The two months old ‘hijab’ controversy in Karnataka, which began in one women’s college in Udupi and which has now spread across the state, owes a lot to TV channels, many of them owned by politicians. Coverage on TV has been hysterical and high-pitched as channels played the role of the judge, prosecutor and the jury. There were few attempts to defuse the situation or to discourage vigilante justice. TV crew have chased schoolgirls, asked them leading questions inside schools and intimidated Muslim teachers. Hate Speech Beda (Beda in Kannada means ‘no’) –a collective to combat hate speech— called on TV channels to engage with editors on the coverage, without much success. They now plan to escalate the issue to the National Broadcasters’ Association. One of the channels, Public TV, in the meanwhile has been running a scroll during its news bulletins threatening criminal defamation cases against anyone who dares to defame the channel on social media. This could well be the first time that a TV channel has held out such a threat. The Department of Minority Welfare ordered an inquiry on complaints of intrusion of privacy and issued instructions not to allow any photography of students inside schools and colleges. A preliminary report was to be submitted by February 22 but attempts to get information on the findings proved futile. Dhanya Rajendran, Editor-in-Chief of The News Minute, says coverage by the electronic media has been outrageous. “They are not just pitting one community against the other, but pitting students of one community against another. The first few days they portrayed students with hijab as not caring for the country; later they accused the students of not following the court’s interim order and finally they whipped up a controversy over hijab vs sindhoor based on two Muslim students questioning the perceived ban on hijab but not on sindhoor’’ she recalled. The TV channels invited Pramod Muthalik, Chief of the Rashtriya Hindu Sena, to comment and he dutifully threatened to cut off tongues of those who dared to speak ‘against the bindi’. “The channels have not realised the damage they have caused,” quips Rajendran. At a college in Chitradurga, a group of hijab and burqa clad Muslim girls engaged in a heated argument with police women preventing them from entering the campus. Unable to cope with the verbal duel, a police woman turned to the TV crew watching the exchange and exclaimed, “Record this. Put it in all TV channels. This student should be highlighted everywhere.’’ Reporter of a Kannada TV channel chased a traumatized hijab-wearing student even as her teacher pleaded with the cameraman to let the child go, assuring him that the girl would remove the headscarf inside the class.
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