Incident: Hoodlums raped two tribal (Christian) women and the administration was not arresting the accused because the BJP was in power and the accused belonged to Bajrang Dal.
Fallout: A Minorities' Commission member, Indira Iyengar, called the press conference to bring the plight of these poor women before the media. Now the mediamen launched an attack on the organisers that why the fuss over rape...'balatkar to hote hi rahte hain', was the query by most of journos. The organisers said that women were raped because they had embraced Christianity willingly.
When a woman journalistm (she was Hindu) tried to calm down fellow scribes and reminded them that it was tribals are not necessarily Hindus as per constitution, the majority of journos got angry at her. Some of them called the Bajrang Dal activists who disrupted the press conference. (Can you imagine this?)
Moral of the story: It may be tough, you might feel prejudiced that the women were converted by Christians and tempted to feel that rape serves them right (Can you think like that?). But that's unpardonable. Not all channels showed the entire episode except Sahara, CNN-IBN and Channel 7. The rapes occurred in faraway Khargone district, the press conference in Bhopal and the bias of mediamen at district level was such that despite the fact that the case of rape was registered, the local newspapers hadn't reported it at all. Isn't it sad? What I feel is that your own biases apart, you have to report and first think in terms of everybody as human beings and think it in terms of justice and injustice. But the entire conduct of journos comes as a shock. Can journalists think like that--Rape serves them right? Mercifully national media is not that biased rather it can't afford to be so.
