While incidents of rapes in metropolitan cities take centre-stage on TV channels, countless such case in remote and rural places do not even get noticed, raising questions about the newsworthiness of the place of crime and the victims involved.
A 22-year-old photo-journalist was gang-raped in Mumbai on Thursday night and hell broke out for the national TV channels. There was a war-like situation in the newsrooms even as the netizens on social media could not stop pouring out their anguish over the disturbing incident which also became a subject of discussion during the ongoing monsoon session of the Parliament.
Next morning in Mysore, a 14-year-old minor girl from a poor family was found to have been sexually exploited for months by a 52-year old man. The girl was pregnant and so traumatised that she was unable to speak coherently. Her family was aghast at her future. This heartrending story was run as a small news scroll briefly on Kannada news channels. Obviously, the national channels were not even aware of this incident. Even if they did, it would not have made any difference. All are equal but some are more equal – applies to the mainstream media which is becoming more and more metro-centric in our country.
Do the crimes that take place in the smaller cities, towns and the darker recesses of the rural India not mean anything?
One of the famous 19th century literary critics, Mathew Arnold, in one of his essays writes - "For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment." These lines present great flexibility to rephrase and redefine the alarming media trend: For, the victims of the crimes to be heard by the mainstream media, two things must concur, the power of the place or the power of the socio-economic class to which the victims belong.
Crime sells. Crime in big cities sells more. Crime in big cities involving big people sells much more. With burgeoning media, especially the spawning of TV channels which bank on the proven formula to garner bigger share of viewership, there has been a wide coverage of the crime. However, the inhuman incidents that take place in smaller places, even if they are located very close to the power centre, go unnoticed. That is why, “Mumbai rape incident puts a question mark on the safety of the women in the country,” becomes a debating point on a prime TV channel, as though the countless number of rapes happening in smaller places do not raise this pertinent question.
According to statistics collated by Mrinal Satish, associate professor of law at Delhi's National Law University, around 75 percent of rape conviction happens in rural India and the rest in towns, cities and the metros, a figure that brings into sharp focus India's urban-rural divide. Given that majority of the cases go unreported, especially in villages, the actual number of rapes that happen in rural areas could be many more. But the skewed media coverage of rape and atrocities on womenfolk blinds a man like Mohan Bhagwat, RSS chief, and leads him to conclude that rapes do not happen in Bharat (meaning rural India).
However, the December 16 Nirbhaya case in New Delhi marked a shift in the media tendency to focus on the crimes involving who’s who of the society. Thanks to the rise of middle class and the proactive voices on social media, it now makes sense for the media to cover crimes connected to the middle class in big cities which form a large chunk of TV viewership.
Commenting on the media attention the case got, Vipul Mudgal of Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, said, “What’s different [about Nirbhaya’s story] is that the media has given the middle-class a voice.” His observations would have been apt if they were confined to the middle class in big cities. The female population in rural India, the most vulnerable to sexual crimes, is still left out of the media attention for its lack of newsworthiness. The rape of the girl in Mysore is a case in point.
(Published as Oped in City Today on August 24, 2013)
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