Ziya Us Salam
In late July 2025, just a few kilometres from India’s capital, a Muslim woman was killed by her boyfriend in an OYO hotel over a marriage proposal. The two had been together for many years and the woman insisted on marriage. The man was not ready to commit. She was strangled to death in Faridabad by her partner with whom she was in a relationship for 10 long years. Do you remember the name of the man who killed her? Or the woman who was killed? You won’t simply because the media either didn’t tell you or whispered it ever so gently it got lost in the din. He was Deepak. The woman was Sheeba.
Now, permit me to take you back in time to another case in our city where a man slashed his partner’s body into small parts and kept them in a fridge. You would have guessed it. The man was Aftab Poonawala and the unfortunate girl was Shradhha Walker. The crime was heinous, the murder most tragic. But the media which was to later go mum on Deepak had screamed its lungs out in the case of Aftab. The difference a name makes for our media!
The breathless coverage of the crime by our media made it to international headlines. The BBC too deemed it necessary to report on the issue, stating,’The crime has been dubbed “the fridge murder” and the huge interest in the case has seen news websites running live pages on the investigation that are being updated every few minutes. And anger has spilled over onto the streets – protesters have burnt Mr Poonawala’s effigies, demanding strict punishment for him. Lawyers, activists and former police officials have expressed concern at the intense media coverage. Vikram Singh, who retired as director general of police in the state of Uttar Pradesh, called it ‘extremely irresponsible’. ‘A ball-by-ball commentary is detrimental to the cause of the investigation and disrespects the deceased,’ he told the BBC.
‘The breathless coverage also made it hard to separate the grain from the chaff – reports are mired in inconsistencies with little clarity on the facts of the case, including on how the couple met,’ the BBC concluded. Not just in Deepak and Aftab cases, sadly, our media is today both a cheerleader of the ruling dispensation and in many ways a happy purveyor of hate and bigotry. Ours is the media which hosted panel discussions on the much talked about Hajj subsidy in the years gone by but found little wrong in district magistrates, police commissioners and other civil officers being asked to shower rose petals on Kanwariyas, the Hindu pilgrims carrying the Ganga water with them. The flower petals were showered from a helicopter, from a jeep, by officers walking on the road. All their excesses in the form of violence, abuse and intimidation of passers-by was ignored. From fruit vendors and eateries having to virtually announce the religion of the owner via a nameplate to roads being cleared for the pilgrims and the administration pulling out all stops to make the pilgrims feel like VIPs, was accepted by the media as the new normal.
Incidentally, on the same route during COVID-19 outbreak, a hospital had refuse to allow Tablighi Jamaat volunteers to come for treatment without a COVID negative certificate. The media, which had gone to town with the alleged excesses of the Tablighi Jamaat volunteers, did not deem it necessary to report on the blatant discrimination on the basis of religion. Only The Wire wrote about it. As for the electronic media, not many would have forgotten how various channels held the Muslim body responsible for the spread of the diseases. They coined terms like Corona Jihad, Superspreaders and the like. With an untiring effort on bearded men with pyjamas ending above the ankles, the channels turned the attention of the common man from the shortcomings of the government to the Muslim body. Interestingly, around the time of the Tablighi Jamaat jod in March 2020, dozens of Hindu and Sikh pilgrims were also stranded on their way from pilgrimage to Vaishnodevi and Amritsar. When the media talked of these pilgrims, the term used was ‘pilgrims stranded in Jammu’ while the same media described the the Tablighi Jamaat men as ‘hiding in masjid’. Not quite Orwellian but close, all men are equal but some more so than others in New India.
The most glaring being the media’s vastly different coverage of Nirbhaya’s criminal assault in Delhi a little more than a decade ago and the more recent release of the criminals in the Bilquis Bano case. Close your eyes for a moment and go back in time to August 2022 when 11 men convicted for the gangrape of the five-month pregnant Bilquis Bano and the murder of 14 of her family members were released as their character was god during imprisonment and they were ‘sanskari Brahmins’. Among the murdered were Bilquis’s mother, her sisters, her three year old daughter. Barely hours before they were released, the Prime Minister had talked of empowerment of women in his Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort. On their release, the 11 men were welcomed with sweets, adorned with garlands of rose and jasmin and young men sought their blessings by touching their feet. A society which welcomed mass murderers and gang-rapists is rotten to the core. Yet what did our media do? It confined itself to cursory reporting of the incident followed by editorials but nothing of the kind of outrage one had seen following the Nirbhaya case in Delhi a decade earlier. It was left to Saamna, Shiv Sena’s newspaper to ask, ‘Who is Bilkis Bank? Just because she is a Muslim that doesn’t mean that atrocities against her, rape and murder of her child, is pardonable. Had it been our mother or sister?…. Neither the PM nor our Home Minister have spoken a word on this What’s the reason?’
In that little support for Bilquis, Saamna ended up underlining the division of ‘we’ and ‘they’. A Muslim woman, even when supported by a section of the media, could not be treated like other Indian citizens. She was the Other in today’s India.
While the Indian Express reproduced the Saamna editorial, our electronic media couldn’t care less. Remember these very channels almost always called Yati Narsinghanand a Hindu priest despite his constant hate tirade against Muslims. Talking of Yati, do recall his hate-filled press conference at the Press Club in New Delhi where he openly indulged in slurs against Prophet Muhammad SAW. It’s unlikely that Yati did it in an almost empty hall as the Press Club is seldom short of patrons. Yet nobody cried a halt to his tirade and the English dailies neatly edited his comments on the Prophet and reported rest of the segment. It’s like he never said anything untoward. No question asked. No one called him a peddler of hate. He remained a Hindu priest for the media. Now, imagine, God forbid, if an imam had said something as reckless about a Hindu deity! All hell would have broken loose. As I said, all men are equal but some more equal than others.
The same media did not raise an eyebrow when one of its members, Suresh Chavhanke, editor-in-chief of Sudarshan TV, said at an event in New Delhi, “We take an oath and make a resolution that till our last breath we shall fight, die for, and if need be, kill, to make the country a Hindu Rashtra.’
Often in reent years it seems, the minorities and Dalits of this country in general and Muslms in particular, are the favourite punching bag of the media. When it is not peddling hate, it stands guilty of complete ignorance of Muslim issues. Worse, it makes no effort to learn about them too. Back in 2017, the media went to town with special programmes on triple talaq. So loud and so frequent were the programmes on triple talaq it seemed every other Muslim woman was in danger of instant divorce. When the five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court gave its verdict in August 2017, invaliding instant triple talaq, only small sections of the media could distinguish between triple talaq and instant triple talaq. There were banner headlines of the apex court banning triple talaq! It didn’t occur to the editors that triple talaq stays and only instant triple talaq or three divorces at one sitting had been outlawed. The media could not bother less. After all, anything was fine to project a negative picture of the Muslim community.
The same media’s eye remained well shut when Muslim women took the lead in raising a voice against the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019. Even as Shaheen Bagh was occupied by hundreds of Muslim women in a peaceful demonstration against the new law, the media did not deem it necessary to tell the viewers that, contrary to their common image, Muslim women have an identity of their own, and they are not just child producing machines, or that they know about the Constitution as much as they know about Islam. Burqa clad women raising the Tricolour and singing the national anthem did not go with the media’s preconceived notions of the helpless, poor, exploited Muslim women.
Call it ignorance or prejudice. Dub it hatred or a convenient hopping on to the government bandwagon, the reality is when it comes to fulfilling its responsibility, a large section of Indian media has left the country down. As the largest minority, the Muslims feel the pinch more than others. If anything, the community has been cheated by the media.
