Features

Port City hurry, Pandemic sorry, Palestinian misery

Published

5 years ago

2021/05/23

by Rajan Philips

The government may have wanted to change the political channel from gloomy pandemic news to hopefully sunshine Port City news. Instead, the government is stuck on a split screen with double-whammy news stories. On the left half, you can see a botched-up Port City Bill, heavily bandaged by the Supreme Court, limping through parliament with as many amendments as there are commas. On the right half, is the daily and depressing news of rising Covid-19 infections, mounting deaths, multiplying variants, shortage of hospital beds, long winding queues for short supplies of vaccine, and new restorations of old restrictions. In the background, you can see the burning silhouette of Modi’s India, a subcontinent of mass cremations. The images sum up the Sri Lankan government’s quandary. Desperate for China’s helping hand in Port City, the government’s default setting for managing the pandemic in Sri Lanka has been to follow Modi’s disastrous footsteps in India.

There are always competing news stories in the globalized news media. The present juncture is no exception, except there is the exception of Covid-19. It is not often in a millennium of years do you see the whole planet caught up in a pandemic. But even the pandemic has not been a strong enough deterrent to stop the current flareup in the Middle East. The ‘next’ Palestinian intifada was always expected after the failure of the earlier Israeli-Palestinian accords, and the decade-long machinations of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s Prime Minister. The recent ‘Abraham Accords’ brokered by Trump’s son-in-law, establishing new ‘deals’ between Israel and less than a handful of Arab states, have been comical overall but provocative to the Palestinians. The Biden Administration wouldn’t even call them ‘Abraham Accords’, only “normalization process.’

Palestinian Misery

Yet, the timing of the current outbreak raises some valid questions for conspiracy followers. Why now when Netanyahu’s future as Prime Minister has never been as precarious as it is now? Buffeted by corruption allegations and a trial to boot, and unable to form a government after yet another election, Mr. Netanyahu is hanging in as PM only because he has started a fight with Hamas. Why now, and not earlier when Trump was President? President Biden is rightly being criticized for not being hard enough on Netanyahu to force a ceasefire. The US is also blocking a potential UN Security Council resolution calling for ceasefire. A US President arguably has some leverage over Netanyahu given America’s annual bankrolling of USD 3.8 billion as military assistance to Israel, although under Trump there would have been full-throated US support for Netanyahu and his government. President Biden has reportedly taken four calls to the Israeli Prime Minister, apparently getting more insistent with each call.

What is new this time is that the calls for a more balanced US approach (i.e., to lean a little hard on Israel) are coming from within the US, more stridently from among the Democratic Party progressives, and even from within the Administration. There are expectations that if the scale of fighting were to exacerbate, social media could play a heightened role in mobilizing public opinion in the US against Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians. What is new within Israel unlike in past intifadas is the specter of mob violence between Israeli extremists and Arab citizens of Israel. As against these new developments stand the old geopolitical realities. The PLO which has its contacts with the west and the US is a spent force among Palestinians. On the other hand, Hamas which controls Gaza has no window with the west given its total dependence on Iran. The US officially dismisses Hamas as a terrorist organization, but the Biden Administration does not want to totally alienate Iran because it is keen to restore President Obama’s agreement with Iran that Trump rescinded to please Netanyahu and the Republicans in the US. The vicious circle goes on.

For Sri Lankans, in the days of the Old Left and non-alignment, taking a principled position on the Middle East was much more straightforward as the world then was in the grips of a Cold War between two ideologically opposite superpowers. Except for universal principles, Sri Lanka was not implicated in anything external. Not anymore. Given Sri Lanka’s recent history of civil war and current goings on over human rights violations, anything anywhere in the world is naturally viewed through the lens of the country’s experience. That experience also includes closer relationships with Israel that grew during the war. But the people’s current experience is only about the pandemic and the government’s handling of it. For the second year in succession the government has not been able to lavishly celebrate the war victory of 2009 because of Covid-19.

