Rohith Vemula, Hyderabad Central University and 'mainstream' Indian media

On one of the social media sites I am on, I received a query as regards the unfolding of events at Hyderabad Central University (HCU) where students and faculty have been subject to massive violence following the return of its vice-chancellor Appa Rao Podile, accused of having fomented the crisis through his anti-Dalit actions some months ago, leading to the suicide – widely referred to as "institutional murder" – of a brilliant doctoral scholar, Rohith Vemula:

X: Tell me something.Why do you think mainstream media is so silent regarding this UoH case? (UoH or University of Hyderabad is also known as HCU.)

Me:  'Coz it's peopled by Savarna Hindus for upto 90 per cent plus. I am among that crowd too.

X: This is so shameful. Those big editors turned a blind eye. We know that very well. They read our public posts but still they will maintain their silence.

Me: For your reading pleasure ( and I posted this link which includes several websites reporting on a path-breaking work by a journalist named BN Uniyal showing that Dalit representation in the Indian media as of the 1990s was non-existent.)

Also read - HCU crackdown: Rohith Vemula's legacy can be Modi’s undoing

When I joined the Press Trust of India in November 1979 as a trainee sub-editor, I was one of nine: All male, eight Hindu-born – a majority Brahmin-born – and one Muslim-born. I say "Hindu-born" and "Brahmin-born" because quite a few Indian journalists would claim to be "above" caste and communal considerations but scratch them on the issue of reservations for Dalits and other backward castes and the true colour emerges.

Over the past few decades, in print and especially electronic media, the gender imbalance is grudgingly being addressed but the caste and communal divide has hardly been. Quite apart from arguably the most voluble television anchor being from a Brahmin, BJP-connected family from the east of India, most others too are Savarna-born clones of him as well.

Also read- Achhe din in Hyderabad University: Students 'thrashed' by cops, teachers called 'anti-national'

There’s a delightful doggerel that the celebrated 20^th century writer George Orwell – author of Animal Farm, 1984, Homage to Catalonia and other works – once quoted, rightly summing up most English journalists’ proclivities and he did so with a pertinent introduction, one which, with a couple of substitutions, holds true for members of India’s media word for word:

"One of the most extraordinary things about England is that there is almost no official censorship, and yet nothing that is actually offensive to the governing class gets into print, at least in any place where large numbers of people are likely to read it. If it is 'not done' to mention something or other, it just doesn't get mentioned."

The position is summed up in the lines by (I think) Hilaire Belloc:

"You cannot hope to bribe or twist

Thank God! the British journalist

But seeing what the man will do

Unbribed, there's no occasion to."

(No, Belloc was not the author, the four lines attributed to one, Humbert Wolfe.) Orwell needs to be applauded, however, for having noted his doubt as regards the authorship of the quotation. After all, he was writing in a chaotic period in Europe and Britain and, hey, the internet and Google/Yahoo and other search engines were much more than half a century away. Do note the words "the man": The British media was and mostly still is male-dominated.

And staying with Orwell’s acknowledgement of his doubt as to the authorship of those four lines, how many of our friends and adversaries among journalists on the Hindtva Right ever do a modicum of fact-checking before they bombard us with their "facts" which for some strange reasons, fail to stand up to scrutiny most of the time?

Also read: When University of Hyderabad turned into a battleground

And oh, Indian journalists are massively corruptible. In the 1980s I heard it said that you could "buy an Indian journalist with a peg and a leg" – the peg referring to a shot of whisky and leg to an innocuous leg of tandoori chicken.

However by the latter half of that decade I heard from one of my colleagues that legs and more of an altogether different species were also on offer and that too as arranged by the public relations officer of a state-owned enterprise. And a mere peg of whisky will hardly do. Entire bottles, airline tickets, subsidised housing, plots of land and more have been offered and accepted by thousands of journalists over the decades.

On Thursday afternoon, on the steps of Bangalore's Town Hall, where the heat was so intense you could well have tried frying coffee beans, many scores of people gathered to denounce the Brahminical fascist onslaught on the students of Hyderabad Central University and to demand a Rohith Act to stop atrocities against the Dalit-Bahujan in Indian universities.

"Where’s the media?" This was among the questions I heard at the venue.

Where indeed?