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[home]>[programmes]>[media]>4th
workshop
Mapping Borders: Inside-Outside Perspectives, Kathmandu, August 30-1 Sept, 2003
It focused on the theme of borders in response to a demand made at
the second regional workshop for a more detailed discussion on borders,
boundaries and borderlands. The workshop brought together 29
participants, including media practitioners, social scientists and
literary critics. In incorporating an inside-outside perspective frame,
the notion of borders was de-territorialized and demystified to
encompass the borders in our minds or the maps in our minds. In the
national imagination, borders cast from the positions of privilege of
power elites are symbolic of state sovereignty. But as the focus on the
margins of such privileged maps showed, the margins too have maps of
their own of spatially dynamic geographies and histories of mobility of
their own.
The dominant media frame in covering the border politics of the post
colonial nation state system of South Asia, has been to contextualize
them as sites of growing conflict, i.e. over territorial and maritime
boundaries, resource sharing, destabilising population movements,
smuggling of drugs and arms and cross border insurgencies. Arguably, the
unsettled and unsettling nature of border politics has produced national
security state pathologies. However, as Prof Sanjay Chaturvedi of the
Centre for the study of Geopolitics demonstrated, there is the
possibility of an alternative emancipatory geographical imagining that
moves towards de-territorializing the national imagination, to recover
spatially expansive geographies of mobilities, to de criminalize, de-
communalize and humanize population movements. It is a movement opposed
to the dominant geographical discourse that predicates space as
something that can be homogenized, bounded and ultimately linked to
territory. In his key note presentation on “Maps as visual Texts:
Geopoplitics of Representation and Resistance” he exposed the
political agenda of the map makers, and the failure of the media to
appreciate the map’s power as a tool of deliberate falsification or
subtle propaganda or violent imperial impositions.
Several media practitioners questioned the possibility of the media
reflecting alternate meanings of the notion of the border as the media’s
relationship with various power constructs predicates a statist view of
the border. Anirban Roy’s study of statelessness of people inhabiting
the borderlands, highlighted the irony of the border viewed form the
metropolis as the marker of sovereignty. Cross border population
movements of the politically persecuted or the desperately poor, i.e.
the production of refugees and migrants are cast in a nationalist
security discourse, eschewing a humanitarian response. The media has
been complicit in scape-goating these ‘unwanted peoples’ and mystifying
demographic data. However, there was some uneasiness about the political
implications of romanticising the recovery of geographies of mobility
when viewed from self perception of demographically fragile communities.
The meanings of the border differ according to location, class,
community identity as insightfully emphasized by Sanjoy Hazarika.
In exploring the philosophical origin of boundaries and borders, the
notion of exclusion and inclusion of self and the other, was examined.
Tapan Bose argued that the material basis of borders ensued from a
culture of private property and ownership that produced claims and
counter claims on bounded space and territory. A territory without an
owner has no need of a border. The concept of border is the physical and
external manifestation of the culture of ownership. As a corollary the
primary border was between the haves and the dispossessed.
Arguably, the mass media has been complicit in constituting cross
border communities viewed through a communal lens and by implication and
assertion converting them into national security threats. Its corollary
is the transformation of poor (illegal) economic migrants into criminals
and worse - terrorist infiltrators; of mixed villages into communally
cleansed border villages that are vulnerable to communal incitement and
manipulation; of cross border insurgents operating with the apparent
complicity of hostile neighbours. Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal and Praveen
Swami’s studies of the J&K border ( LOC and international border)
strikingly juxtaposed two different and opposing ways of covering the
border. Where Jamwal engaged with the LOC as a site for humanitarian
concern, Swamy’s focus was on the vertical and horizonal transgressions
that make the border a site for national security concern. Moreover, the
remoteness of the border from the metropolis, and the national security
framework encourages a dependence on sources with privileged and
therefore non-verifiable access –i.e. intelligence agencies and defence
and foreign ministries. These agencies manipulate information in line
with their own agendas.
Haroon Habib analysed media coverage of border politics as viewed in
the prism of competing and confrontational nationalisms. In reporting
differences over territorial claims, water resources or fishing rights
the mass media surrenders fairness and accuracy to the nationalist
imperative. However, while hostility was active in generating identity
and nation hood as symbolized in the Indo- Pakistan border, the Indo-
Bangla border was not as yet configured as a site of confrontation and
hostility.
Bharat Bhushan’s cameo study of the competing claims on Sir Creek
provided an excellent example of the contribution sensitive, well
informed and balanced media coverage of a dispute can make to create an
environment in which boundary disputes are seen not as sites of
competing nationalisms but of cooperation – of cooperate monitoring at
the very least and joint exploration and exploitation of economic
resources at best.
While Lakshman Gunasekere explored the media of dealing with the
construction of a Sinhala consciousness of a homeland co-terminus with
the whole island, Sivaram incisively described how the majoritarian
state project of erasing peoples’s borders paradoxically gave rise to
what has become an entrenched concept of a border separating the Tamil
homeland from the rest. Panneerselvam was the outsiders view located as
it were in No Man’s land of a Sri Lanka with not one (as the media
emphasizes) but several public spheres. Plotting the moral geography of
the island he finds each has its own truths especially of death, that
change as you cross the border into another sphere.
The Nepal- India open border was posited by Kanak Mani Dixit as a
possible model of a pragmatic and humane way of border management in
contrast to militarization as a means of managing the border. Rita
Manchanda explored the dilemma for the media of engaging with the
situation of a state within a state, i.e. Nepal and Sri Lanka where
there are territorially speaking, two belligerent parties that control
territories and run parallel governments. Should the media aspire to
transcend its statist bias wherein a state within a state is understood
as a recipe for instability, and engage with these zones of alternate
authority/ liberated zones/ uncleared areas? In seeking to be fair and
empathetic, does the media run the risk of conferring legitimacy to the
contesting authority? Neutrality is not an issue, for as the media
workshops have demonstrated, routines of news gathering are inscribed
with choosing sides. Does the media have to cross borders and
empathetically engage to contribute to a more complex reading of the
nature of violence and thus contribute to an understanding of how peace
is to be made.
Output:
Reports on Workshops & edited Volume on the proceedings of the workshops
for use in mass communication institutes, journalism courses and human
rights and peace institutes.
Also, Booklet on do’s and don’t’s of Border Reporting- a ready
reckoner for facilitating sensitive and well informed reporting of the
border
Regional Network of South Asian Journalists
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