And new detractions will keep coming, courtesy this time of the recent passage in the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Ontario in Canada of “An Act to proclaim Tamil Genocide Education Week,” in that Province. Not to be outdone, former Chief Minister CV Wigneswaran has called for an “internationally supervised referendum” to end the suffering of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. This is puerile Tamil diasporic politics, but one that will have equal and opposite reactions among no less immature Sinhala nationalists. Midsummer madness produces midweek reactions. Already Canada’s history from birth to its current politics has been given a rather harsh but wholly ignorant archaeological treatment. No one is wiser from these exchanges.

For people everywhere including Ontario, and including Tamils living in Sri Lanka, the need of the hour is not education on genocide or referendums that will never happen, but protection from Covid-19. People in Sri Lanka have only the government of Sri Lanka to turn to for protection from Covid-19. So, the only question that now matters in Sri Lanka is – how well or ill equipped the government of Sri Lanka is to protect Sri Lankans from the global pandemic. As the Sunday Times editorially put it last week, “there’s little point any more in blaming the Government for allowing the COVID-19 pandemic to slip into virtual free fall. Reports coming in from all parts of the country are distressing. The time for blame-games is over, it’s time for action.” But is the government up to it? Will it play port city politics to improve its pandemic image, or seriously take a new direction for managing Covid-19?

Port City Questions

By the time this column appears in print, parliament would have passed the Port City legislation by a simple majority, if not a simpletons’ majority, as a result of the government accepting all the amendments that were marked up in the Supreme Court’s ruling. I do not think Minister GL Peiris was quite accurate in saying that all the amendments in the ruling had been proposed by the Attorney General before the Court. In addition to AG’s amendments the Court added its own in a number of instances. But the real question that Minister Pieris as a former law professor needs to answer to the country is how come a bill that needed so many amendments could have left the drawing board to become law, and would have become law without any amendment were it not for its objectors and the Courts intervention.

Worse, in its original form the bill stood for weakening Sri Lanka’s economic interests and enhancing foreign investors’ profit making interests by withdrawing oversight across the board and offering incentives with no one to oversee. It is a sad commentary on the government’s usual apologists, who brought the sky down over the Millennium Corporation Compact screaming sovereignty, that they were ready to give this bill a pass and give abuse to those who raised valid questions about the bill. Even the epithet Sinophobia got flung in the melee, likely for strawman effect. Sovereignty has been reduced to a worthless red herring, and the referendum mechanism is not a real safeguard. A successful referendum cannot turn a bad bill into good law; it will only enshrine it as bad law.

No one in the government has been able to explain why the bill was presented in its original form in the first place. And as far as I can say there are still a few questions that have not been persistently (or rather not at all) asked; and only someone like Anura Kumara Dissanayake can vigorously pursue THEM in parliament. Opposition MPs like Champika Ranawaka, Harsha de Silva and Eran Wickramaratne are eminently knowledgeable, but they have all had their right hands in port city during their time in government and seem to be having only their left hands to swing at the blunders of this government.

The CHEC (China Harbour Engineering Company) Port City Colombo website includes plenty of information about the discussions and agreements reached between the private company and the previous government of Sri Lanka. There is a sense that the bill drafted by the present government significantly deviates from the earlier understandings and documentations. This point was publicly asserted by Yuthukama Group leader Gevindu Cumaratunga, who is also a government National List MP. But no one has described what this deviation is and why it was made. Champika Ranawaka or Ranil Wickremesinghe should be able to shed light on this matter. Neither has, nor likely will. Hopefully, the JVP leader will add this to his list of national questions.

The second question is about the Port City Bill’s deviations from the financial and economic assumptions underlying the Economic Impact Assessment of the Port City Colombo, a report prepared in February 2020 by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Colombo. The government has been using PwC’s assessment to make its economic case but then went ahead and invalidated the report’s assumptions by the tax exemptions included in its Bill. With the new amendments, parliament’s approval will be needed but getting a simple majority will not be a problem for this government. Economic assessments are good as the assumptions on which they are made, and as far as I know no one in parliament has brought attention to PwC’s report and the need to provide updates on how its assumptions are faring as port city developments get under way.

