I had published the following post on my site in 2004 when the whole of Manipur was on fire against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

Some time back when Maninder Pal Singh Kohli, prime suspect in the Hannah Foster rape/murder case, was arrested in this rather somnolent little town I met some young reporters who had charged upto Kalimpong along with their huge antenna sprouting, satellite connected vehicles. And during my discourse with them I learnt that there were such things as “hard” and “soft” news. “Soft news” was a totally forgettable report on a bookfair somewhere and “hard news” was what jerked you out of bed and made you switch on the TV.

So Kohli was “hard news”, an international criminal hiding behind the skirts of an innocent young woman whom he managed to beguile and marry in a small & otherwise unheard of town, and hard news was the annual flooding which ravaged the north east with predictable regularity. In other words hard news is sensational and it sells. But in their obsession for what sells, it is deplorable that the metro-centric media more often than not finds nothing else worth reporting in the north-east than the Kohlis or the insurgency or now Manipur.

I had written in the Outlook magazine (22 Dec 2003 issue) that unless the Centre, the Ambanis (corporate world) and the media give more attention to the North East, the sense of alienation which these states already feel will turn to open hostility. So while watching the hard news boiling out of Manipur and so many other North Eastern states and hearing that Indian goods are being boycotted there, I feel a grim sense of foreboding that perhaps my prediction is becoming a reality too soon.

Four years later, now with scores of young people on a fast unto death, with yet some more threatening self immolation for the cause of Gorkhaland, I am dismayed at the almost total news blackout in the national media. It seems uncanny that very little has been reported in the print media about the week long strife in the hills and almost deliberate that the TV channels find it more appropriate to give two whole days of news coverage to a small boy (Prince) who had fallen into a well while not even giving 5 minutes air time to the many young men and women now so intensely involved in the fight for their cause.

What shocked me was that on contacting a prominent national weekly, a friend of mine was told that the happenings here were not sensational enough to be news worthy as yet and that they would wait for “harder” news to come out of the hills..

So unbelievably, the media is actually waiting for people to start dying here before they come charging up once again.

-Praful Rao