Migration – forced or otherwise – is not an issue that exercises the mainstream media, print or electronic, in any sustained manner. This is particularly true of the metropolitan, or more generally urban, media. The situation is somewhat different in areas where migration creates endemic and secular problems of governance and everyday life, as with northeast India by and large, where the media has to engage in a more sustained fashion.

This, it would appear to many, is a logical consequence of a combination of factors, which we shall speak about in a bit. But from another perspective, this unwillingness to engage can also be seen to be counter-intuitive. Any large city in South Asia is of necessity beset by the problem of migration, often forced, as the recipient of large numbers of migrants. It is improbable that a citizen who ventures out of his home – or gated community – for even a couple of hours will not have chanced upon people who have been forced to leave their homes to camp in the city in search of livelihood or bare sustenance. Of course, many will have seen such people either without registering them at all or without knowing that they are migrants in the first place.

Those who actually see such people – dwelling on pavements, hawking, begging – usually do so on a negative register. To them these people are just inconveniences – they make the city dirty, ugly, unsafe, difficult to navigate and constitute an egregious burden on the city’s infrastructure, stretching it to its limits and beyond. Not many ever pause to wonder where these people come from and why they do so in an attempt to eke out a bare existence on the mean streets of the city.

Clearly, however, a large number of migrants to big cities make the move because of push more than pull factors. That is to say, they are driven to the city by endemic poverty, disasters and environmental/ecological unsustainability, or conflict situations. Even though they provide a pool of cheap labour, which benefits the host city, the hostility to migrants is unremitting among the citizenry and among the administration. Even the judiciary is often unsympathetic. A few years ago a judge of the Supreme Court advised migrants to Delhi to go back to their homes unless they arrived with a place to stay and the means of making a living.

This is just a thin slice of the problem of forced migration. But it is a good point of departure principally because it serves to highlight a salient point: that the metropolitan mainstream media does not even report the problem of migrants who arrive at their very doorsteps and live their deracinated lives within spitting distance. It is seldom considered necessary that the plight of these migrants should be brought to the notice of the citizenry and the factors behind and dynamics of such migration explained so that host populations can arrive at a more informed understanding of the problem and the issues involved, if they choose to. Given this set of circumstances, it is hardly surprising that newspapers, television channels, the almost extinct radio and internet sites with a predominantly big city market are not moved to report on forced migration and population flows within national borders and even less across national borders, unless, in the latter case, national security is construed to be compromised. A case in point is, for instance, the targeting of Bengali-speaking migrants to Delhi as being Bangladeshi by the state, which receives widespread support from both the media and the citizenry, without, all too often, any attempt to verify actual provenance. (I ignore for the moment the legitimacy of targeting them even if they were, in fact, Bangladeshi.)

In this kind of a context, it is incumbent, first, on any media organization and the personnel it deploys to understand what forced migration is about: its multifarious manifestations, the factors that cause it, the disabilities it imposes on victims, its macrosocial, macropolitical and macroeconomic consequences and the ways in which forced migrants can be delivered their ‘just’ entitlements from both a humanitarian and a rights perspective. Consequent to that, it is further incumbent on media organizations to use this understanding and an array of tools, either existent or devised, to present to readers and citizens the various facets and dimensions of the problem to generate public debate about forced migration and perhaps by so doing create citizens’ movements aiming at resolving the problem of forced migration within equitable frames. This may sound a little naïve, given the character and dynamics of the media in today’s world, but the point of this course is to explore ways in which the foregoing can be made more practicable, pragmatic and ‘do-able’.

Before taking up at greater length the issue of the role and responsibility of the media in relation to forced migration, a brief disquisition on forced migration itself would be in order. Let us begin by saying that forced migration can be categorized into two classes – population flows within the borders of a nation-state and those across borders. The former creates a class of people generally called internally displaced persons (IDPs) and the latter refugees or stateless persons. Furthermore, as we have already mentioned forced migration can be caused by a variety of reasons.

In the former case, these would include economic necessity, under which we could include much of rural-urban migration and development-induced displacement, that is displacement caused by loss of land, habitation or livelihoods or all of these as a result of the initiation of ‘development’ projects relating to industry and infrastructure, as in the case, say, of the Narmada project; environmental degradation or change, which deprives people of access to natural resources that they had previously been dependent on, as is the case with most mining projects, especially those located in forested areas; natural disasters like earthquakes, cyclones or tsunamis, examples of these in the Indian context being say the earthquake in Latur, the super-cyclone in Odisha and the tsunami that hit the southeast coast of India; and conflict, which has cause large-scale, endemic migrations in most of northeast India and episodically elsewhere as well, most egregiously by the 2002 riots in Gujarat.

Cross-border forced migrations are caused by all of the abovementioned factors, seriatim: migration from Bangladesh hinterlands to Indian cities or those displaced by the Kaptai dam in the Chittagong Hill Tracts to Arunachal Pradesh in India; migration from Nepal to India; migration from, again, Bangladesh to India, caused by the ravages of periodic floods; and migration from Sri Lanka to India in the wake of the decades-long ‘war’, now terminated, in Sri Lanka between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Lankan state. In addition, cross-border migration can be forcibly induced by state persecution of groups, mostly ethnic or political, as with much of population flows out of Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, Jammu and Kashmir or Afghanistan to neighbouring countries.