So far, much has been made of CHEC’s initial USD 1.4B investment in the Port City venture, but nothing has been said about how much the government Sri Lanka has spent, directly and indirectly, in cash as well as in kind. And how much more the government is on the hook for spending in the future. I do not think PwC’s report sheds any light on this matter. There is also no clarity about how rate payments for utilities and services to the Port City lands will be determined and payments collected by Sri Lanka’s service agencies. Extending infrastructure to provide service connections to a new luxury city is an expensive undertaking. Who is paying for it? And where is the capacity to expand these services coming from? I am not suggesting that these details have not been worked out. But in the new culture of sovereignty assertion over technical projects, technical details and their significant costs are getting sidelined not only from public’s view but also from the scrutiny of parliament.

Pandemic Humility

There is no need to recount how Prime Minister Modi and the BJP have turned India into a pandemic crematorium. As “India’s utmost isle,” Sri Lanka has the advantage of being small to get away with manageable difficulties. Even as the Covid-19 situation is getting worse by the day, government policy can draw some consolation if Sri Lanka’s numbers (of infections and deaths) stay under India’s totals divided by 70. India’s population is 70 times Sri Lanka’s. India’s current totals are 25.7 M infections and nearly 300,000 deaths. Sri Lanka at just over 150,000 infections and 1,000 deaths, is still well under the threshold totals of nearly 400,00 infections and 4,000 deaths. However, the proportionality threshold is in danger of being breached.

According to Dr Hemantha Herath, of the Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka is facing the risk of surpassing one million COVID-19 cases within the next 100 days. Independently, forecasting done by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluations (IHME) at the University of Washington has reportedly indicated that Sri Lanka may experience over 20,000 COVID-19 deaths by September. So, by more than reasonably reliable predictions, Sri Lanka could have reached one million infection and 20,000 death totals by August/September. And Sri Lanka would be far worse off on a per capita basis than where India is now. India’s case total is showing a declining trend, whereas cases are going up in Sri Lanka.

The fallouts will be catastrophic in every respect. One would hope that the government will not waste time arguing that these projections are not correct, but make every effort to prevent them from occurring. Since it has been a virtual one-man show, or no show, so far, it is up to the President to show the greatness of humility and think of a new approach by taking good advice from people who know more about public health. He should seriously think about and seek advice on striking an All-Party Parliamentary Committee that could function as a pandemic cabinet (without perks or titles, for god’s sake) under the President’s direct leadership. Medical professionals will report to this committee and will be responsible for all the medical public health decisions and communications. The Armed Services could operate in parallel providing practical and logistical support.

The President should invite Dr. Tissa Vitarana to serve on this committee. The President would do well to read the two public statements by Dr. Vitarana on pandemic management, both of which were published in the Sunday Island. The statements are expert applications of the current state of knowledge of the pandemic to Sri Lanka’s specific circumstances. They include the following propositions which have also been expressed by other experts in every other country: (1) There is no permanent state of herd immunity for this global pandemic. But the virus can be contained and controlled. (2) Vaccines are not the panacea for this virus. They are currently effective and useful, but their long term effectiveness is still a study in progress. (3) For potential herd immunity at the global level, at least 12 billion doses will be required for full (two-shot) vaccination. The total global production is still under 1.5 billion doses. Their distribution is another story. (4) Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia have shown that Covid-19 can be managed through effective public health measures and public participation. There is no reason why Sri Lanka should not follow their example, while securing whatever vaccines it can get.

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Features

Meet the women protecting India’s snow leopards

Published

2 days ago

2026/02/6

Priyan

These women work with the local forest department to track and protect the snow leopard species [BBC]

In one of India’s coldest and most remote regions, a group of women have taken on an unlikely role: protecting one of Asia’s most elusive predators, the snow leopard.

Snow leopards are found in just 12 countries across Central and South Asia. India is home to one of the world’s largest populations, with a nationwide survey in 2023 – the first comprehensive count ever carried out in the country – estimating more than 700 animals, .

