Media Freedom in Times of National Crisis

--Shrish S. Rana

A National Crisis?

To the chagrin of media professionals, the Nepali media’s longstanding linkages with the political establishment marring professional coverage in preference of partisan or biased political coverage holds. It is in this light that one must assess the exercise of the freedoms enshrined in the constitution for the media by the media on the perspectives it has chosen to opt for regarding the existence of, or the recognition of, a ‘national crisis’ in Nepal. Is there a ‘national crisis’?

Typical of this politico- media linkage, a national crisis as recognized by the legal enactment of parliament and hence legislated and thus recognized also by the media did exist in the formal imposition of an Emergency under Article 115 of the Constitution of Nepal in November 26th 2001 which was extended by Royal decree upon mandatory expiry on May 27th, 2002.

The attempt by the Sher Bahadur Deuba government to extend the emergency after its three-month expiry, however, triggered a series of political crises the reverberations of which continues to be felt today but is not corroborated as such by the political sector and thus has yet to be adequately attended to by the media too.

Deuba who took office on a platform of talks with the Maoists was fired by his party boss Girija Koirala on the issue of the extension of the emergency and had to engineer a formal split in the Nepali Congress. In anticipation of the opposition CPN/UML coalescing with his Koirala rivals in parliament to challenge his parliamentary majority on the emergency issue, he chose to recommend the dissolution of parliament while he retained his majority and extend the emergency by Royal decree. This concluded the ‘national’ approach to a national emergency. If the national crisis is by implication the ensuing Maoist conflict this is the sole occasion in its eight-year history when the nation, including the press, met the crisis as a nation. Ever before or after, it has merely been governments that have tackled the crisis. The media, expectedly perhaps, has followed the political hues.

The opposition to the emergency by Deuba’s opponents emanated from their contention that the newly promulgated anti-terrorism laws sufficed to cope with the Maoist ‘crisis’. The media, directly hit by the curbs, readily agreed. Deuba eventually lifted the emergency. But another national crisis emerged: a constitutional crisis. Until Deuba’s emergency existed by decree, he was accused in the media of ruling by decree in the absence of parliament and in coalition with the king and the army. After the emergency was lifted, the non-resolution of the Maoist ‘crisis’ proved impedimental to elections constitutionally to be held within six months of the dissolution of parliament and the Deuba government, in cognizance with the opposition CPN/UML and the RPP, sought recourse to the use of the residual powers of the king under Article 127 of the Constitution the interpretations of which is the current source of the constitutional crisis.

In essence, then, there is the Maoist conflict and there is the constitutional conflict. Except for the emergency period, the Maoist conflict has not been approached as a ‘national crisis’. It has been approached on separate partisan lines and the media has followed suit. Identifying a national crisis, thus, appears difficult in the very first place for the political and media sectors in Nepal. Its consequences on attempts at conflict resolution are somber indeed. It need not be stressed that crisis role functions can only be determined after the crisis is identified; in the absence of such identification, recourse will be to assume the normal role functions. On the issue of the Maoist conflict, the Nepali media is replete with reportage and comments on the conflict on a routine basis. This would be normally expected in a crisis situation too. But a national crisis situation which would want from the media a role to provoke, promote and prompt a national approach to the crisis or even to prefer one would surely entail the identification of the national crisis first. Even if the politicians may be blamed for their partisan interests playing foul with the need for a national consensus in approaching the Maoist issue since it has provoked a national crisis, can the media which carries the twist and turns of the conflict and opinions and advice on it day in day out afford not to identify this as a national crisis and demand a national approach? In this, the media will have digressed from its traditional partnership with the political sector but will indeed have served a long cherished goal in opinion building surely. Such a media preference would very much subscribe to the modernism prescribed by Jurgen Haabermas’s Theory of Communicative Action.

