Features

Senarat Paranavitana, the gentleman I knew.

Published

5 years ago

2021/02/7

by Raja de Silva

An inevitable change in our social life has resulted from the restriction to our movement caused by the onset of Covid-19. We tend to refrain from visiting friends and relatives, staying in our homes instead; we have more time to think of the past and reflect on those we knew in days gone by. Very recently I had a rare visit from a relative, a medical man who is also an amateur antiquarian. He asked me to relate something about the legendary Paranavitana, whose last living erstwhile assistant I am. Like Hercule Poirot, I consulted my little grey cells and told him old stories, which I now place on record.

1.The interview

The year was 1949 and I had appeared before Paranavitana, Archaeological Commissioner (AC) (1940-1956), who together with Director of Museums, Paul Deraniyagala and the Professor of Chemistry, A. Kandiah constituted an Interview Board at the Archaeological Department. Three of us friends had applied for the post of Archaeological Chemist to be trained in India, and I was the first to be interviewed. Paranavitana commenced his inquisition with the following memorable words.

: Mr. de Silva, we have your biodata with us. Tell me, who was your mother?

RH de S (knowing that the purpose of this question was to find out my caste): My mother’s maiden name was Jayawickrama, Sir.

: Jayawickrama from Kurunegala?

RH de S: No Sir, from the South, in Mirissa.

: Any relation of Francis Jayawickrama who helped to restore the Tissamaharama Mahathupa?

RH de S: Her father, Sir.

(with a gleam in his eye): If you were to join this department it is not impossible that one day you would be able to restore old dagobas in a more scientific manner.

I knew of course that the superstructure of the Tissamaharama Mahathupa was of a most peculiar shape, conical in silhouette, unlike the familiar superstructures of all restored dagobas in Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva.

After a second interview at the Public Services Commission, and being appointed a Probationer I was immediately sent for a two-year period of training by the Archaeological Chemist in India, Dehra Dun.

Smoking

One day the AC called me and Saddhamangala Karunaratne (SK) Assistant Commissioner, who was appointed a year after me, to his room to speak generally about our duties. His opening move was to slide two tins of cigarettes forward, a Navy Cut and Bristol, the latter of which he used to smoke. I took a Navy Cut and put it in my shirt pocket. SK declined. When we came away, I asked SK why he didn’t accept a cigarette. His reply was, ‘How could I smoke in front of the AC?’ From then on the AC used to offer me a cigarette but none to SK.

Post-luncheon nap

One early afternoon the AC had sent his peon on several occasions to my office requesting me to see him. It was about 2.10 when I appeared in the AC’s office soon after returning to work from my lunch break. The following dialogue took place:

: I have sent for you many times; where were you?

RH de S: I went home to lunch, Sir.

: Where do you live?

RH de S: In Ward Place, Sir.

: Don’t you know the lunch period is 12 to 1? It is now past 2.

RH de S: I know Sir, but I have a nap for one hour after lunch, because my efficiency is then better in the afternoon.

: Is that so?

and the AC told me what he wanted done.

From then on I was allowed to continue this salutary practice. I made a discovery 13 years later, when I moved into the office of the AC, that there was an ante-room provided with a large safe, a small table and chair for having lunch, a wash-basin and a cane easy-chair ideal for reposing in for forty-winks. It served me as it must have done the Old Chief.

Drinks

At the outset, the AC told me that the Sigiriya fresco pocket had been closed to the public from 1947, and I was to go there often and attend to the paintings, some of which were cracked and in danger of falling off. In 1952/53 I used to occupy room No. 2 at the circuit bungalow, whereas the AC was often in room No. 1, after peering at the ancient writings on the gallery wall. One evening after sundown, he summoned me from room No. 2 where I had taken refuge and told me to get into his Willy’s station wagon. He told his chauffeur to drive us to the Rest House one minute away. Once we were settled comfortably in the verandah, with the waiter standing by, the AC asked me what I would like to drink, to which I replied, ‘A small whiskey and water please’. He ordered a wee whiskey for me and a small brandy and ginger ale for himself. He next announced, ‘You may smoke’, at which I brought out my packet of Gold Flake cigarettes and laid it on the table. The AC extracted his tin of Bristol from his coat-pocket and lit a cigarette, while I gave my Gold Flake a rest. We spent close to half an hour at the Rest House, and I remember what the AC told me, as if it were yesterday. ‘Do not accept anything from those junior officers in the field. They might put king coconuts in your car or offer you cigarettes or soft drinks. Do not take anything’. This was (I believed) in order that I would not become familiar with or beholden to anybody.

