Making news of the absent
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: February 23, 2015 -

It has often been argued that reportage of the Northeast in all media in mainland India produces or reproduces almost the same content of the region based on information gathered from intelligence agencies, police or security forces' press handouts.

A cursory look at the content of the mainland media indicates that the shortcomings of the coverage can be broadly categorized into at least three – inaccurate news; hyperbolic reportage and news in the absence of context and perspective.

Given the wider and expanding reach of both the print and electronic media in India, the "representation" of the Northeast should have increased manifold.

However, it has become more or less frozen with images of gun-wielding insurgents, security rings over protestors on the streets; inter-community and tribal feuds, kidnappings, extortions and corpses.

Why do these 'images' have more enduring value than any other story from the region?

The reasons probably hinge on the fact that there is the unconscious 'absence' of the region from the dominant imagination of the Indian national 'Self".

The imagination of the Northeast still continues to be "violence-ridden", "backward", "tribal" and "exotic".

The presence of this imagination is to some extent responsible for creating a total absence or a clean slate where one can sketch anything calling it the Northeast.

This phenomenon has been held responsible by many for de-linking the region from India's national mainstream consciousness.

In many senses, he says, the "Northeast" functions as the marginal or repressed 'other'.

This kind of pointed argument comes from the modes in which mainstream media's news from the region, constructed for the consumption of its viewers and readers mainly in the metropolitan cities.

The content of the projected news and current affairs programmes from the region via the media, however inadequate, do impact on the psyche of their audience.

The fixation of the media with violence and insurgency in the region is as old as the development of the 'Indian Republic'.

Against what has been discussed here, there is further need to read the texts and images of the Northeast in a continual objective of assessing the quantum of information, news and vies disseminated by mainland newspapers and television channels based in Delhi or Mumbai.