indigenousnagaland #20 — Press Freedom Or Its Absence

Japfu Cross

Dzukou Valley

I will present below the argument of: India's suppression of freedom of press.

Arundhati Roy, the award-winning writer and activist behind the book "The Doctor and the Saint", one of whose well-known remarks on India was that ​"India is a corporate upper-caste state"; according to Roy, she was informed by a particular western journalist whose editors have warned, "No negative press on India!", in the larger scheme of things to make India an investment destination for the benefit of the corporate world, all the expense of the common people. Roy has written extensively on that subject. Her 1 hour-long videos are available on YouTube.

Roy — in answering a critic — has offered this counter-response,

”You tell me one democratic institution or tell me one institution that an ordinary villager in India can go to, if he or she has been wronged; because there’s no court of appeal — there’s no court of appeal.”

According to Roy, “It may be far more violent in China but it is easier to see how a totalitarian govt functions; it is far more difficult to see it when you have this smokescreen of democracy”; she said, “India is a democracy but it is a democracy for a few people”.

Roy said,

"Since the moment India became an independent country, it has waged war in Nagaland, in Manipur, in Mizoram, in Kashmir, in Punjab, in Telangana, in Hyderabad, in Goa; you look at who are these people; they are either tribal people, Christians, Muslims, Adivasis, Dalits — you see an upper-caste state at work".

Man may forget but history will tell of how about 50 million years ago, a triangular plate of land broke off from Madagascar and, adrift on the earth’s mantle, sailed across the Indian Ocean and smashed into the belly of Central Asia with such force that it squeezed the earth five miles up into the skies to form the Himalayan range and fused with Central Asia to become the Indian subcontinent.

Not just land but people came to India from Africa, much later; the winds that bring the monsoon rains to India each year also brought the first humans to peninsular India by sea from East Africa in around 50,000 BCE. From the very start India was a place made up of land and people from somewhere else. Even the ancient “Aryans” came, ultimately, from Africa. India itself is an import, or if you prefer, Africa outsourced India.

The name 'India' was a label of convenience given — by travellers (outsiders) — to a multitude of different countries where every other kingdom ruled their land as a separate country rather than with an idea that they were ruling a smaller part of a bigger nation, according to Sir John Strachey, with people who lived beyond the river Sindhu loosely referred to as ​"Hindu" and the land as ​"India", as labels of convenience.

The ghosts of Adichanallur: Artefacts that suggest an ancient Tamil civilisation of great sophistication

The fear in south India in regard to north India's patronising attitude, historical manipulation, language (Hindi) imposition, etc., bringing about visible cultural hegemony over the south, has been on the rise. M. Kalyanaraman in his article "The ghosts of Adichanallur: Artefacts that suggest an ancient Tamil civilisation of great sophistication" dated January 12, 2018, writes:

"Many of them have charged the Centre (Central govt.) with wilfully stalling the excavations at Keezhadi, contending that the ASI (Archeological Survey of India) was baulking at the prospect of digging out an extensive, ancient Tamil civilisation that was independent of Vedic Hinduism".

Kalyanaraman continues,

"Sangam literature, especially the earlier works, has been a touchstone for the Dravidian movement. The poetry of the Sangam canon evokes the inner world of feelings and the outer world of activity, but is largely silent on religious practices or even God. Many scholars aver that there is no trace of Vedic Hinduism in the verses, and almost nothing of the caste system or Brahmins. To many proponents of the Dravidian movement, the early Sangam era represents an ideal non-Brahmin, non-caste past, and gives them their separate identity".

In Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, University of Oxford, "MARGINAL ON THE MAP: HIDDEN WARS AND HIDDEN MEDIA IN NORTHEAST INDIA", by Arijit Sen, the content of British journalist Gavin Young (reporter of The Observer) has been used to shine the light on the media blacked out Naga hills. The media blackout of 1955 to 1960 was solid and complete.

Flanked by Naga soldiers for 18 days, Young would trek along the jungles of Nagaland, meet several people from the indigenous background and finally emerge with some answers to what still is one of Asia’s oldest unresolved conflicts: the invasion and massacres of indigenous Nagaland by Indian troops.

Young's work was the first proper example of reportage - on India's invasion and massacres of indigenous Nagaland - in the global media and broke the wall of silence on India's scorched-earth policy. India has preached the idea of Hindu vegetarianism and non-violence and projected her image of being a democracy, while the invasion and massacres orchestrated behind the curtain did not fit in with this image.

When promises, invitations, veiled threats, etc., to make indigenous Nagaland a colony of India have all proved futile, the Indian Army moved in to indigenous Nagaland in 1955. The rest is history. The massacres, military rapes inside churches, body mutilation, burning of houses and granaries, starvation and deaths and diseases, the list extends to the present, although camouflaged from the visual recognition of the ordinary travellers.

On National Press Day, 2015, the Nagaland media houses have published blank editorials, in protest against the extension of media blackout or "censorship", by the Indian gunmen in uniform, which, in one guise or another, continues to this day to cover up their own footprints and fingerprints.

References

YouTube [1 hr]: Disappearing World Forum with Arundhati Roy, held at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London

YouTube [2 hrs]: Democracy and Dissent in China and India - Arundhati Roy with Dibyesh Anand

The ghosts of Adichanallur: Artefacts that suggest an ancient Tamil civilisation of great sophistication

MARGINAL ON THE MAP: HIDDEN WARS AND HIDDEN MEDIA IN NORTHEAST INDIA

The Nagas: An Unknown War by Gavin Young

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