Again in 1954, in Anuradhapura, the AC took me out one evening to the Grand Hotel (now Tissawewa Rest House) for a drink. One drink; the same, and I did not smoke. I have no doubt that Driver Grade 1 Dassanaike would have duly reported to the minor staff that the lokumahattaya had given me a drink; my reputation would have gone up through the ceiling.

After about two years work at Sigiriya, I was able to inform the AC that, in my opinion, it was safe to open the fresco pocket to the public, provided that only a few people were allowed in at any one time. This was done in 1954, and the AC was commended in the newspapers.

Barber’s saloon

On the occasion of the retirement of a senior Assistant Commissioner P.H. Wilson Peiris, ARIBA, in the course of the AC’s valedictory speech, he referred to an incident concerning Peiris’s little son who used to roam about exploring the Archaeological Department. One entrance to the AC’s private office had swivel half-doors (as was common in barber’s saloons). The AC related how the little boy pushed open the two flaps of this entrance and inquired of him who had looked up in surprise, ‘Barber saloon ekak the?’. AC had replied, ‘Nää puthè, barber saloon ekak nevey’. The boy had retreated in disappointment. The AC concluded by declaring that we would all miss the intrepid young explorer.

The gourami

In the garden of the Polonnaruva circuit bungalow, Conservation Assistant Shanmuganathan had built a pond rather like the ancient lotus pond in the archeological reserve. It contained water and a gourami fish lived there. The AC on circuit never failed to feed the gourami a crumb or two after breakfast. One day, Hinton (the bungalow keeper) was suddenly informed that the AC on circuit, was arriving at the bungalow to dinner. The resourceful Hinton executed the gourami and served a fish course to the AC. The next morning when the AC looked to feed the gourami, he was aghast to find it missing. On inquiry, Hinton had professed no knowledge of the fate of the fish. A well-wisher who aspired to be the circuit bungalow keeper had ratted to the AC that Hinton was the guilty party. It was common knowledge that Hinton was no more at the circuit bungalow. On a visit of mine to Dimbulagala, ten miles away, I met Hinton who related to me the story of his banishment. Several years later, feeling that Hinton had served a long enough sentence among wild bears, who infested the jungles around the Maravidiya caves, I restored him to the Polonnaruva Circuit Bungalow.

Out of favour

Misfortune had set in. In 1954, certain paintings in one of the Maravidiya caves at Dimbulagala were subject to vandalism by a fanatic carrying buckets of cow-dung and applying it in water over the paintings (ASCAR 1954, 8, para 32). On the occasion of the AC seeing me at the Anuradhapura circuit bungalow, the following dialogue took place one morning.

: I want you to give instructions to Sarath Wattala to clean those paintings at Dimbulagala.

Assistant Commissioner (Chemist): Sorry, Sir, I am unable to do so.

: Why?

Assistant Commissioner (Chemist): He is the Modellor, and he would not know the difference between an acid and an alkali, Sir.

. You do not like him, do you?

Assistant Commissioner (Chemist): Sir, it is not a question of like or dislike. He is just not suitable for the job you wish me to give him. I shall try to clean the paintings myself.

