The gory death of Santanu Bhowmick a journalist with a local television channel in Tripura should set the alarm bells ringing. Bhowmick was covering a political event at Mandai where the Indigenous Peoples’ Front of Tripura (IPFT) had clashed with the police. Bhowmick was attacked by a mob at a spot where there were no policemen and he succumbed to his injuries. This month alone several journalists were killed at different places. Most of them are from small towns and mohallas and not so well known. Those who are ‘famous’ become the subject of much television debates on the metro channels. Each time a journalist is killed there are condemnations and expressions of solidarity from different media related organisations but there is no persistence in following the cases to their logical end. Assam alone has lost over a dozen journalists who were killed for reporting on insurgency. In India’s North East the threat has always been from insurgent outfits who have banned newspapers, intimidated editors and killed reporters for not toeing their line. Thus far the Government has not shown any inclination to take the cases of journalists being done to death, seriously. The lives of journalists in this country hangs by a thread!
As a profession, journalism is the least paying and most insecure one. It is a sad commentary on the profession that quite a few journalists today subscribe to political ideologies and have no qualms about it. The CPI (M) functionaries in Tripura have claimed that Bhowmick was a member of the Party. This is surely going beyond the brief of journalism. It would be difficult therefore to ascribe the reasons for Bhowmick’s death to the discharge of his journalistic duties alone. And this is the problem area today. Some of the leading journalists of the country today seem to owe their allegiance to the ruling party. So what happens to journalism in such cases? Is it not completely compromised?
