REPORTING FROM THE TWILIGHT ZONE

Source : The PIONEER, New Delhi, Tuesday, October 6, 1998. REPORTING FROM THE TWILIGHT ZONE This year's Sanskriti award winner Purushottam Thakur reports from places where journalists fear to tread. Amit Sengupta profiles the idealist from Kalahandi. Purushottm Thakur has been given the Sanskriti award this year for excellence in journalism. Journalists in mainstream media and metropolitan readers would never have seen his byline. Purushottam works in a small town called Khariar in drought -striken Kalahandi, edits his own paper, and is adamant that he would stay and report from these backyards of underdevelopment, and not seek urban landscapes of fame or accomplishments. His paper had been banned for its anti-establishment coverage and investigative stories. He was maybe the first to report on starvation deaths and sale of children in Kalahandi. Since then he has reported the intricate tragedies of Kalahandi, taking obscure individual cases,events, stories of exile and suffering. " My job is to report the truth. I don't believe in camps, political or ideological. I don't want to be a success story, I want the story to touch the heart of the locals and disturb the authorities," he says. To use an outdated term, he is a committed journalist, a specie not so easily found these days. Purusottam stands as testimony that it is possible to create hope, when there is none. It was election time last year. My first encounter with young, spectacled Purushottam. It was a hard day and he was happy. His report on Kalahandi was on BBC a few minutes back. He had taped it. For the world which keeps forgetting Kalahandi, his hesitant voice was a reminder that this twilight zone exists. His crisp audio-report was categorical, without hope, meant for a global information system for which Kalahandi is a little drop of perpetual tragedy, so constant that there is nothing " new of newsworthy " about it any more. It is India's own little drop piece of Ethiopia and Sudan, to be sensationalised and dumped. In the moffusil block headquarters of this village-town in Western Orissa, with just one mainstreet stretching for a couple of kilometers and no cinema halls or hotels, hidden inthe interiors of Nuapada district of Kalahandi, the darkness is thick. It penetrates the skin despite the full moon. In this quiet terrain, surrounded by starving villages and parched agricultural land, Purushottam walks inside the heart of darkness to look for stories which deal with human beings and their invisible struggles. He reports on transactions of poverty designed meticulously by an entrenched nexus of exploiters in a corrupt, hardened and divided rural society, patronised by the political mafia of all rulling and opposition parties. Purushottam's stories tell us that, starvation and starvation deaths in Kalahandi is an obsessive continuity. People have to suffer and die, and it is not because they want it. It is not natural, ecologcal or a sudden shift of fate. This poverty and hunger, and forced migartion and uprootment to sub-human work-station, is man-made, strategical designed, to sustain a parasitic political economy, ruled by local mafias of traders, land lords, middle men and Marwaris, and the cold, brutal political class. It is rare to find a man and a journalist like Purushottam these days. He will remind you of the early days of idealism when reporters thought that words could change the world. Report injustice was integral to the beat. Young Purushottam, with his cycle and camera, is reporter from this fading tradition. Purushottam runs a fortnightly four page A-3 size Oriya newspaper called Jan madhyam from Khariar town. His official designation is editor, but he is shy to admit this. He runs it single-handedly, from a small room office, near the bus stop. With a print run of 4,000 plus, the paper is a classic example of immence possibilities of local journalism in a world where small is no longer considered beautiful. " I am not a marxist or a Gandhian. My ideology is that of truth. I will report and write on society's injustices, its corruption, its sufferings and its beautiful, human endeavours of hope. If they think it is anti-establishment, than let them do whatever they want. They may put me in jail, beat me, kill me ; they can put me inside the jail, beat me, kill me; they can unleash propaganda campaigns against me. My friends and relatives can become my enemies. But this is my mission. Local news for local people; not big news for big people." Purushottam's clarity is lucid.The paper reflects that. It is a clean paper, neatly laid outby a friend who does the computer work for Purushottam without charging any thing. There is one big picture with the lead story clicked by Purushottam himself, an edit, and small investigative capsules from villages and nearby towns, with evocative illustrations. There are a couple of advertisements, including one by a local politician, who has changed his party and ideology a number of times in the last few years. Purushottam hates it ; but he needs the money. The politician’s Marwari-buisnessman agents says he has no money.Purushottam is angry: “ This is the last time. I will never again ask money from this man.” But there is no money in his pocket. His family is low middle classclass. They understand his dogged idealism and they know they cannot stop him. He has no resources. Not even film rolls for his camera. When I met him, he did not even have money to pay his office rent, which was around Rs. 400. He cannot borrow a two wheeler from a friend to go to interiors, because there is no money for petrol. But he has a cycle. Stoic Purushottam , on his cycle, in a hurry, looking for the bitter truths of Kalahandi, so that he does not miss the deadline. But he did miss the deadline. His stories threatened the power structures of the local mafia and the official administration. Janmadhyam was banned by the district authoritiesfor its anti –Government news coverage. Purushottam undeterred, files a case against the ban in the Press Council. For more than a year, the paper was not published He meanwhile lived by stringing for mainline and regional dailies, exposing exploitation, clicking pictures realism. His photos are deeply human, especially his portraits. They never objectify person's suffering; tragedy here is not a media commodity. This is the subtle aesthetic difference which marks his picture, gives them authenticity, dignity and content. He has fought a very lonely battle, against the ban, against his powerful enemies whom encunters in the streets almost every day. Local journalism has its direct feed back. Readers ask him for the next is issue; officials warn him- beware. But he has a stubborn streak, common in die-hard idealists. Finally, the Press Council declaredthe ban null and void. And Jan Madhyam was once again reborn. So there he is, travelling to Mahulkot village to meet Gomati Majhi, whose husband's death he had reported. Despite the hyped up media attention, visits of dignitaries, politician, NGOs, National Human Rights Commission, high profile Indian and foreign journalists " with a social conscience." nothing much has changed in Gomati's starving , jobless village. Almost empty, the village stood forlorn on the map of poverty, because almost every one had left for a unknown destination in Andhra Pradesh, picked up by a truck in the middle of the night, to work as bonded labour in brick kilns. Including Gomati's 16 year-old son. She has not heard from him since six months. She is alone, but she is strong. " He will come back," she says. We wish he would. Purushottam moves from village to village. There is no work, no food, no hope. They know him. He knows the mother with a diseased child, lying in the middle of a village square, waiting for death. The nearest medical centre is 20 kilometers away; and where is the money to take him there ? Purushottam organises help. But already defeated. " Nuapada district is full of suffering. We are so helpless. And to think that so much money is floating every where." The Sanskriti award ( Rs.20,000 ) will probably pay off his debts, office rent and help him bring out a couple of issues of Jan Madhyam. But more than that, it is a reminder, that idealism is still alive; that words can still have meaning and value.