Lately, as we are finding ourselves glued to our TV so as to not miss the minutest of developments (not even a story on people smoking rolled cigarettes!) of what can easily be called one of the most excitement-inducing murder mystery tales of the year, another story — one from 1990 — is also floating along the labyrinth of social media.
“On October 2, 1990, Mukesh, [actress] Rekha’s husband, decided to take away his life. He had hanged himself to the ceiling fan of his room, using his wife’s dupatta.
Same Mukesh, who reportedly seemed happy on the fateful day, according to his brother Anil.
Rekha came to know about Mukesh’s chronic depression after getting married.”
What followed has been described as a ‘national witch hunt’ with people all across the country shaming her and calling her names. There’s something to say about a country where widows are usually referred to be devourers of husbands (case in point, ‘khasma nu khaniye’ in Punjabi) and are blamed for their death. It might sound eerie at this point, but for ages, on the occasion of a man’s death, our Indian culture has found a scapegoat in the wife or the girlfriend.
Mukesh’s mother’s wail made headlines when she cried, “Woh daayan mere bete ko kha gayi. Bhagwan use kabhi maaf nahi karega.” (That witch devoured my son. God will never forgive her.)”
Amongst other things, the post says, “the press lapped up the sensational story of Mukesh’s suicide and featured reports with outrageous headlines like ‘The Black Widow’ (Showtime, November 1990) and ‘The Macabre Truth behind Mukesh’s Suicide’ (Cine Blitz, November 1990). Delhi high society and Bombay’s film industry vociferously condemned Rekha for ‘murdering’ Mukesh Agarwal.”
With the trope of a dead hero (who was apparently suffering from a mental illness), a husband/boyfriend-devouring murderer for a girlfriend who apparently practises witchcraft (mostly because she hails from a Bengali family!), smokes up marijuana (drugs, drugs, drugs!!), is less successful than her now-late boyfriend (and so, obviously, a gold-digger), Sushant Singh Rajput’s and Rhea Chakraborty’s rings in the exact same manner as Rekha’s did. The only difference is that the scale of reach, attack, and overall hatred is far more sizeable than one could have imagined in 1990.
Citizens or Audience?
A quick glance through the comments’ section of Rhea Chakraborty’s public profile will reveal to you the magnitude of execration that we, as a people, are capable of unloading on a single person who has not even been confirmed guilty.
But let’s pause for a moment and think about how we arrived here. Are we naturally hateful as a people—waiting eagerly to look for one excuse or the other to follow our primal instincts and pounce? Was Hobbes right? Or was social psychologist Stanley Milgram who had concluded that obedience to authority, even at the cost of causing deep hurt to people, is a universal feature of human behaviour, correct?
As of this day, all we ever watch, listen or talk about on our TV, social media, social circles, and dining tables is about this case. We are a people obsessed and possessed — media, political players, and common audiences alike.
The media, led by Arnab Goswami’s Republic TV and Navika Kumar’s Times Now, by means of overt and loud echolalia, somewhere made an entire nation believe and beg for one single person to be arrested. It’s general knowledge that when power demands, power receives, and so, who was to get spared anyway!
The news cycle went from grieving over Sushant’s and well, the country’s mental health, or the lack of it. We talked about reaching out. I wrote a newsletter for our audience after having audaciously confirmed if our suicide helplines work in India or not. Then came doubts. Doubts were followed by vociferation. Bollywood was blamed for not giving him films. Audiences were blamed for not appreciating enough. Films were discredited for subscribing to nepotism and favouritism. And then came the gruelling witch-hunt, taking Rhea’s, her family’s, and an entire nation’s mental health down with itself, making us wonder if we are truly a nation who would believe
Vigilante justice and witch hunt, as also mob lynching, Panchali Ray writes, “are not new to our country (or globally) and most of the time the crime had not/could not be proved. Rumours have often played a central role in whipping up public emotion, leading to vigilante justice, resulting in murders. This mob justice often falls disproportionately on women, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and queers. Most of the cases of lynching are not spontaneous but pre-planned and meditated and draws its affective charge from an (mostly imagined) injury – of a hierarchy displaced, a norm transgressed, of social order threatened.”
The idea of drawing-room justice, as one would expect, only serves the purpose of solidifying people’s extant belief systems. In one way or the other, media channels have lately been invoking issues that hit at people’s hearts and belief systems.
Ray, who was herself a victim of newspaper-based media trials, continues, “The media trial of Rhea Chakraborty is a result of the ambitions of the current political dispensation and a vociferous viewership whose visceral desire to ‘right’ the ‘wrong’ equals the grieved family’s decision to fall back on misogynist tropes of witch/gold digger/manipulative female partner to explain their son’s death by suicide.”
Tejinder Singh, an ex-Republic employee went on record to express his displeasure at how “TV anchors have turned the tragedy into a circus, peddled innuendos to tarnish a woman’s character and aired conspiracy theories.” He further said, “A bit of theatrics may fly, but these people have crossed all limits.”
And truly, when another Newslaundry reporter went to Rhea’s house where reporters had thronged, he asked, “I couldn’t fathom why a gaggle of reporters was chasing whoever came near the building and shoving their mics into their faces. What little piece of news were they afraid to miss?” He further explained how a random person’s unverified quote on Rhea practising ‘black magic’ had been relayed by the top-most TV channels with elaborate graphics — please read ‘unverified’ again.