Freedom: Communicative Action

As pointed out above, the crisis that is the result of the Maoist insurgency is very much part of the current constitutional crisis. In the very first place, the insurgency takes place on Maoist claims that the constitution is inadequate and a new constitution must replace the current one. This systemic challenge appears not to have been recognized as such by the stakeholders of the system or else one would have seen a suitable response from the stakeholders. Is or is not the media among the stakeholders? Direct beneficiaries as they are of the Constitution of 1990, one must surely answer this in the affirmative. And, so asking for communicative action on part of the communicators at least in locating the crisis is hardly the preserve of Haabermas in our case. As of the moment, if there is a role for our media, it is here.

Coming, then to the constitutional crisis, recognition by the media that there is linkage between the lack of systemic response and the emergence of the constitutional crisis would surely be a good beginning. Indeed, this would entail a frank assessment of the events leading to the October 4th, 2002 decision by King Gyanendra to deny prime minister Deuba his claim to continue in office by the use of the king’s residual powers in the constitution under Article 127 but, instead, to call for cooperation in the "setting up soon of an interim, neutral administration composed of individuals with a ‘clean’ image who would not contest the forthcoming polls." As yet, general media coverage has tended to view the king’s use of Article 127 in line with the mainstream parties who allege that it is a step towards ‘regression’. The Deuba Congress deems its dismissal as unconstitutional and wants its reinstitution in government, the Congress- Girija wants the revival of the dissolved parliament while the CPN-UML which claims it opposed the dissolution of the house viewed the constitutional recourse to be the appointment of a government under Article 128 of the Constitution, a clause that gave the interim government of 1990 its constitutional legitimacy after the panchayat constitution was abrogated and the interim government which oversaw the drafting of the new constitution was installed.

Since October 2002, an independent media standpoint on the need for a united national approach to the national crisis would surely have questioned the constitutionality of these partisan interpretations as well. Had the coverage, willingly given, of the international community’s suggestion that the King and the political parties cooperate for a permanent solution been granted its constitutional perspective, the constitutional flaws in the separate partisan demands would perhaps have been more widely disseminated by a media concerned for the emergence of a consensus national opinion in the formulation of a national government capable of putting the constitution back on track and handling the Maoist crisis.

How the political sector is handling the crisis in the agitation is better discussed elsewhere, but after two governments under Article 127 and two sets of failed talks with the Maoists, the actual implications and ramifications of the agitation ‘against regression’ conducted by the mainstream political parties remains strangely beyond the reach of public discussion in the media. A sense of the surreal thus dominates Nepali politics today and its reflection in the media is stranger still. An agitation by and large limited to cadre of the organized political sector largely ignored by the lay public dominates media coverage. A government whose very constitutionality is challenged is isolated by the agitating parties is having to face the brunt of the Maoist crisis. The Maoists have verily taken advantage of both to heighten the crisis and media reportage cannot but cover this, especially when the Maoists have calculatedly paced-up their violent presence.

In the process, the media must largely tow partisan lines while commenting on and reporting the King’s resort to assuage an increasingly desperate people by visiting the crisis affected areas as proof of ‘regression’ while the presence of the masses at these gatherings despite the visible non-cooperation of the mainstream parties and the violent opposition to it by the Maoists remains largely dismissed as state sponsored. This, then, should provoke a question of the media: ‘What is the Nepali state’? At times of national crisis, it is perhaps in locating the nation that the media can use its freedoms best.

From a media perspective, the use of this freedom would seem especially relevant in analyzing the Nepali crisis and suggesting a role for the media. Noam Chomsky’s much admired analyses on how the state and its partners in the business community control the media for propaganda appears conspicuous in its absence in the Nepali context. While this would surely work wonders for any attestation of media freedom in Nepal, Chomsky’s logic could well be applied to expose a curiosity: If the state controls the media in the developed democracies in the manner that Chomsky says it does, who controls the media in Nepal? One could perhaps deduce that, in accordance to Chomsky’s logic, the state and business, in the Nepali case, are not as hand in glove as in Chomsky’s media perspective. But in this instance in Nepal, the organized business sector, the Federation of Nepali Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Chamber of Commerce appear to be among the few in the professionally organized sector that have openly endorsed the King’s move under Article 127 and, indeed, even actively participated in it. If anything, this rare political gesture by an otherwise wary business community should indicate the severity of the crisis in Nepal apart from raising questions as to its non-corroboration or reflection in the media defying Chomsky’s classical mould.