The issue that follows from the foregoing is what kind of disabilities are suffered by people who are forced to migrate for one reason or another. Clearly, they would be different for IDPs, refugees and stateless persons. In material terms, deracination and migration means most fundamentally that IDPs are denied access to resources and livelihood options, or can access them only through the largesse of the state or charitable actions as far as the former is concerned and on extremely disadvantageous terms as far as the latter is concerned. These lacks are, moreover, located in the context of other vulnerabilities – the uncertainties of camp life, for instance, in which, quite apart from the deficit of amenities, IDPs, especially women and children, are exposed to the predatory attentions of both state personnel and members of the host population. Violence and violation are ever-present conditions of life. The mental, affective and psychological havoc wreaked by such conditions of existence are all too obvious.

Refugees suffer all these disabilities, while additionally they do not have systemic recourse to constitutional, statutory and legal safeguards that at least in theory IDPs enjoy, other than those tenuously guaranteed by international laws and covenants, which experience tells us are all too often enforceable more in the breach than the practice, and whatever consular protection they get from their countries of origin. But, by definition, the stateless are at the bottom of the heap because they do not have any protection under any national laws or legal systems, because they are not nationals or citizens of any nation-state. They do in theory enjoy the protection of international covenants – but their effectiveness is even more limited than in the refugees’ case, especially because many countries, including India, have not ratified them.

The question is how the media can, specifically in the case of India, engage with this problem, and what are the obstacles to a productive engagement that will produce felicific outcomes for victims/survivors of forced migrations and population flows. Let us address the latter issue first. The media – print or electronic, mainstream metropolitan or local – by and large report on migration and large-scale population flows only when it ‘becomes news’. In other words, they feel impelled to engage when the scale involves a critical mass, when there is a political angle to the phenomenon that marks it out as ‘newsworthy’, or, say, when a natural disaster of immense proportion causes such migration. By and large, again, the media is reluctant to engage when the scale is small or when the migration is more quotidian and by that logic stretched over a long duration. The media is similarly reluctant to expend column inches, and time and effort, in what is called in the profession ‘follow-up stories’, even when they have covered the first wave of migration – that is to say, over time even a spectacular case of massive displacement ceases to be newsworthy with the passage of time. If one was to arraign a practising journalist on these counts, he or she would most likely respond with the argument that a journalists’ job is to report what is news not create it. But that response would be, in many ways, somewhat specious. We shall have occasion to interrogate it later on.

For the moment, it is necessary to note what kinds of factors inhibit sustained reporting on forced migration in different situations and locales. Let us begin with the metropolitan/big town situation. The news market in these locales are dominated by the corporate media both as far as English and Indian language media are concerned and in both print and electronic sectors. Editorial decisions are significantly influenced by management perceptions of what would constitute news for their targeted readership: the upper middle class and middle class. In the urban context, it is further perceived that among such a readership issues like forced migration have no sustained traction. Thus, newspapers report ‘spectacular’ episodes of migration, forced or otherwise, but have no incentive to pursue sustained ‘campaigns’ on this and similar issues. This is where the ‘specious argument’ mentioned above kicks in. Media organizations run campaigns all the time to create news from what may not usually be considered news. Clearly, such campaigns are run only when organizations think that they will resonate with their target readership/viewership – for example, urban crime, traffic conditions, etc. Media organizations have to be persuaded that forced migration is an issue that merits ‘campaigning’.

Among other issues that inhibit balanced reportage on forced migration is, importantly, the tendency of the media to assume an identity of interest with that of the state. This applies both to internal migration and to cross-border migrations, though in the latter case it is ubiquitous and egregious. Thus, for instance, the media is all too ready to assume, when at all it reports, to return to an example already cited, that the Bengali-speaking labouring poor in Delhi are predominantly Bangladeshi and, therefore, a security threat, instead of investigating whether, first, it is true that they are Bangladeshi and, second, whether they are economic migrants whose security should be guaranteed by the state or whether they are actual or potential terrorists. Similarly, the media can often share the state’s condition of denial about the magnitude of internal forced migration and the circumstances its victims/survivors live their lives in.

Media organizations in smaller – hinterland, mofussil – locales, which have a stake in reporting on forced migration extensively and in a sustained fashion because they are either in or proximate to zones of forced migration, face different kinds of pressures. Areas from where forced migration happens, for instance, are often areas affected by conflicts or insurgencies. In such areas, newspapers are often buffeted by pressures from various contending (ethnic) groups and state agencies making balanced reporting not just difficult but hazardous.

Another more general problem that many, if not most, media organizations face is the lack of a specific set of skills, which would, in the first place, enable them to report intelligibly on the phenomenon of forced migration. Principal among these would, obviously, be the fact that most journalists are not very familiar with the many dimensions of the problem. They are further hamstrung by a lack of access to data, documentation, literature – sources in general – that would make it possible for them to form a rounded idea of the problem. In such a context, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to apply their conventional journalistic training to report on forced migration.

This media course on forced migration, therefore, aims to build media skills so that it can report in a more sustained and extensive manner on the problem, thus playing a necessary and perhaps crucial role in strengthening the rights of forced migrants and ensuring that they get the opportunities that both citizens and non-citizens are entitled to within a nation-state. Thus, first, this course will focus on acquainting students with the problem of forced migration in its myriad forms – this will include material on causes, forms and remedies in the shape of national and international legal frameworks. Specific case studies will be referred to – for instance, the northeast of India. The course will also provide participants an opportunity to interact with rights activists, survivors, policymakers and academics.