Ray is of the belief that media-trials only work on bored audience members. Bored of the mundaneness of life and tired of limiting consumerist aspirations, the Indian middle-class audience turns to find meaning via engagement with a larger purpose, even though it’s rooted in violence and futile back-and-forth. Enamoured by fiery speeches and thunderous claims, we get excited. We find heroes in dhamakedaar news anchors, who sometimes feel one step away from a Gargantuan explosion!
#JusticeforRhea under ‘Entertainment’ on Twitter was still trending higher on a day India’s GDP fell to -23.9%, the lowest ever recorded.
Are Indian citizens simply creatures of entertainment — the audience then? An audience that has grown so comfortable, so accustomed to the plummeting standards of ‘news’ that we don’t care as long as it’s entertaining?
The Newswallah’s Bazaar
Growing up, afternoons used to be reserved for stories. Sometimes it used to be about the poor ‘Chunchun Chidiya’(Chunchun Bird), some other times, a greedy boy who wanted too many toffees and got his hand stuck in the jar, and some other times, about a lazy boy whose school uniform and writing tools decided to teach him a lesson because he was never tidy. Lost in the world of Mumma’s stories, my sister and I would happily chomp off our lunch.
Rega Jha, who shares a similar tale from her childhood, talks about Esther Dyson’s concept of the ‘attention economy’ — “an ecosystem in which audience’s attentions are gathered for the ultimate benefit of funders and advertisers.”
Long ago, Nicholas Coleridge, in an attempt to capture the shift in the newspaper industry, had written his iconic book Paper Tigers. In his chapter ‘The Greatest Newspaper Bazaar’, Coleridge talked about his meeting with Samir Jain, who was the top-boss of The Times of India in 1993. Samir Jain, who has been credited with ‘Americanising’ the TOI, not in terms of content, but in terms of marketing the newspaper, reportedly only spoke of “Units. Revenue. PROFITS.”
The 90s in India are largely seen as heralding the tidal wave of commercialism and overtaking broadcasting media, and Samir Jain was probably one the forerunners of this movement. Public broadcasters naturally rushed as fast as they could to merge their services with those offered by commercial networks. A little while ago, Noam Chomsky had gotten together with Edward S.Herman to make sense of the media in a commercial world. The resultant was the ‘propaganda model’. Media giants, advertising agencies, political parties, and great multinational corporations have a joint and close interest in what common people listen to and how they act. The result is that a lot of times, the media says what it’s asked to say.
20 years later, however, social media has changed all these rules. We are free to express, aren’t we?
So, is social media our escape from commercialised, propaganda-based mainstream media?
Yes and No.
More recently, with the takeover of social media which has had every online news platform on their knees, the bid to market has become all the more crucial and convoluted. If you caught Netflix’s Social Dilemma over the weekend, you might have realised how your attention is the product that fills the media’s pockets. Attention is sold off as TRPs and hit-rates, opening-rates, and the amount of time you spend on a page. It’s attracted via SEOs and made as juicy and as slippery as possible – slippery for your finger to glide to the next story.
Further, Avay Shukla says, “Social media belongs to the ruling party, and the latest exposures relating to Facebook only confirm what was well known. The millions of fake accounts, the well-trained trolls, the synchronised abuse of any sane voice ensures that only that is heard which the government wants to be heard. Paradoxically, however, digital platforms provide also the only space where one can hear some independent voices and a view contrary to what the government wants you to hear.”
But again, he continues, “The resultant cacophony kills news. The waters are so muddied by alternative facts, untruths, fake news that only the loudest can be heard, and who can possibly be louder than the likes of sold-out anchors, self-seeking editors and the BJP’s IT cell?”
So, the point is, who is talking and whom are we listening to? Or maybe, what are we listening to and what do they not want us to hear?
Are We Listening Closely?
The Print informs, “The BJP has launched a campaign in Bihar seeking “justice for actor Sushant Singh Rajput”, with the party planning to paste posters across the state declaring, “Na bhoole hain, na bhulne denge (we have neither forgotten, nor will we let anyone forget)”, along with a photograph of the late actor.”
The government, as you would expect, only shares what it wants to share with the people. At a time when the economy is failing, cross-border tensions are at their peak, and the century’s biggest pandemic is running out of control, perhaps all we need is a Chunchun Chidiya story to finish our lunch and be tucked for a nap.
As it seems, tamasha-like events will keep following each other and each one will seem more important than your basic, mundane issue of being unemployed, of not having enough to eat, or not being able to send your children to school. It will probably pull you out of your drudgery and make you feel powerful — part of something bigger.
But at this point, and I will reiterate Rega’s advice: “When you feel that pull on your attention, that hook tethering you to your screen, when the anchors’ rising and falling voice is ringing through your home, you must ask yourself a few questions. Does this story affect my life or the lives of my loved ones? Is this a story I can do anything helpful about? Is this a story being told to me for my benefit?”
Recently, Denzel Washington relayed a largely misattributed but never incorrect quote, “ If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” Yellow journalism is back and it’s yellower than ever. The fun fact is that this time, they are not just selling newspapers.
Bottom line, it’s entirely upon us to ask for the news we deserve.
There’s still time (probably).
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