One of the places they roam is around Kibber village in Himachal Pradesh state’s Spiti Valley, a stark, high-altitude cold desert along the Himalayan belt. Here, snow leopards are often called the “ghosts of the mountains”, slipping silently across rocky slopes and rarely revealing themselves.

For generations, the animals were seen largely as a threat, for attacking livestock. But attitudes in Kibber and neighbouring villages are beginning to shift, as people increasingly recognise the snow leopard’s role as a top predator in the food chain and its importance in maintaining the region’s fragile mountain ecosystem.

Nearly a dozen local women are now working alongside the Himachal Pradesh forest department and conservationists to track and protect the species, playing a growing role in conservation efforts.

Locally, the snow leopard is known as Shen and the women call their group “Shenmo”. Trained to install and monitor camera traps, they handle devices fitted with unique IDs and memory cards that automatically photograph snow leopards as they pass.

“Earlier, men used to go and install the cameras and we kept wondering why couldn’t we do it too,” says Lobzang Yangchen, a local coordinator working with a small group supported by the non-profit Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) in collaboration with the forest department.

Yangchen was among the women who helped collect data for Himachal Pradesh’s snow leopard survey in 2024, which found that the state was home to 83 snow leopards – up from 51 in 2021.

Spiti Wildlife Division A snow leopard looks into the camera — *Snow leopards are often called the “ghosts of the mountains” because they are so hard to spot [BBC]*

The survey documented snow leopards and 43 other species using camera traps spread across an area of nearly 26,000sq km (10,000sq miles). Individual leopards were identified by the unique rosette patterns on their fur, a standard technique used for spotted big cats. The findings are now feeding into wider conservation and habitat-management plans.

“Their contribution was critical to identifying individual animals,” says Goldy Chhabra, deputy conservator of forests with the Spiti Wildlife Division.

Collecting the data is demanding work. Most of it takes place in winter, when heavy snowfall pushes snow leopards and their prey to lower altitudes, making their routes easier to track.

On survey days, the women wake up early, finish household chores and gather at a base camp before travelling by vehicle as far as the terrain allows. From there, they trek several kilometres to reach camera sites, often at altitudes above 14,000ft (4,300m), where the thin air makes even simple movement exhausting.

The BBC accompanied the group on one such trek in December. After hours of walking in biting cold, the women suddenly stopped on a narrow trail.

Yangchen points to pugmarks in the dust: “This shows the snow leopard has been here recently. These pugmarks are fresh.”

Devesh Chopra/BBC A woman wearing a black and red scarf writes something in her notebook and a camera trap is placed in front of her. — *The women set up cameras with unique IDs and memory cards, which capture an image of a snow leopard as soon as it passes through [BBC]*

Along with pugmarks, the team looks for other signs, including scrapes and scent‑marking spots, before carefully fixing a camera to a rock along the trail.

One woman then carries out a “walk test”, crawling along the path to check whether the camera’s height and angle will capture a clear image.

The group then moves on to older sites, retrieving memory cards and replacing batteries installed weeks earlier.

By mid-afternoon, they return to camp to log and analyse the images using specialised software – tools many had never encountered before.

“I studied only until grade five,” says Chhering Lanzom. “At first, I was scared to use the computer. But slowly, we learned how to use the keyboard and mouse.”

The women joined the camera-trapping programme in 2023. Initially, conservation was not their motivation. But winters in the Spiti Valley are long and quiet, with little agricultural work to fall back on.

“At first, this work on snow leopards didn’t interest us,” Lobzang says. “We joined because we were curious and we could earn a small income.”

The women earn between 500 ($5.46; £4) and 700 rupees a day.

But beyond the money, the work has helped transform how the community views the animal.

Spiti Wildlife Division A woman looks at a computer screen which has a grab of a leopard. — *Images captured by the camera traps are analysed using a special software [BBC]*

“Earlier, we thought the snow leopard was our enemy,” says Dolma Zangmo, a local resident. “Now we think their conservation is important.”

Alongside survey work, the women help villagers access government insurance schemes for their livestock and promote the use of predator‑proof corrals – stone or mesh enclosures that protect animals at night.

