Related Stories THREE MURDERS, A RAPE AND VIOLENCE ‘Every child needs a father’s name but my children never had it’ The story behind the storiesA radical change Remains of that day

Chinmay Dev
Bhagalpur
8.30 pm, August 27, 2007
A cable news programme run by Chinmay Dev in Bhagalpur showed disturbing images of a man accused of snatching a chain being beaten first by the mob and then by the police who even tied him to their motorcycle and dragged him for a distance. But the images had little impact in the town.
Three hours later Zee TV, to which Dev had first provided the footage, aired the story on national network and the following days it was on all channels. Viewers watched in outrage and soon the whole country was debating the role of the police in fighting crime. And the man who shot the now-famous footage became the most wanted man in Bhagalpur.
Chinmay Dev is just 22, but has mastered the tricks of the trade. So on the morning of August 27, a college student called him to tell him that a chain snatcher had been caught near Manaskamna temple in Nathnagar, he immediately rushed to the spot.
‘‘I set my camera rolling. The man—Salim also known as Aurangzeb—was dragged on the road. After a while, two policemen arrived and joined in the beating. They saw me with my camera and asked me to go away. I went behind the crowd and found a place from where the policemen could not see me and continued to shoot,’’ he says, the excitement still to ebb.
After Zee aired the story at 11.30 pm, all channels began calling up Dev frantically. ‘‘I switched off my mobile and virtually went underground. Even the police started looking for me and I got scared. I did not sleep that night,’’ he says.
Finally, on Tuesday morning Dev decided to share the footage with other TV news channels and well, life hasn’t been the same for Dev since.
Brought up and educated in Patna, Dev came to Bhagalpur a year ago with the intention of running a news programme. He had no professional training but started handling the camera over two years ago while working for a local news channel at Patna.
In Bhagalpur he now has a team of some 20 reporters moving around town, armed with small cameras. He even teaches the tricks of the trade to enthusiastic youngsters. His news programme—Progressive Television Network—is shown in Bhagalpur every night at 8:30 on cable. But it has been stopped following his Aurangzeb footage. ‘‘Cable operators have told me to secure a No Objection Certificate from the SDO and only then would they air my programme,’’' he says.
His original tape has been confiscated by the police for investigation and he says he is under constant pressure. ‘‘But I will remain firm,’’ he says.
–J. P. Yadav

Priyank Sharma
Ajmer
September 10, 2007, Boraj (Rajasthan)
Young and enthusiastic, 27-year-old Priyank Sharma was among the first ones to have caught on camera the stripping of over 1,000 men in the village of Boraj, near Ajmer, early this week. The village panchayat had asked the men to strip to establish whether any of them was involved in the rape of a 35-year-old woman from the village.
‘‘When I reached there, my first impression was that the men are stripping voluntarily but I later realised that they were doing it out of fear of the village heads and the local police present there. I captured this incident on camera and by the following day, it was picked up by most other news channels,’’ says Sharma.
Sharma who has an undergraduate degree in Journalism and Mass Communication from Kota, always wanted to be a journalist. ‘‘Before picking up the camera for the first time almost three years ago, I worked with a local newspaper in Jaipur. Later, I shifted to television and worked as a reporter for local news channels in Ajmer before I became a stringer for IBN7,’’ says Sharma, who belongs to Bundi.
For this young man who dreams of making it big one day, the job with a leading news channel meant a widow to opportunities. ‘‘Based in Ajmer, I get a lot of opportunities to do stories from the rural areas, which I like. More than 60 per cent people in India continue to live in the rural areas but not even 20 per cent of the news shown during the prime time belongs to them,’’ says Sharma.
He would love to change that.
–Palak Nandi

Swaran Singh Danewalia
Bathinda
On the evening of September 8...
Swaran Singh Danewalia held a lonely vigil on a cotton farm overlooking the railway track near village Katar Singh Wala in Bathinda district. It paid off.
The following day, Danewalia, India TV’s stringer at Bathinda, had a story that exposed theft from trains that ferried oil. Danewalia’s visuals showed a group of people, including women and children, filling buckets of oil from the train. Within hours of the channel running the story, a probe was ordered and Danewalia is happy with the response his expose got.
Danewalia, now 42, has been in journalism for years. What started as a hobby in school days, when he joined a photography club in his school, turned into a profession. ‘‘I have no formal education in videography. It was my interest that drove me to this field,’’ says the Political Science postgraduate.
Danewalia says he does about five stories a week on average for India TV—he is paid Rs 1,000 for every story, besides travelling expenses.
Though he thinks fondly of all his stories, his personal favourite is a story he did a couple of years ago exposing a rice scam in FCI.
He may be happy working with the channel he’s now with, but he looks back at his 10-year-old career with one regret. ‘‘I’m still what I was ten years ago—a stringer.’’
–Navjeevan Gopal

Vinod
Mahajan
Meerut
January 2004, Meerut
When Vinod Mahajan started working at a petrol pump in Meerut more than 20 years ago, he never imagined that life would take a complete U-turn one day. Today, at 48, he is known more as a journalist than as a small-time gas station attendant who later dabbled in several failed ventures.
In 2004, his news story on Gudiya, the wife of a prisoner of war who married another man after her husband didn’t return from the war front, hit national headlines. The big break came four years after he joined a television channel as stringer for Rs 1,000 per story. ‘‘A two column story had appeared in a Hindi daily about an Indian soldier about to be released by Pakistan. I set out to explore and it turned out to be much bigger than I had imagined,’’ he remembers.
His quest led him to another big break a year later when his story on Imrana, a Muslim woman who accused her own father-in-law of rape, put him in national spotlight again. This time, he travelled to Muzaffarnagar for the story.
And though there has been much criticism of the visual media’s treatment of the stories, Mahajan argues that he simply did his job. ‘‘When we started, we didn’t anticipate that the stories would turn out to be so important. We didn’t intend to harm anyone. But if the media is accused of going overboard, I would say that our highlighting the issue only helped matters get better,’’ he says.
But much before his city stories stirred debates in the national media, Mahajan started out with passing news to a reporter with a local daily. The fact that his cable control room was close to a local hospital buzzing with news helped immensely. ‘‘My news sense developed and I began learning the ropes,’’ he says.
Later, he hit the streets of Meerut with a hired video camera generally used for shooting marriage ceremonies. ‘‘I just wanted to record news and was fascinated by the exercise,’’ he says.
That was 13 years ago. The amateur videos shot then were put to good use. He started broadcasting the clips compiled into a programme called City Hulchul on his cable network that he set up in 1989 after his dealings in sports equipment and shares didn’t yield much. ‘‘At that time, I had stopped feeling ashamed of my failures and poverty; I was not afraid of taking risks anymore,’’ he says.
The effort paid off. His brush with self-willed city journalism led him to apply for the vacancy of a stringer with a private television channel. And, once he started, there was no looking back. Today, his old scooter has given way to a white Santro, and days of walking in the scorching sun with cable wires are just painful flashes from the past, dimmed by the whirring of the air conditioner in his adequately equipped office.
But alongside journalism, he still runs his cable business to support the expenses on reporting that often exceed the amount he is paid for the exercise. He insists he is a journalist out of passion and not compulsion. ‘‘I use my own car and camera and am never paid for any damages to the equipment since I am a stringer and not a full-time staffer with any news channel,’’ he explains.
In the coming months, Mahajan plans to float a film company that would produce music videos and comedy films. But the enterprising journalist still has a regret: He is still a stringer, though with a different channel.
–Pallavi Singh

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