He changes colours like a chameleon. Tarun Tejpal changed his version several times.
The ticker of the TV channel goes on highlighting a new headline every second to ensure that the viewer's attention is constantly engaged.
And each headline hits like a fresh nail on the already nailed Tejpal.
Does it help the cause of justice to hang a person many times?
Carried away by these headlines that would provoke someone willing to be provoked by TV, one politician even took a paint brush and started tarring the name plate of Shoma Chaudhury, whose offence was to react to the complaint of the rape victim the way she did. TV channels have repeatedly recounted how she is responsible for the 'cover up' of the case.They have almost made it seem as if she had a hand in the sexual assault of which Tejpal is accused of.
There was a time when readers were used to reading their news once in the morning when the newspapers reported what had happened. It could be repeated a couple of times by All India Radio if at all it reported those very items in its bulletins.
Did justice do very badly then?
There were no tabloids blaring out on a minute by minute basis that the murderers of the Chopra siblings for instance were at large, or were spotted at the airport, and so on.
And yet murderers and rapists when caught were punished if the courts found them guilty if the victims summoned the courage to complain. If justice fared badly then it was more because of the latter.
The grotesqueness of the coverage of an offence by the electronic media does not strike anyone probably because it is often confused with the responsibility of the media as a watchdog. But even a watchdog need not bark every second. And it need not bark only at one thief, or only certain thieves
When Vijay Jolly the BJP legislator who had long dreamt of making it big in Delhi actually got carried away by the excitement created by the news headlines and tried to do his own protest outside Shoma Chaudhury's house, he was mocked at by the media as behaving in an improper way. But it was only a physical enactment of what the virtual and television media have been doing all the time.
The coverage of the Tejpal story reflects some kind of celebration of the fall of a media personality who had made it big, and even an open celebration of the fall of a journal, which is quite inexplicable.
What is the fault of Tehelka in all this? There are no answers.
What is the fault of Tehelka in all this? There are no answers.
The only answer is the confirmation of the primitive instinct in man to tear apart someone who has fallen from his pedestal of honour or position or whatever perch he once had. It could be voyeurism or envy or both. The fact that the victim's emailed complaint is being circulated among people who are supposedly concerned about her, and is in fact there on the internet itself, and her identity is known to most of those who are talking about it shows the flip side to the media overkill.
As Anil Dharkar, a former editor pointed out in a television discussion this week, the media found in Tejpal an easy target and is going hammer and tongs at it. It cannot work hard to find real targets who are hiding and are difficult to find.
If people loved to throw stones at convicts and offenders in the dark ages, the same holds good now.The non stop media coverage of just one case is nothing less than the frenzy of the mob baying for the blood of someone it decides to punish.
What is lost is precious media time and space which could have actually been used to cover issues that get scant attention from the media.
Here is a case of a journalist who is empowered enough to fight her case, and an editor who already has several political forces baying for his blood. Why should the case need the assistance of any TV channel to keep the offender from slipping out of the hands of justice?
On the other hand, there have been acid victims across the country, who have been fighting their battles all alone, and probably losing them. No media channel is interested in highlighting those battles.
There are ordinary people living in Delhi's unauthorised colonies and slums who are forced to live near ditches and cess pools exposed to disease.There are poor people struggling in government hospitals to get medical attention. There are children struggling in private and government schools to get a good education.
But no media channel or website is interested in highlighting these struggles. Some of them have offices just meters away from a slum which live on the banks of such cesspools.
Tehelka probably was one of the few journals where there was some chance of such issues getting highlighted.
It would be a pity if the journal is sent for burial rather than be adopted and nurtured by a community of journalists who want to turn it into a sacred space where real news finds space irrespective of the revenue the news generates, irrespective of the glamour quotient of the persons in the news.
The journal could be published in regional languages and distributed free to every citizen who wants to read it.