Partisan media or not, non-empirical academics or otherwise, expert and generalist, foreign and national, all appear to have a rare convergence of view that the crisis in Nepal is a consequence of a series of delinquent neglect in the sphere of governance that helped foster the Maoist demand for change and that the Maoist violence has added to the crisis. In all fairness, partisan though it is, the Nepali media has contributed a fair share to the public exposure and awareness of the flaws in governance over the past decade. Even the massive repression of the Maoists under government police action found considerable coverage especially after the Maoist propaganda machine went to work in the media. As a result, public awareness at home and abroad that the crisis in Nepal is all-pervasive and, indeed, ‘national’ in nature is demonstrably high. How else does one explain the lack-luster public response to the highly publicized agitations mounted by the mainstream political parties in the country? How else can one see the less than luke-warm response of the concerned expatriate community and foreign governments to the agitation? In this sense, the media has worked. In doing so, however, one might well ask whether the media has contributed to the crisis or is helping solve it?

Setting the Standards

Of course, in the context of our violent conflict, the media echoes the unanimous public demand for peace. It is also very much in the forefront in voicing the widespread preference for talks along with the cessation of violence and the resort to human rights. But especially in the context of the national crisis, to call for a set of standards prescribed for the media in its coverage of the crisis/conflict/violence would surely seem appropriate here. It is for this purpose that one turns to Norwegian peace studies professor Johann Galtung. He has "laid out 12 points of concern where journalism often goes wrong when dealing with violence. Each implicitly suggests more explicit remedies.

Decontextualizing violence: focusing on the irrational without looking at the reasons for unresolved conflicts and polarization.

Dualism: reducing the number of parties in a conflict to two, when often more are involved. Stories that just focus on internal developments often ignore such outside or "external" forces as foreign governments and transnational companies.

Manicheanism: portraying one side as good and demonizing the other as "evil".

Armageddon: presenting violence as inevitable, omitting alternatives.

Focusing on individual acts of violence while avoiding structural causes, like poverty, government neglect, and military or police repression.

Confusion: focusing only on the conflict arena (i.e., the battlefield or .location of violent incidents) but not on the forces and factors that influence the violence.

Excluding and omitting the bereaved, thus never explaining why there are acts of revenge and spirals of violence.

Failure to explore the causes of escalation and the impact of media causes itself.

Failure to explore the goals of outside interventionists, especially big powers.

Failure to explore peace proposals and offer images of peaceful outcomes.

Confusing cease-fires and negotiations with actual peace.

Omitting reconciliation: conflicts tend to reemerge if attention is not paid to efforts to heal fractured societies. When news about attempts to resolve conflicts are absent, fatalism is reinforced. That can help engender even more violence, when people have no images or information about possible peaceful outcomes and the promise of healing."

A paper presented by the author at a ESON sponsored seminar held recently in Kathmandu-Editor.

Economic Policies and Aggravation of the Social Conflicts

Dr. Meena Acharya

The issues of structural discrimination have been aggravated in the last decade because of the political corruption, lack of social perspective in economic policies of structural adjustment, rising expectations of the masses, and social traditionalism among the politicians. Economic policies fostering dependency on foreign aid and foreign employment has led to emergence of new classes "fragmented personalities" and "multiple states" leading to contradictory decisions, constant shift in inter and intra-party political coalitions to exploit the state resources, growth of non-competent bureaucracy, and radicalism among the overdeveloped non-productive classes. In Nepal this radicalism has resulted in the Maoist insurgency. This radicalism found ready ground for its activities among the impoverished masses.

New conflict points generated by such developments and cross cutting across gender, caste and ethnicity include rural/urban divide in access to resources, highly educated/uneducated or semi-educated divide in access to new sources of livelihood, capitalist/feudal divide among the haves, capitalist /worker divide, lower peasantry/ capitalist/feudal divide etc. In any future social transformation these new sources of conflict must also be dealt with.

