir is a law which polices voices of people from Kashmir who speak for their rights and autonomy. The policy mandates a "genuinely positive image of the Government" by the media, and anything lesser will be blacked out. In a state where the internet is already under constant jeopardy and threat, this policy further stigmatizes honest and real reportage, knowingly silencing those who will speak out critically. 

Thus, we come back to the question of borders and our little balls of yarn. It is our responsibility to unwound ourselves from our own little balls of yarn and roll over to be wound with different colours; by asking questions, and thinking about which structural ideas we can resist. The project of homogeneity is one of erasure, and one we are most familiar with. Post-Colonial and Settler-Colonial countries were made on this occupation and erasure, with indigenous, vernacular identities being written off by colonial forces. History often has the answers that help us to recuperate our present. The ideas that are spread, the ideas that are created, but most importantly; the ideas that are silenced tell us the stories of revolution we need to make. On the streets, we see these revolutions. On the lower right bottom, on the 3rd page, we see these revolutions.