The Fine Print

ON 19 MARCH 2005, thousands came out on the streets of Udupi, in coastal Karnataka, to protest a gruesome incident that had shaken the region a week earlier. Not far from the city centre, Hajabba and Hasanabba, a father-son duo of cattle traders, were waylaid by a mob led by the Hindu Yuva Sene, who beat the two Muslim men for hours, stripped them naked and paraded them while bystanders watched. In the days that followed, many protest marches were held in the region. Reporting on the protest in Udupi on 19 March, Udayavani, the most popular Kannada daily in coastal Karnataka, published a photograph of a Muslim protester holding up a green flag bearing a crescent and star. It ran alongside a loud headline: “This is not in Pakistan; it is in Udupi!” The caption below the photograph identified it as a Pakistani flag and claimed that “Pakistan Zindabad” slogans were heard throughout the protest procession. Two other local newspapers, Vijaya Kirana and Karavali Ale, published similarly provocative headlines, suggesting a conspiracy to create a “mini-Pakistan” in Udupi and speculating whether the protesters were seeking support from Pakistan.

On 21 March, a new Kannada daily published a prominent news item on its front page showing the Pakistani flag and the flag seen at the protest, clarifying that the latter was a religious symbol often seen atop mosques and dargahs. The newspaper also carried a statement by the police superintendent that there were no Pakistani flags or pro-Pakistan slogans at the protest rally. The large headline above it read: “A newspaper’s false report fuelled tensions.” It was not the first time, nor the last, that local newspapers stoked communal tensions in coastal Karnataka. But it was one of the first instances when Vartha Bharati, an alternative newspaper that had been founded less than two years earlier, used the institutional weight of the medium to challenge the mainstream narrative. Sitting in a sparse, modest cabin in their head office in Mangaluru, Mohammed Muslim, the chief executive officer of Vartha Bharati, told me, “That was the first fact-check by us. It had such a big impact that, when people couldn’t get a copy of the newspaper—we did not have many copies at the time—people photocopied it and distributed it everywhere.”

The media in Karnataka, much like the national media, has actively contributed to normalising hateful rhetoric against religious minorities, justifying majoritarian interests, and furthering the ideology of the Sangh Parivar. Karnataka is the only southern state where the Bharatiya Janata Party has formed a government, and many senior journalists and media observers believe that regional print and television media have played an undeniable role in the growth of its hate-fuelled politics. They chalk this complicity down to various factors, including the political interests of the owners. For instance, Vijay Sankeshwar, a businessman and a former BJP member of parliament, owns the newspaper Vijayavani, while another BJP MP, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, has a controlling stake in the newspaper Kannada Prabha and the channel Asianet Suvarna News. The overrepresentation of upper-caste journalists, particularly Brahmins, in newsrooms and senior leadership positions is another major factor, especially true of coastal Karnataka, where Islamophobic misinformation and sensationalist reporting in the Kannada press frequently fanned the flames of communal tensions lit by Hindu-nationalist groups. It was in response to this media environment that Vartha Bharati emerged, in 2003, as the only Muslim-owned Kannada newspaper with a statewide circulation, to counter the majoritarian narrative and amplify the voices of the marginalised. The story of this alternative newspaper, defending its existence in a hostile political and media landscape, offers an insight into independent journalism in India outside English and Hindi media.