Srinagar: As a Kashmiri, you have to be highly impervious to insults and abuse to watch the Kashmir related discussions on national television. One cant help experiencing a helpless sense of outrage at the way the facts are thrown to winds when it comes to analyzing the issues facing the state and the way an entire community is demonized. Most of the leading anchors and the talking heads, except those from Kashmir dabble profusely in communal innuendo and outright threats against the people of Kashmir to hammer their arguments home.
The recent discussions about the Chief Minister Mehbooba Muftis call for a unilateral ceasefire in the state was once again revealing in this regard. Not only did the channels take a position against the ceasefire as it will allow terrorists to regroup, rearm and re-launch the attacks on the security forces but also championed a scorched earth policy to wipe out the militancy.
And the BJP whose Deputy Chief Minister in the state Kavinder Gupta sat by the side of the CM when she appealed for the announcement of a unilateral truce in the state went back on the issue, toeing the line of the ‘national media’.
The partys state spokesperson Anil Sethi called for the Operation All Out, which is aimed at killing all militants in the Valley, to continue.
No leniency should be shown towards militants, Sethi said. At this stage, we cant give an escape route to militants and any opportunity to regroup.
Sections of television channels have a played rabid role on Kashmir, subverting every appeal or push for a political initiative or engagement by plying a commercially lucrative line on the state. If the direction of the state government is to be decided in Delhi and according to TRP preferences of the TV studios then how would the situation in Kashmir ever improve.
Right from its start, the PDP-BJP coalition has been paralyzed by the recurrent media-promoted controversies which have threatened to tip the state into strife and deprived the coalition of its sense of possibility. When late Mufti Muhammad Sayeed had thanked Pakistan for a peaceful Assembly election in his very first press conference after being sworn in as the Chief Minister in 2015, a section of television channels had turned it into a saleable controversy, so trumping his understandable attempt to reach out to Pakistan and separatists.
So, far from trusting the Chief Minister who is supposed to know her state and act in its best interests. The excessive TRP fixation of the national media in regard to its coverage of Kashmir has already choked the manoeuvring space of the state government, including even the one in New Delhi.
But apart from working up controversies and hate for Kashmiris, the television channels also simplify the fiendishly complex issue of Kashmir. The result is abetment to revenge in Kashmir than a search for a solution to the deepening crisis in the state.
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