Taran N. Khan takes us through the lanes of Kabul, creating an elegant cartography of poets, museums, archaeologists and local book markets.
Written on the City
The road to Kabul is made of stories. A fragment of a memory leads me to the afternoon when I first read about the city, in a book I found on Baba’s shelves. The adults were deep in sleep; the house filled with the kind of stillness in which fables begin. The short story I perused was written by the legendary Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore in 1892.
In the wake of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic in India, mainstream Indian journalists like Rahul Kanwal of TV Today (owned by India Today), Arnab Goswami (founder of Republic TV) and Sudhir Chaudhary (TV anchor and editor, Zee News) have come under fire for promoting hate against a particular community for spreading the Covid-19 virus. Of late, the targets of their programmes have been the Nizamuddin Markaz of the Tableeghi Jamaat in New Delhi and Madrasas.
According to Suchitra Vijayan, a lawyer and founder of The Polis Project, who says that hate is a big business, this kind of journalism could fall under the category of Genocide journalism, as it establishes a “… pattern of presenting and commenting on the news” that “transforms political debate into righteous passion against individuals and groups that disagree with the status quo.”
The modus operandi of this sort of journalism is as follows: “The targets of violence are marked with precision, taken as public hostages and accused of being enemies of the state. Later they explain what has to be done to this enemy. Through constant repetition, they construct a political, moral and historical alibi that eventually becomes the accepted truth. In this steady journey into the abyss of intolerance, journalists and news anchors become agents of the state and even annihilators of society. All the ingredients for conditioning a democratic alibi that existed in Nazi Germany and Rwanda exist in India today.”
