Reporters Without Orders Ep 26: Media, Assam and NRC, PM Modi’s goof-up, women in newsrooms and more

This episode of Reporters Without Orders has our in-house reporter Amit Bhardwaj joining our host Cherry Agrawal, along with special guests Vishakha Saxena from Asia Times and Arunabh Saikia from Scroll.in.The discussion kicks off with Cherry asking the participants to comment on the Supreme Court’s decision to extend the deadline to publish the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to July 30th. Arunabh comments on how the government is planning to establish the number of citizens in Assam and how it will affect them. “It’s a complicated process," he says, which necessitates one to “establish their connection to someone who was there before 1971...this could be anything from your father or grandfather’s name on a voter list before 1971.” Speaking about the verification processes, Arunabh explains that the process is long, as different states need to send in their data in the case of migrants. “It’s clear to everyone in the state that this could be horrific…because currently illegal migrants are being held in detention camps.” Arunabh remarks that it is a “bleak future ahead”.Citing a report by The Hindu on the Citizen Amendment Bill, Cherry asks if this Bill is the method by which the “government is trying to change the definition of illegal migrants”. She also asks about the possible impact of the Bill, if passed, on the NRC list.Arunabh responds, “They are kind of changing who a foreigner is in India. If the Bill is enforced, then the NRC process becomes largely redundant…what it does is, it makes six years of a gigantic bureaucratic process largely redundant.” He also remarks that it is “essentially an anti-Muslim Bill.”The panel also discusses the local and national media's coverage of the NRC.  While Arunabh feels that the quantity of coverage was sufficient, he says that “the coverage could have been better” in terms of the quality. According to him, the issue of illegal migrants in Assam is an “immensely complex one. There are multiple academic interpretations." He adds,  "It is definitely xenophobic to a certain extent, but there was also an element of class struggle."Amit joins in. He asks Arunabh if there is a tendency to cover bizarre comments made by leaders instead of covering issues of governance and the “morally corrupt” appointment of officials, citing the Tripura governor’s recommendation of a BJP member to be appointed to the government.Arunabh agrees, he adds that there is much more to be covered in Tripura other than Biplab’s statements. Perhaps its harder to find these stories as “covering corruption requires the reporter to be underground, go through paperwork…it requires real digging which a lot of us find hard to do”, he adds.Now over to Vishakha, who feels that the June 26 Thomson Reuters survey which found that India was the most dangerous country for women was “quite under-reported and the reaction to it was also quite conflicting". Cherry disagrees, pointing to prime-time debates about the survey on news channels such as NewsX and CNN-News18.While there can be some contention about the methodology, because of the small sample size of 550 experts, the report should rather have been used as a trigger for a larger debate, Cherry says.“We don’t need any Thomson Reuters report or any UN report to realise what is happening in our country," comments Amit.Vishakha, Amit, and Arunabh also weigh in on gender equality in the newsroom. Then there are Amit's remarks about PM Modi’s recent goof-up in his speech in Maghar which was under-reported. There's more, listen up!

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