GUWAHATI: The Editor of The Shillong Times, Patricia Mukhim has resigned from the membership of the Editors’ Guild of India expressing her dissatisfaction over its ‘partisan’ way of functioning and for not responding to a plea submitted by her.
In her resignation letter addressed to Seema Mustafa, the President of the Editors’ Guild of India, Ms Mukhim has expressed her anguish over the way the Guild has ignored her appeal to respond in a proper way to a particular order of High Court of Meghalaya refusing to quash an FIR filed against her by Dorbar Shnong for criticising in a Facebook post the brutal assault on nine non-tribal youths by some masked tribal miscreants on July 3 this year in a tribal-majority area, Lawsohtun in Shillong.
In her Facebook post on July 4 this, Ms Mukhim called upon the Chief Minister of Meghalaya, Conrad Sangma, state DGP R Chandranathan and Dorbar Shnong to take action to book the culprits behind the brutal assault on non-tribal boys mere for playing basketball in a tribal-majority area.
In a sharp reaction to her Facebook post, the Dorbar Shnong filed an FIR against her. Mukhim’s lawyer sought to quash the FIR and approached the High Court.
“On November 10, the single bench judge of the Meghalaya High Court judge ruled that he finds me guilty of creating communal disharmony – a crime under Section 153 CrPC and refused to quash an FIR filed by the Dorbar Shnong (traditional institution) of that area. This, merely for calling for the rule of law to prevail and for the guilty to be arrested!” Mukhim mentioned in her resignation letter.
She then shared the High Court order with the Guild hoping that it would at least give out a statement condemning the HC order but there was and has been complete silence from the executive body of the Guild which Ironically, responded with alacrity and issued a statement condemning Arnab Goswami’s arrest (a non-member), not on grounds of journalistic pursuits but on an abetment to suicide case.
“I see this as a classic case of the Guild playing to the gallery to defend celebrity editors/anchors whose voices matter while choosing to deliberately ignore a plea (unstated) from one of its members. Clearly this is also a case of prejudice and a deliberate attempt to push those in the margins even further away so that they disappear completely from the national discourse (since the Guild is a national association of editors) and leave them to deal with the matter in their personal capacity. A Facebook post is also another form of media to draw attention to a serious issue. It may not be a purely ‘journalistic’ pursuit but it still is a platform of communication which is taken seriously by the powers that be, hence an FIR being filed because of it.
“As such, it is no longer tenable for me to be part of this hallowed group of editors whose loyalties are to those that occupy a certain elite space. In fact, I feel completely out of place; almost an outlier in the Guild. Kindly therefore accept my resignation today, November 16, 2020,” Mukhim wrote to the President of the Guild.