Their efforts come at a time of growing recognition for the region. Spiti Valley has recently been included in the Cold Desert Biosphere Reserve, a Unesco-recognised network aimed at conserving fragile ecosystems while supporting local livelihoods.

As climate change reshapes the fragile trans-Himalayan landscape, conservationists say such community participation will be crucial to safeguarding species like the snow leopard.

“Once communities are involved, conservation becomes more sustainable,” says Deepshikha Sharma, programme manager with NCF’s High Altitudes initiative.

“These women are not just assisting, they are becoming practitioners of wildlife conservation and monitoring,” she adds.

As for the women, their work makes them feel closer to their home, the village and the mountains that raised them, they say.

“We were born here, this is all we know,” Lobzang says. “Sometimes we feel afraid because these snow leopards are after all predatory animals, but this is where we belong.”

[BBC]

Features

Freedom for giants: What Udawalawe really tells about human–elephant conflict

Published

2 days ago

2026/02/6

Thilina Walpola

Too many vehicles entering national parks

If elephants are truly to be given “freedom” in Udawalawe, the solution is not simply to open gates or redraw park boundaries. The map itself tells the real story — a story of shrinking habitats, broken corridors, and more than a decade of silent but relentless ecological destruction.

“Look at Udawalawe today and compare it with satellite maps from ten years ago,” says Sameera Weerathunga, one of Sri Lanka’s most consistent and vocal elephant conservation activists. “You don’t need complicated science. You can literally see what we have done to them.”

What we commonly describe as the human–elephant conflict (HEC) is, in reality, a land-use conflict driven by development policies that ignore ecological realities. Elephants are not invading villages; villages, farms, highways and megaprojects have steadily invaded elephant landscapes.

Udawalawe: From Landscape to Island

Udawalawe National Park was once part of a vast ecological network connecting the southern dry zone to the central highlands and eastern forests. Elephants moved freely between Udawalawe, Lunugamvehera, Bundala, Gal Oya and even parts of the Walawe river basin, following seasonal water and food availability.

Today, Udawalawe appears on the map as a shrinking green island surrounded by human settlements, monoculture plantations, reservoirs, electric fences and asphalt.

“For elephants, Udawalawe is like a prison surrounded by invisible walls,” Sameera explains. “We expect animals that evolved to roam hundreds of square nationakilometres to survive inside a box created by humans.”

Elephants are ecosystem engineers. They shape forests by dispersing seeds, opening pathways, and regulating vegetation. Their survival depends on movement — not containment. But in Udawalawa, movement is precisely what has been taken away.

Over the past decade, ancient elephant corridors have been blocked or erased by:

Irrigation and agricultural expansion

Tourism resorts and safari infrastructure

New roads, highways and power lines

Human settlements inside former forest reserves

Sameera

“The destruction didn’t happen overnight,” Sameera says. “It happened project by project, fence by fence, without anyone looking at the cumulative impact.”

The Illusion of Protection

Sri Lanka prides itself on its protected area network. Yet most national parks function as ecological islands rather than connected systems.

“We think declaring land as a ‘national park’ is enough,” Sameera argues. “But protection without connectivity is just slow extinction.”

Udawalawe currently holds far more elephants than it can sustainably support. The result is habitat degradation inside the park, increased competition for resources, and escalating conflict along the boundaries.

“When elephants cannot move naturally, they turn to crops, tanks and villages,” Sameera says. “And then we blame the elephant for being a problem.”

The Other Side of the Map: Wanni and Hambantota

Sameera often points to the irony visible on the very same map. While elephants are squeezed into overcrowded parks in the south, large landscapes remain in the Wanni, parts of Hambantota and the eastern dry zone where elephant density is naturally lower and ecological space still exists.

“We keep talking about Udawalawe as if it’s the only place elephants exist,” he says. “But the real question is why we are not restoring and reconnecting landscapes elsewhere.”

The Hambantota MER (Managed Elephant Reserve), for instance, was originally designed as a landscape-level solution. The idea was not to trap elephants inside fences, but to manage land use so that people and elephants could coexist through zoning, seasonal access, and corridor protection.

