The 30-year-old journalist Hem Chandra Pandey, who was killed along with Cherukuri Rajkumar (Azad) in a fake encounter exactly a year ago, was also an accomplished raconteur. In “Since She was a Girl…”, a nuanced story written for the magazine Uttara , he unearths the psychological depths of Dalit oppression and a terribly-convoluted universe erected on the twin pillars of honour and loyalty in a seemingly-liberal community in mountainous Uttarakhand. The story recounts the tale of a troubled liaison between Rekha, an artisan's daughter with a deep interest in philosophy who tried to relate notions of work-ethic and fate to her caste status, and Keval, a Bharadwaj Brahmin scion in the neighbourhood. A three-month-pregnant Rekha is eventually poisoned to death by her father, caste purity proving more significant than upward social mobility. Keval, supposedly a romantic at heart, remains silent. The story is a shrewd testimony to Pandey's discernment of the mind-games involved in perpetuating social hierarchies in contemporary India.
Pandey was a quiet man. But he was deeply argumentative and interventionist, in both his journalism and his organisational politics; his body was discovered in the Adilabad jungles of Andhra Pradesh. How does such a mindset fare amid current preoccupations about objectivity and professionalism in Indian journalism? What decides the nature of ethical obligation in chronicling our times: Does it have to do with getting the facts right, or with getting the meaning of the events right? How far can ideology and activism be allowed to intervene in selecting and reporting stories?
These were some of the questions raised by Sumanta Banerjee — veteran journalist, writer, analyst — the keynote speaker at the First Hem Chandra Pandey Memorial Lecture held at the Gandhi Peace Foundation in New Delhi in the first week of July.
Dangers of the profession
The two recent high-profile deaths of Saleem Sahzad in Islamabad and Jyotirmoy Dey in Mumbai — and those of journalists like Umesh Dobhal, Anil Majumdar and Prahlad Goala earlier, as well as the arrests and harassment of Laxman Choudhury in Orissa, K.K. Shahina in Karnataka, Bharat Desai in Gujarat and Prashant Rahi in Uttarakhand — have again made these questions utterly relevant. According to the international media watch group “Reporters without Borders”, at least 57 journalists were killed and 124 arrested in different parts of the world in 2010. Asia leads the list with 40 reporters slain during 2010 by both state and non-state agencies. Journalists are constantly negotiating such dangers; Pandey, as a freelancer, regularly contributed articles under the name of Hemanta Pandey to three Hindi newspapers — Nai Dunia , Dainik Jagaran and Rashtriya Sahara . All three, significantly, denied any involvement with Pandey after his death.
Sumanta Banerjee, in his keynote, raised certain fundamental questions about journalistic functioning and the Indian state's treatment of journalists, arising from this condition of constant threat that journalists who report and comment on areas of conflict live — and sometimes die — in. And there can be little doubt that all understanding of the work of such journalists must hinge on the critical question of a different kind of “job-security”, that of remaining alive and free to pursue the job at hand. However, focussing on this very real issue of lives-at-risk must also then push us towards contemplating how journalists operating in the spirit of Hem Chandra Pandey can best negotiate what they consider to be their duty on their jobs, their ethical, and perhaps ideological, responsibility to bring to light the fraught state of the nation. It is obvious that they will know that their commitment will put them at life-risk. But then there is risk also in bungee-jumping — its very unadulterated thrill lying, presumably, in the wholesomeness of the risk itself. In the case of Pandey and many other unknowns of his ilk, however, the challenge lies in telling tales with a purpose, at grave risk, and yet surviving to tell them. Pandey lost that gamble a year ago, as did Sahzad and Dey more recently. Their laudable purpose, then, was defeated, by the power of the state and various enemies ranged against them. Is this reason enough for brave committed journalists to turn cautious? Of course there will always continue to be a school of journalists whose members — even if we never know their names — will courageously accrue to their ethical commitment at work, placing it far above questions both of personal safety and professional obligation to their employers' political alignments. As receptors of their news and views, however, we are in continual danger of losing them, often violently and senselessly. How can this impasse be mediated, then?
Wide-ranging concerns
Widely-and-eclectically-read Pandey nurtured a peripatetic soul — choosing to gift Premchand's Godan to his partner during their courtship. Each exchange with his close ones was an excuse to get into discussion, banter, argument. An astute student of economics, Pandey abandoned his doctoral ambitions for organising and thinking about the utilisation of natural resources in the villages of Almora. Urban affiliations remained, though, and eventually the couple relocated to Delhi, making new friends, joining higher courses in translation studies and journalism, watching all kinds of plays and performances. All the while he continued to freelance — a strategic choice surely — and during an engrossed career cut tragically short, wrote on parliamentary politics, the judiciary, food security, alternative farming and forestry, global warming, water management, the death penalty. It is from their Shastri Nagar apartment that Pandey left for Nagpur on that fateful June afternoon, only to be brought back to Delhi in a body-bag in July last year.
He died as he lived, perhaps, like a miniature meteor, seen in quick flashes at different points of space and time, making a tiny mark and moving on. Front-page headline-breaking stories, often a journalist's ultimate dream, were carefully skirted by Pandey. How Pandey lived and worked — even though he lost the battle to nurture those pursuits — tells us a great deal about the quiet passion, courage and commitment that journalists can bring to their jobs without making larger-than-life pronouncements. Meaningful intervention in journalism is eventually an affair in reclaiming a certain kind of realisable utopia. The sense of inadequacy and disenchantment with lived reality is given an affirmative — even humorous — dimension while reporting, commenting and analysing; perhaps a trust in the principle of hope which is not distant but achievable right now, as Ernst Bloch reflected almost a century ago. Spreading and sharing a certain consciousness about topical stories is part of this realisation, as Pandey's brief life proved — fuelled by a steadfast belief in winning back readers from the swindle of fulfilment, and to set them thinking, colouring, introspecting.
Brinda Bose and Prasanta Chakravarty teach in the Department of English, University of Delhi.
Published - July 16, 2011 04:04 pm IST
