I saw the news on page 15 of the Indian Express on Saturday, when the Bombay siege was reaching a climax. It was a short agency report about the cyclone in Tamil Nadu: 86 fishermen dead, hundreds of boats missing, one lakh acres of crop submerged, 2,426 villages affected. There was no follow-up the next day. Death is supposedly a leveller. But as in life, the fishermen of Tamil Nadu would not attain anything like the same level as the Bombay dead, though the systemic failures on the Coromandel coast were as shameful as those on the Bombay coast. The news was not covered at all by the three major English news channels. It did not even make it to the ticker. Reporters and anchors were otherwise occupied, some doing an outstanding job of the Bombay coverage, others trampling every responsibility entrusted them. Across the board, however, was the kind of hypocrisy that the politicians were being accused of. As politicians juice their constituencies at times like these, so too does the media, drawn from the middle and upper classes and pandering to those classes.

The point here is not really the coverage, but our particular anxieties, and that they militate against the idea of India offered up in these same forums. That idea is of inclusion. This was just another example of exclusion. And to look around the country nowadays is to sense the outrage of exclusion everywhere: of class, caste, religion, territory; to feel that everything that has already happened was waiting to happen, and everything that will happen is waiting to happen.

... contd.