“But what happened?” Sameera asks. “Instead of managing land, we managed elephants. We translocated them, fenced them, chased them, tranquilised them. And the conflict only got worse.”

The Failure of Translocation

For decades, Sri Lanka relied heavily on elephant translocation as a conflict management tool. Hundreds of elephants were captured from conflict zones and released into national parks like Udawalawa, Yala and Wilpattu.

Elephant deaths

The logic was simple: remove the elephant, remove the problem.

The reality was tragic.

“Most translocated elephants try to return home,” Sameera explains. “They walk hundreds of kilometres, crossing highways, railway lines and villages. Many die from exhaustion, accidents or gunshots. Others become even more aggressive.”

Scientific studies now confirm what conservationists warned from the beginning: translocation increases stress, mortality, and conflict. Displaced elephants often lose social structures, familiar landscapes, and access to traditional water sources.

“You cannot solve a spatial problem with a transport solution,” Sameera says bluntly.

In many cases, the same elephant is captured and moved multiple times — a process that only deepens trauma and behavioural change.

Freedom Is Not About Removing Fences

The popular slogan “give elephants freedom” has become emotionally powerful but scientifically misleading. Elephants do not need symbolic freedom; they need functional landscapes.

Real solutions lie in:

Restoring elephant corridors

Preventing development in key migratory routes

Creating buffer zones with elephant-friendly crops

Community-based land-use planning

Landscape-level conservation instead of park-based thinking

“We must stop treating national parks like wildlife prisons and villages like war zones,” Sameera insists. “The real battlefield is land policy.”

Electric fences, for instance, are often promoted as a solution. But fences merely shift conflict from one village to another.

“A fence does not create peace,” Sameera says. “It just moves the problem down the line.”

A Crisis Created by Humans

Sri Lanka loses more than 400 elephants and nearly 100 humans every year due to HEC — one of the highest rates globally.

Yet Sameera refuses to call it a wildlife problem.

“This is a human-created crisis,” he says. “Elephants are only responding to what we’ve done to their world.”

From expressways cutting through forests to solar farms replacing scrublands, development continues without ecological memory or long-term planning.

“We plan five-year political cycles,” Sameera notes. “Elephants plan in centuries.”

The tragedy is not just ecological. It is moral.

“We are destroying a species that is central to our culture, religion, tourism and identity,” Sameera says. “And then we act surprised when they fight back.”

The Question We Avoid Asking

If Udawalawe is overcrowded, if Yala is saturated, if Wilpattu is bursting — then the real question is not where to put elephants.

The real question is: Where have we left space for wildness in Sri Lanka?

Sameera believes the future lies not in more fences or more parks, but in reimagining land itself.

“Conservation cannot survive as an island inside a development ocean,” he says. “Either we redesign Sri Lanka to include elephants, or one day we’ll only see them in logos, statues and children’s books.”

And the map will show nothing but empty green patches — places where giants once walked, and humans chose. roads instead.

By Ifham Nizam

Features

Challenges faced by the media in South Asia in fostering regionalism

Published

3 days ago

2026/02/5

Sahan Weerasooriya

Main speaker Roman Gautam (R) and Executive Director, RCSS, Ambassador (Retd) Ravinatha Aryasinha.

SAARC or the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has been declared ‘dead’ by some sections in South Asia and the idea seems to be catching on. Over the years the evidence seems to have been building that this is so, but a matter that requires thorough probing is whether the media in South Asia, given the vital part it could play in fostering regional amity, has had a role too in bringing about SAARC’s apparent demise.

That South Asian governments have had a hand in the ‘SAARC debacle’ is plain to see. For example, it is beyond doubt that the India-Pakistan rivalry has invariably got in the way, particularly over the past 15 years or thereabouts, of the Indian and Pakistani governments sitting at the negotiating table and in a spirit of reconciliation resolving the vexatious issues growing out of the SAARC exercise. The inaction had a paralyzing effect on the organization.

