Date: April 6, 2020
On one too many evenings between the end of March and the beginning of April, the chief editor of Republic TV, Arnab Goswami, displeased with the Tablighi Jamaat, gave harsh monologues in its disfavor.
In this artefact, Arnab starts by victimizing himself in light of being personally 'attacked' by 'fanatics.' With a '#TablighisInHiding flashing on the screen, he goes on to proudly proclaim that he is unfazed by these 'violent threats.' Vigorously loud, he defies any such 'stupid WhatsApp abusers.' He explains with 'facts' that the Tablighi Jamaat Attendees are the 'only and only' culprits behind the spike in India's Coronavirus cases.
During the sixty-minute debate, he attempts to answer the question 'Why are Tablighis in hiding?'. While he vehemently denies 'communalizing' the issue, he does seem to repeatedly emphasize how some Tablighis were found hiding in mosques and constantly referring to them as an 'Islamic congregation' and 'Muslim clerics.' The speakers who applauded Arnab's sincere passion as a journalist and supported his view were visibly given more talk-time. At the same time, those that opposed him were conveniently drowned out in the cacophony. The first forty minutes were devoted to rechristening the Jamaat as the 'Talibani Jamaat' and labeling the incident as a 'deliberate' and 'callous' conspiracy to infect the Indian Army and citizens with Coronavirus. "How can one group put everyone at risk?" he asked. Arnab unsurprisingly answered his own question, declaring that the Jamaat attendees had hatched a plot to demean the Prime Minister's efforts to control the escalation in the number of cases of the infections. The debate soon took a predictable 'patriotic' turn when Arnab beseeched his audience saying "Why are they spreading in my country?”, they being the foreign members of the Tablighi Jamaat who he claimed were breaching VISA laws by refusing to hand themselves over to the government. A conspiracy against the nation, Arnab proclaims, shall be immediately brought down.
In accordance with the 'Propaganda Model' as explained in 'Manufacturing Consent' (Chomsky, 1988) regional media houses followed the lead, joining in making the issue wholly about religion. A report in the Kannada media gained traction when it labelled the Coronavirus-coronavirus as the “Tablighi virus”; an example of communally charged reporting.
Upon deeper inspection, one realizes that most of Republic TV's content on the Tablighi Jamaat issue would amount to bigoted opinion at best. There are hardly any ground reports or evidence to substantiate any of the claims they made. Republic TV, along with many other media houses, failed to emphasize that the meeting had been organized well before the government imposed the nation-wide lockdown. This claim has been recognized as true by most legal courts in the country: on March 13 coronavirus had been classified as 'not a health emergency' by the government. But most news networks committed adequate coverage of this clarification and their deceptive reporting broadcasts by Republic and other networks set off a chain of extreme Islamophobic reactions online.
While this artifact highlighted the media’s attempts sensationalising and communalise the incident, the next article shall highlight the government’s stand, which was sadly similar to the media houses.