Roundtable
Between the battle lines

Barkha Dutt

About a year ago I started a weekly reporting programme called “Reality Bytes” on New Delhi Television. Some time ago I did a couple of stories on this programme which illustrate the challenges for a journalist, particularly a television journalist, covering conflict who does not want to be identified with any camp. The title of one of these stories “Between the Battle Lines” reflects one of these challenges, namely the frustration of a reporter on Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) caught between two kinds of expectations from the audience. It is basically a story of two women widowed in the conflict, the wife of Jalil Andrabi, the Kashmiri human rights activist who was killed by an Indian army major, and the wife of a policeman who was killed by militants. The other story I want to discuss is one on the build-up of troops along the India-Pakistan border in December. Together they demonstrate the difficulties and complexities of detailed reportage, especially when the story primarily concerns the army. What do you do then?

Despite all my efforts at achieving a balance, after these episodes were screened I was criticised by both sides. People in the army were extremely angry with me for doing this story; after Kargil perhaps they had thought I could be counted on to say ‘the right thing’. They felt that I had given more space to the first story on Jalil Andrabi than to the killing of the policeman. On the other hand, in the border story which was just a narrative based on ‘facts’, there was criticism from liberal opinion that this kind of reportage could worsen an already tense situation. This is something to be factored in when looking at the impact of coverage.

In the context of multiple truths and lies and perceptions of coverage, the danger of slotting is not confined to just the viewers. Perceptions on the ground could be coloured and come in the way of reporting from a conflict zone. A story that I filmed at Kashmir University is a case in point. This was after the war against the Taliban had commenced. This seemed like a good enough context to look at the changing nature of the movement in Kashmir, which I personally believe has happened. From being a homespun political movement it is now a movement which the people who started it do not recognise anymore as their own creation. When we reached Kashmir University there were about 200 people in a pro-Osama rally. Being very conscious of this stereotype that dominates international coverage, of Muslims everywhere rallying behind Osama, we really did not want to cover it. But these people told us to take footage of their rally and we agreed and did an interview with them. At the end, the man who was interviewed turned around and said, “I know you are an agent of India and you are going to give me less space and you are going to give the moderate voice more space.”

We moved on to the mass communication department of the university, which is reputed to be a more liberal kind of centre. Students there told us that there was no pro-Taliban sentiment on campus. Meanwhile somebody went and reported this exchange to the pro-Osama group, who then accosted us and demanded our tape. When I refused, they accused me of being an agent of the Indian government who wanted to project the Kashmiris as moderates. Our camera was broken and I escaped with the tape. The next day a local newspaper in Kashmir printed a story saying that a lady reporter of Star News had egged on students to raise slogans against Pakistan and when they refused there was an altercation in which her camera was broken. We eventually aired the story in a raw, pretty much uncut kind of form, just showing what these people had to say. And once again I got slammed by both sides. In Kashmir, there are these kinds of stories where you cannot aggregate and balance out an overall reality. There is a little bit of reality here and a little bit of a reality there. Every angle of a story has one truth attached to it and one lie. A reporter’s job is to sift through the various truths and lies and glean something worthwhile from both sides.

This raises questions about objectivity in reporting. My attempt at objectivity is defined not so much in the traditional way, which would suggest leaving your own subjective perception of the situation outside the story. My definition is to be allowed to tell every side of the story with my own subjective perception because I do not believe that it can be left out. If there is an emotional engagement with the story, as there often is when reporting J&K, then there should be the scope to report with the same degree of emotional empathy for the story on either side. Of course that kind of luxury is only available in the format of a longer programme. For those reporting within the framework of a 1 minute 40 second slot in the main news bulletin, this kind of formula where you can tell both sides of the story is not possible. This problem is more acute reporting something very specific like a troop build-up at the border. The only option is for a reporter over time to throw in an array and variety of stories and build up a reputation of being independent.