The Indian media has been rife with news of a heinous crime since November 11. Not a day has passed when Aftab Poonawala, the alleged murderer of Shraddha Walker, has not appeared on the primetime news channels or the front page of national dailies.
Daily, news channels vomit out the gory details of the gruesome murder like an unwinding crime thriller on some OTT platform. The daily incremental dose of crime serial gets consumed by millions of Indians every day in their living and bedrooms. Damn the impact on society, the TRPs matter greatly in this cut-throat competitive environment. And this crime thriller, unlike other OTT platforms, comes for free.
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But is that all that is driving this OTT crime series? Certainly not.
Almost around the same time, at least four cases of similar nature of heinous and sensational crimes have been reported by the media - in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, and in Azamgarh.
Sample these in brief.
In Ghaziabad, a woman killed her husband with her brother-in-law's help. She took all the precautions and was ready with a bucket to collect the blood dripping from the bullet wounds. They shifted the body to the brother-in-law's house, where the duo dug a six-feet deep grave within the four walls to bury the body. This took them four days. To kill the smell of the decomposing body, they used incense sticks.
In Azamgarh, a youth strangled his married girlfriend and then, to conceal the identity, hacked her body into several pieces. The limbs and torso were dumped in an obscure and unused well while the decapitated head and the weapons were thrown into a pond six kilometres away.
In Madhya Pradesh's Shahdol district, a man, suspecting infidelity, took his wife to a nearby forest and then chopped her head with an axe. He buried the head and the torso separately at two places in the woods.
In yet another case, in Delhi's Badarpur, a man shot dead her daughter and then wrapped her bloodstained body in a plastic sheet, stuffed it in a trolley suitcase, and dumped it on the Yamuna Expressway. Even though an adult, the daughter's fault was that she had ventured out of the house without informing her father.
Strangely, despite having all the masala to boost TRPs, these cases failed to attract the media czars and their well-paid minions. This brings us to the original question. What is the main idea that is driving this OTT crime series?
The only thing that separates these cases from the Aftab-Shraddha crime blockbuster is religion and cosmopolitan nature. Shraddha, a Hindu name meaning devotion, resonates, especially when it gets clubbed with Aftab, a Muslim name. And a perfect recipe for 'love jihad' is ready when it is sprinkled with patchy and unsubstantiated details of the heinous crime.
Each of the four cases described above is a misfit in the current socio-political scenario as all the characters involved are Hindus, thus, devoid of a Love Jihad angle. The brutalisation of society continues as the news anchors lap up the crime story to hold bizarre debates and deliberately bring religion into the discourse.
Sadly, the so-called liberal channels have also failed to resist this temptation, or possibly, have fallen prey to the diktat from the powers that be. The loser is the Indian society - our homes, mohallas, villages, towns, and cities. A large populace is slowly being stripped of the finer emotions of love, compassion, and brotherhood and is engulfed by negative emotions of fear, hate, revenge, and deceit.
It's a no-brainer that the impact of this reckless onslaught is disastrous for our society and may change it into a pathological quagmire. We are already seeing its proof in the increasing cases of hate crimes and mob lynching, where innocents and petty criminals often become the target of mob fury.
This brings us to the fundamental questions - how can this madness be reined in, and who can do it? The two major stakeholders - the government and news channels have done nothing so far.
Despite having all the paraphernalia at its service and the power to make effective laws, the central government seems disinterested for obvious reasons. The self-regulatory mechanism devised by the news broadcast channels through two independent bodies - National Broadcasters Association (NBA) and National Broadcasters Federation (NBF) - have failed to put any sort of ethical checks on the news content as TRP ratings are at stake.
But both bodies are infested with rogue channels that excel in whipping up hate.
This leaves the judiciary and civil society as the only options that can put a lid on this madness. The judiciary has time and again spoken about this menace. An observation of the Supreme Court bench comprising Justice K M Joseph and Justice Hrishikesh Roy on September 22 serves as a grim reminder. "The channels are bringing in hate and all such spicy things to increase TRPs, and there is no mechanism to deal with it," said the bench. Pinpointing the lacuna, the bench added, "The problem is we do not have a regulatory mechanism with television, and they are not being dealt with under a proper legal framework."
The government at the Centre has all the wherewithal to put the Supreme Court's observation into practice. It can enact new legislation or effect changes in the existing one and bring out a regulatory mechanism to rein in rogue channels. Article 19 (1) (a) of the Indian Constitution confers the right to freedom of speech and expression to citizens. It empowers the State to impose reasonable restrictions on the exercise of this right in the interest of public order, decency, or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation, or incitement to an offence.
As the government is in the habit of taking observations of the Supreme Court rather lightly, specific orders by the apex court to constitute an authority or put a mechanism in place can help check wanton abuse of the media's power to whip up hate. Pressure from the public in the form of a movement against the brutalisation of society will also put the government under moral pressure to act.
(The writer is a Delhi-based journalist)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.