That was the end of the conversation, which I saw had displeased the AC, who left Anuradhapura in continuation of his circuit. However, in a day or two I received written orders from the AC to give instructions to Sarath Wattala to clean the Dimbulagala paintings. I replied, from Anuradhapura, that as explained personally, I regretted it was not possible for me to do as the AC required, but that I would attempt to clean the paintings. All attempts, including an effort by Luciano Maranzi, UNESCO expert, failed. In this connection, Paranavitana later (1958) wrote ‘In caves on the adjoining hill at Dimbulagala, there were, before a fanatic recently obliterated them, fragmentary paintings of the first half of the 12^th century.’

The AC was annoyed with me. In February 1956 I was given nine months duty leave by the AC to attend a British Council course in the Preservation of Works of Art. But, the AC arranged for my junior colleague, Saddhamangala Karunaratne (SK), Assistant Commissioner (Epigraphist), to study for a PhD at Cambridge University, for a period of three years on duty leave. For this purpose, the AC had addressed Government stating that “with my imminent retirement, it is necessary to have an officer trained in research work so that he may be equipped to head the Archaeological Department“. SK was chosen for such a scholarship abroad. I saw that letter in the file in 1957 when I was senior Assistant Commissioner (detailed to look after administration), while the Acting AC, Claudio Sestieri, was to be free to do field work and train the staff in excavation. SK left for Cambridge in 1957.

It was now my turn to be righteously annoyed. I wanted to show the retired AC that I was capable of research work, and how better than by criticizing one of his own theories?

I published a long newspaper article in the Sunday Observer dated April 4, 1957, criticizing Paranavitana’s theory that the Dakkhina thupa, Anuradhapura, was built on the site of King Dutugemunu’s cremation (See de Silva, Raja 2005, 93 – 103). There was no reply from my old chief, who was by then Professor of Archaeology, Peradeniya University.

Lost ground retrieved

The Government (1959) agreed (on representation made by me) that I should be given the same facility for post-graduate research work abroad as was given to SK. I was to be given a placement at Oxford University, provided that my university professor and my departmental head testify to my good character and capability to undertake research work. The certificates were to be sent to Oxford through the Education Officer, Ceylon High Commission in London. The Chemistry Professor sent his recommendation (on my request) direct to London. I informed Professor Paranavitana of this requirement, and kindly requested that the required certificate be sent to London. Mirabileé dictu, my old AC sent me (for onward transmission) a recommendation that was couched in superlative terms. I realized what a warm-hearted gentleman Paranavitana was, and humbly thanked him for the splendid certificate. I was thus able to be on duty leave in Oxford for a period of three years from August 1959.

Retired AC becomes Professor

After I was appointed AC in 1967, my former AC used to visit me in my office, whenever he came to the Library to refer documents. I would get up, go round to the visitor’s side and sit down to converse about his requirements. To assist Professor Paranavitana in his researches, I was able to obtain the approval of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs to give him all his requirements free of charge. I used to take to his residence rubbings of inscriptions that he wished to inspect; I was once shown on a rubbing the spots where the words Platava (Plato), Alaksandara (Alexander), and Abrasthita (Aphrodite) were seen by him. The Professor used to give me autographed off-prints of his academic papers, which I have safeguarded to this day.

My old chief died in 1972. It gave me satisfaction to persuade a chieftan of the Lake House Press, to bring out from their press, the former AC’s latest book, The Story of Sigiriya, before the date of his state funeral.

Paranavitana was roundly criticized by latter day scholars for his study and publication of later interlinear writings on old inscribed stones. I replied to several of these critics and defended Paranavitana from the insinuated charge that there were no interlinear writings and he was therefore an intellectual fraud. My defense of Paranavitana was titled ‘Paranavitana and the interlinear writings’ in my book Digging into the past (2005: 203-216), where I showed that his peers CE Godakumbure and Saddhamangala Karunaratne had both accepted that there were interlinear writings on stones.

Senarat Paranavitana the scholar, is justly remembered as the greatest Sri Lankan archaeologist of the first half of the 20^thcentury. But not second to him was Paranavitana the gentleman, who was not known to many people outside the Archaeological Department. It was an honour to have known him.

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Features

Meet the women protecting India’s snow leopards

Published

1 day 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

1 day 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

2 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.