Hala Jaber, who reports on West Asian affairs for The Sunday Times, recently brought us the shocking story of a teenaged Iranian girl on death row. “She was only 14 years old when she was forced into a loveless marriage with an older man,” writes Hala Jaber, “Yet within a year of her wedding Azar Bagheri had been charged with adultery and sentenced to be stoned to death.” That’s only the beginning of a tragic tale which most of us who abhor the cruel practices legitimised by sharia’h — flogging, decapitation, chopping off of limbs — would find terrifying, the stuff nightmares that make you wake up in a cold sweat are made of. Hala Jaber’s bland prose captures the tragedy best: “The sentence could not be carried out until she reached 18. So for the past four years she has been languishing on death row while courts waited for her to reach maturity.” So, here’s this teenaged girl waiting to come of age not to live her dreams but to be stoned to death.
The plight of Azar Bagheri has been brought to light by Iranian human rights activist Mina Ahadi, who says the girl — she was by no means either an adult or a woman when forced into marriage — “was denounced by her own husband, who accused her of committing adultery with two men”. Hala Jaber, quoting Ms Ahadi, says, “The teenager had been subjected to two mock stonings. On each occasion she was taken out of her cell and buried up to her shoulders in the yard of Tabriz prison, in north-west Iran, as if being prepared to be pelted to death with stones.” The girl’s lawyers haven’t given up hope: They now plan to petition the courts to show mercy on Azar Bagheri by reducing the death sentence to 99 lashes. That, then, is the quality of mercy expected from sharia’h courts in the Islamic Republic of Iran with which, ironically, we claim civilisational and cultural affinity. Any affinity that may have existed ages ago has evaporated ever since the Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Komeini; fanatical mullahs cannot be secular India’s natural allies.
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The same paper also has another brilliant article this time by Swapan Dasgupta about how media continues be the judge and prosecutor in many cases.
Next to playing god, contemporary journalism is built on the principles of infallibility and public gullibility. Journalists and pompous editors are disinclined to admit that, being humans, they too can make mistakes and commit errors of judgement. More crucially, a misplaced sense of self-esteem has proved inimical to a sense of contrition. Like love, journalism usually means never having to say you are sorry.
Of course, honest mistakes can and do happen. Since information is subject to human interventions and interpretation, the scope for being misled by ‘sources’ loath to see Yudhisthir as a role model is enormous. This may explain why old-fashioned practitioners of the trade strove to highlight the important distinction between verified reality and unsubstantiated claims or allegations. Both have a place in reportage but only when it is clear which is which.
One of the casualties of the tabloid culture and popular TV is that scepticism (I’d even say cynicism) has been replaced by certitude. Like the old Bollywood potboilers, the media seems to be driven by a macabre desire to divide humankind into the good and the bad — with the media, naturally, on the side of their chosen good. This undaunted sense of partisanship (depending on political preferences, nationality and commerce) is compounded by some robust demonology that transforms the ‘bad’ into both the ‘ugly’ and the ‘evil’.
In a made-in-media society, this misplaced self-righteousness can have a hideously distorting effect on public discourse. Journalists are naturally dependant on non-attributable ‘sources’ for both insider information and perspectives. The problem, however, begins when the ‘sources’ start taking over the finished product. This seems to be happening in India with alarming frequency, especially now that the ‘sources’ have got it into their heads that they are not going to be held accountable for anything they dish out to news-hungry journalists in a fiercely competitive environment. The unending quest for the ‘exclusive’ has turned a large section of mediapersons into stenographers. They have become captives to official dictation.
In the past 48 hours, India has witnessed a fierce trial by media targeting the favourite ogre of the liberal consensus: The Government of Gujarat. The CBI has charged Amit Shah, one of Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s closest political associates, with a direct hand in the ‘encounter deaths’ of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife Kauserbi and his associate Tulsiram Prajapati. It has alleged that Shah, who was Minister of State for Home till his resignation on Saturday, conspired to kill Sohrabuddin, not because he was a suspected terrorist intent on killing Modi — the police in Madhya Pradesh had recovered some 300 AK47s from his home — but because he was running a protection and extortion racket with his favourite police officers. It has been suggested that Shah targeted Sohrabuddin at the behest of some harassed marble traders of Rajasthan. Prajapati and Kauserbi were on the other hand killed because they knew too much.
These are grave charges, particularly when levelled against a senior political functionary. It is almost akin to Home Minister P Chidambaram or his Andhra Pradesh counterpart being formally charged with organising an ‘encounter’ killing of the CPI(Maoist) Politburo member Azad and ‘journalist’ Pandey. If these charges are upheld by the courts they would undeniably constitute a damning indictment of the State Government.
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