The scandal-laced reportage on the murder of an upcoming journalist with a husband and a child has already begun to affect people closest to Shivani. "The reports have been inhuman," fumes Rakesh Bhatnagar, her husband and legal editor at The Times of India. "My wife was murdered once, but her character has been assassinated over and over in print, on TV. The suggestion largely is that she was a small town over-ambitious girl, and that such girls are asking to be killed." Bhatnagar doesn’t think much about a media that is patting itself for having kept Shivani’s murder fresh in the public mind: "You don’t kill the surviving people, ruin families, question a child’s paternity, publish ludicrous demands that he be subjected to DNA tests, all just to keep a story alive. The story hasn’t been about constructive investigation but about running with cameras and notepads to just about anyone who has just about anything to say on the issue, no matter how hurtful."
He’s right. Irresponsible, insensitive and downright sexist journalism has become synonymous with the Shivani murder media coverage. A popular national weekly newsmagazine concluded a story on the Shivani murder saying: "The fun has just begun." Another prominent newsweekly carried a piece on the murdered scribe suggestively headlined ‘Life on the fast lane’. One of Calcutta’s largest dailies ran a report on the murder with somebody else’s picture instead of Bhatnagar’s. A Delhi-based afternoon paper carried two contradicting stories on the murder the same day—one referring to Shivani’s surviving child as her daughter, the other as her son. "Most of the stories have been done with this casual approach, anything goes," says Bhatnagar.
No wonder that Shivani’s relatives live in apprehension about the next round of pulp (non?) fiction that the media, aided generously by fuzzy police briefings (plants?), will serve up. The media scrumming outside absconding prime suspect police officer Ravi Kant Sharma’s house in Panchkula, Chandigarh, is ready to pick up on any allegation and innuendo thrown to them by family members. It was from here that Sharma’s suitably irate wife Madhu howled about politician Pramod Mahajan’s extra-marital links with Shivani. Then came the demands for DNA tests to prove the paternity of Shivani’s child.
If memory is a human right, then Shivani’s right to be remembered "well" has indeed been violated. "And this by none other than the trustees of public memory, the media itself. Reportage in the case has mostly been about trivialisation of memory, caricature of personality and magnification of rumours," says sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan. Media commentator Sudesh Pachauri agrees: "Telecasting and printing unsubstantiated allegations and counter-allegation are acceptable today. Analysis of the barrage of information bombarded into our homes is rare." The consequence of an increasing lack of editorial check and balance, according to Amrita Shah, author of Hype, Hypocrisy and Television in Urban India, is that stories such as the Shivani murder move in whichever direction the "wind blows": "What else can explain the fact that the family of an absconding accused gave the nation its lead story on more than one occasion in these past few days!"
It’s a free-for-all. Madhu Sharma, Pramod Mahajan, undisclosed police sources, unnamed friends, ‘confidants’ who now want to share Shivani’s secrets with the media are all extempore actors in this giddy saga. When the story occasionally grinds to a halt, it is because the police or ‘people in the know’ have no sleaze to share. In this sordid soap opera, truth, decency and balance, basic canons of good journalism, have been conveniently sacrificed for a ‘sexy’ story. "Unfortunately, the extras in this drama, it seems, are the members of the victim’s family. There’s little concern over the havoc that such callous and insensitive reporting is wreaking on their lives. The preoccupation is with an unholy competition for headlines, the race to beat others even if it means getting down to the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t matter how it impacts those who loved Shivani," argues B.G. Verghese, former editor and columnist.
It also has to do with the way crime is reported today. Renu Ghosh, a Delhi-based communications professional who’s edited Branded, a compilation of essays on crime reporting, says often young charged-up crime reporters don’t realise they’re playing with the lives of the people involved: "People break when they are attacked in the media, speculations become allegations, reputations are ruined and people branded for life." Even so, it’s not unusual to be curious about people’s lives, says veteran journalist Khushwant Singh, but damaging people’s lives because of such curiosity is unwarranted: "The media had better learn to draw its own Lakshman rekha." The limits to brash inquisitiveness gets fuzzier when it comes to reporting unnatural deaths of women. It’s not mere coincidence that Naina Sahni, Jessica Lall, Sujata Saha, Natasha Singh, even Phoolan Devi have all been immortalised by scandal after they suffered bloody deaths. Reams of newsprint and hours of prime-time TV have discussed threadbare their ambitious, on-the-edge professional, personal and sexual lives. The insinuation is that these women lived "dangerously" and so were largely responsible for their tragic fates. Mrinal Pande, editor, Hindustan, explains: "These discriminatory imputations, biases against gender, language, small towns, are at the heart of our society. Our media only reflects these prejudices. We’ve got the media we deserve."
But titillating tales are not necessarily the reader’s choice, insists public interest researcher Akhila Sivadas. She argues: "The market is a flexible entity, to say only sensation sells is to have no understanding of either the market or of one’s own editorial product. Instant visibility through brash headlines doesn’t make long-term business sense, ethical, credible reporting does. " However, neither ethics nor law seems to be reining in the journalistic fervour running riot in the Shivani stories. That Shivani’s family, or for that matter Mahajan, has still not sued anyone for defamation is an indication of how little we trust the country’s legal process. Advocate Anitha Shenoy, consultant with the Human Rights Law Network, reasons why: "The burden of proof in defamation cases is heavy, and the court fees if one is seeking financial compensation for damages can also run high. Plus, convictions are rare, litigation is lengthy... Even so, defaming a murdered woman, demanding DNA tests of the child—this should see people being taken to court." But that could well mean a more lewd and flashier media-scripted sequel. And the thoughtless mockery of the dead continuing.
