– B.N. Uniyal
One morning last week, a correspondent of a foreign newspaper stationed in Delhi rang me up to find out whether I knew any Dalit journalist from whom he could get a quote on Kanshi Ram and Mayawati’s recent squabble with some media persons. “Mr. Uniyal, could you tell me if it would be offensive to ask an Indian journalist whether he is a Dalit?” he began.
“I don’t know, friend,” I said, “I really don’t know!”
“Okay, tell me, if you would feel offended if asked you this question?”
That left me baffled for a response.
“Well,” I hesitated for a while, struggling in my mind with my various selves to formulate a correct response on behalf of them all, but before I could do that, I found I had already launched myself on a long, peroration which, when I began, I did not know how I was going to end it. “You know, the thing is that in India it should be seen in the context of the ceaseless struggle which has been conducted through the last 200 years or so against it in various ways and ….” Oh, God! What a rock fall of gibberish, I thought. I tried to bring it to a halt, but I just could not.
Thankfully, he interrupted me in the middle of the delinquent sentence.
“That is nice, Mr. Uniyal, but what I want is a brief quote from a Dalit journalist. I am not writing an article on the caste system, but just about this matter.”
“Frankly, friend,” I said. “I do not know any Dalit journalist but I can ask some friends. I shall let you know in a day or two.”
Suddenly, I realized that in all the 30 years I had worked as a journalist I had never met a fellow journalist who was a Dalit; no, not one. And, worse still was the thought that during all these years it had never occurred to me that there was something so seriously amiss in the profession, something which I should have noticed as a journalist. In all these years I have travelled through almost every district of the country in the company of numerous journalists and met hundreds of others in different cities and towns, and yet I did not remember having met any Dalit journalist. I have journalist friend who are Christians or Muslims, and a few Jains and Sikhs too, but none who is a Dalit. How strange? There must at least be a few in the profession here in Delhi, I told myself. I decided to find out.
I rang up an English language columnist friend, a former editor of a weekly who knows and meets more journalists from among the younger lot these days than I do. “No, I don’t know any,” he said. I rang up another friend. He said the same, I rang up another friend. He said the same. I rang up an editor of a Hindi daily. He got angry with me.
“These western journalists don’t understand India,” he fulminated. “They have no knowledge of Indian history. They just want to malign the country. Why do you encourage such people?” I hung up, feeling uncertain about the usefulness of such an enquiry.
Just then walked into my room a well-known Hindi columnist who had also once been an editor of a very popular Hindi weekly. I put the same question to him and he also came out with the same response. I decided to call up another journalist friend, a trade union activist of long standing. He must know someone, I told myself. But, he too felt upset about it all. He saw in my query a conspiracy to divide the journalist fraternity. I hung up again, now feeling uncertain of the intentions of the foreign correspondent who had set the ball rolling in the first place.
The poet’s anguish
That night I went to Press Club and asked several friends and acquaintances whether they knew any journalist who was a Dalit. Nobody did. A friend thought I was trying to act smart or score a point over others by thinking of writing on such a subject. “This is what is called one-upmanship,” he said, admonishingly, “you want to show that you are the only one who is not a casteist amongst us!”
Another friend of long years told me that journalists are journalists and should not be screened on caste basis. “Do you mean to say the Press is really Manuwadi as Kansi Ram says? Do you think any of us writes or reports as a Brahmin journalist, or as a Kayastha or a Jain journalist?” asked another friend. I admitted that that was not true, though I was by now becoming unsure of such an assertion. Does it really mean anything not to have any journalist amidst us from among the Dalits? I asked myself. I even wondered whether I could now trust a reply from myself to a question like that?
I came home and began leafing through the Accreditation Index, 1996, of the Press Information Bureau of the government of India which lists the names of all the accredited correspondents who serve as the eyes and the ears of the nation in the capital city of Delhi. They are the ones who decide what is news and what is not; what is worth reporting of the day and what is not.
Though it is not they alone who decide what or whom to play up or play down in next morning’s newspapers or in the next edition of their weeklies and fortnightlies, it is basically they who give the news the slant which shapes our attitudes towards men and women in the news. Everything depends on what questions they ask at a Press conference and how they ask these. And, at the end of the day, it all depends on how they compose their reports.
The Accreditation Index was revealing. Of the 686 accredited correspondents listed in it, as many as 454 bore their caste surnames and, of them, as many as 240 turned out Brahmins, 79 Punjabi Khatris, 44 Kayastha, 26 Muslims with as many Baniyas, 19 Christians, 12 Jains and nine (Bengali) Baidyas. I checked out the caste affiliation of the 47 of the remaining 232 correspondents at random none of them turned out to be a Dalit either.
“There most be some,” said a senior official in the PIB, but it is difficult to find out because they don’t write their caste surnames. They must be wanting to hide their caste identity you know. Who would want to be known as a Scheduled Caste?”
“What are you trying to achieve by making such an enquiry, anyway?” asked another, Do you want to provide grist to Mr. Kanshi Ram’s caste mill? Why do you think it is necessary to ascertain the caste of journalists? After all most journalists are not casteist. You are not for example, are you?”
“I am not sure,” I said and hung up.
What would journalism be like if there were as many journalists amidst us from among the Dalits as were among the Brahmins, I asked myself. I was reminded of some lines of Maharashtra’s Dalit poet, Namdev Dhasal, searched for the anthology in which I had read those lines;
One day I cursed that mother-fucker god
He just laughed shamelessly.
My neighbour, a born-to-the pen Brahman
Was shocked.
He looked at me with his castor-oil face
I cursed another good hot curse
The university building shuddered
And sank waist-deep
All at once scholars began doing research
Into what makes people angry….
Reproduced from The Pioneer,
16 November 1996
BN Uniyal is a journalist who lives in Delhi