Unfortunately the rest of South Asian governments too have not seen it to be in the collective interest of the region to explore ways of jump-starting the SAARC process and sustaining it. That is, a lack of statesmanship on the part of the SAARC Eight is clearly in evidence. Narrow national interests have been allowed to hijack and derail the cooperative process that ought to be at the heart of the SAARC initiative.

However, a dimension that has hitherto gone comparatively unaddressed is the largely negative role sections of the media in the SAARC region could play in debilitating regional cooperation and amity. We had some thought-provoking ‘takes’ on this question recently from Roman Gautam, the editor of ‘Himal Southasian’.

Gautam was delivering the third of talks on February 2nd in the RCSS Strategic Dialogue Series under the aegis of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo, at the latter’s conference hall. The forum was ably presided over by RCSS Executive Director and Ambassador (Retd.) Ravinatha Aryasinha who, among other things, ensured lively participation on the part of the attendees at the Q&A which followed the main presentation. The talk was titled, ‘Where does the media stand in connecting (or dividing) Southasia?’.

Gautam singled out those sections of the Indian media that are tamely subservient to Indian governments, including those that are professedly independent, for the glaring lack of, among other things, regionalism or collective amity within South Asia. These sections of the media, it was pointed out, pander easily to the narratives framed by the Indian centre on developments in the region and fall easy prey, as it were, to the nationalist forces that are supportive of the latter. Consequently, divisive forces within the region receive a boost which is hugely detrimental to regional cooperation.

Two cases in point, Gautam pointed out, were the recent political upheavals in Nepal and Bangladesh. In each of these cases stray opinions favorable to India voiced by a few participants in the relevant protests were clung on to by sections of the Indian media covering these trouble spots. In the case of Nepal, to consider one example, a young protester’s single comment to the effect that Nepal too needed a firm leader like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seized upon by the Indian media and fed to audiences at home in a sensational, exaggerated fashion. No effort was made by the Indian media to canvass more opinions on this matter or to extensively research the issue.

In the case of Bangladesh, widely held rumours that the Hindus in the country were being hunted and killed, pogrom fashion, and that the crisis was all about this was propagated by the relevant sections of the Indian media. This was a clear pandering to religious extremist sentiment in India. Once again, essentially hearsay stories were given prominence with hardly any effort at understanding what the crisis was really all about. There is no doubt that anti-Muslim sentiment in India would have been further fueled.

Gautam was of the view that, in the main, it is fear of victimization of the relevant sections of the media by the Indian centre and anxiety over financial reprisals and like punitive measures by the latter that prompted the media to frame their narratives in these terms. It is important to keep in mind these ‘structures’ within which the Indian media works, we were told. The issue in other words, is a question of the media completely subjugating themselves to the ruling powers.

Basically, the need for financial survival on the part of the Indian media, it was pointed out, prompted it to subscribe to the prejudices and partialities of the Indian centre. A failure to abide by the official line could spell financial ruin for the media.

A principal question that occurred to this columnist was whether the ‘Indian media’ referred to by Gautam referred to the totality of the Indian media or whether he had in mind some divisive, chauvinistic and narrow-based elements within it. If the latter is the case it would not be fair to generalize one’s comments to cover the entirety of the Indian media. Nevertheless, it is a matter for further research.

However, an overall point made by the speaker that as a result of the above referred to negative media practices South Asian regionalism has suffered badly needs to be taken. Certainly, as matters stand currently, there is a very real information gap about South Asian realities among South Asian publics and harmful media practices account considerably for such ignorance which gets in the way of South Asian cooperation and amity.

Moreover, divisive, chauvinistic media are widespread and active in South Asia. Sri Lanka has a fair share of this species of media and the latter are not doing the country any good, leave alone the region. All in all, the democratic spirit has gone well into decline all over the region.

The above is a huge problem that needs to be managed reflectively by democratic rulers and their allied publics in South Asia and the region’s more enlightened media could play a constructive role in taking up this challenge. The latter need to take the initiative to come together and deliberate on the questions at hand. To succeed in such efforts they do not need the backing of governments. What is of paramount importance is the vision and grit to go the extra mile.