Economic policies, imported "lock, barrel and stock"-- wholesale without trying to socially and politically contextualize them, has aggravated the problem of poverty in remote rural areas (Acharya and Khatiwada,.2003). The increasing disparity of income and access to the resources has been recognized even by the World Bank experts (Prennusi, 1999). Progressive penetration of the hinter-lands by roads and mass- produced factory products as also the progressive sub-division of land among the landed households have destroyed the traditional local labor market for the service castes in rural areas. Such impact is clearly visible in the every day life in the case of plastic utensils replacing the locally produced wooden, metal and earthen utensils, factory produced farm implements, rubber shoes and textile replacing locally produced farm implement, shoes and the home spun clothes. As land-holdings get divided and sub-divided among the landed households agricultural labor market has also shrunk for the land less service-caste. This market has been further narrowed in the short run by a tendency among the larger landholders to switch to fruit plantation or forestry (Acharya, 2003, on this issue).

Until about 1980, Nepal had relatively free land, where the poor and lower middle class had user rights. They could easily move and occupy the government land with immunity. National forests were accessible to all for grazing animals, for fuel and fodder. It was disastrous for the country because the land and forest resources were being exhausted fast. For the poor, however, it was a means of livelihood. They could move to higher level land although only with low productivity. Nevertheless, it was a resource. Similarly, they could raise livestock grazing on community land. They could gather berries and fuel for sale and earn their livelihood. All this stopped with the introduction of lease and community forestry. It is true that these measures have helped to regenerate the forests to some extent but they have also closed the avenues of livelihood to the poorer groups.

Further large tracts of private and sometimes also public land have been enclosed by the powerful and strong in the name of commercial agriculture. The middle class instead of investing in land is set on selling the land to send their children abroad. Or they are converting land to forestry, fruit orchards or some other plantation with long gestation period eroding the food security system of the villages. The poor are left with no access to resources or alternative employment. This is clearly illustrated in the case of livestock-raising. The poor and the very poor, seeking employment are those who have no education or asset base to take advantage of the wide spread credit network, which is supposed to be the primary intervention for poverty alleviation in rural areas. Livestock raring was the only activity they could take up on a small with micro-credit in the hill areas with little market accessibility and lack of alternative employment. But this channel has been closed as discussed above.

The role of non-agriculture sector, particularly manufacturing, trade, restaurants, hotels and construction has increased in proportion to decline in agriculture. The recorded manufacturing output has increased but its institutional structure is estimated to be changing substantially from home and village cottage industry based to factory based and from small scale to large scale capital intensive factories. This transformation with no mechanism to prepare the laboring class for this transformation by training and adequate agreements with the employers to employ the Nepalese labor, has further eroded the livelihood opportunities for the service caste. The labor market situation is made much worse by the free flow of imported labor in these areas. Whether the carpet and the garment industries have been able to compensate for such job loss can not be ascertained as the industrial production data do not even list woolen carpets, hosiery or garments in their manufacturing data. Carpet exports have definitely opened up new employment opportunities for women. Whether the poorer service castes, suffering from the job losses in rural areas, have been able to take advantage of this opening is not clear.

It must also be recognized that unemployment exists among the lower middle class with small pieces of farmland and so with comparatively higher reservation price of labor. In-spite of the emerging unemployment problem among the educated youth from this lower middle class, this group of people is not willing to work as physical labor in the country. Nor do they want to go back to farming and hence provide a fertile ground for the Maoist recruitment.

Thus, besides the rising aspirations of the disadvantaged groups and communities to power sharing, the widespread loss of traditional sources of employment and livelihood without alternative employment opportunities and increasing disparity of income and poverty seem to be the major factors contributing to the attractiveness of the Maoist insurgent army among the youth in rural areas, which is reinforced by the threat of execution by the Maoists.

(Courtesy: conflict resolution and governance in Nepal,NEFAS/FES publication)

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