Or, when suicide threat becomes political strategy

Guest post by ANANT MARINGANTI

I am witnessing a bizarre phenomenon in Andhra Pradesh which I can at the moment only call ‘Media Induced Morbidity Syndrome‘. That this is pathological, and that this has to do with the media I am certain. But it is difficult to pin down what the pathogen is.

First, in the days and weeks following the then chief minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy’s (YSR) death on September 2nd, 2009; over 450 people were reported to have died either of heart attacks or suicides. Newspapers kept a daily tally and the numbers kept mounting. Being in Singapore at the time, several thousands of miles away from Hyderabad during those weeks, I had no first hand experience of the mood in Hyderabad. I dismissed the reportage as a silly political gimmick. It was easy to surmise that vested interests had simply been collecting daily death reports from various government hospitals in different towns and attributing them to grief over YSR’s death. The largest number of these deaths – 227 occurred on the day of the funeral and the following day.

And now, since K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR), the Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader began his fast on November 29th with the slogan – KCR sacchudo – Telangana vacchudo – (either KCR dies or we get Telangana), apparently more than 37 persons have either committed suicides or have died due to (of) heart attacks in sympathy with the Telangana cause.  This number does not include the mounting toll in heart attacks and suicides in the rest of the state since December 10^th, when the Home Minister Chidambaram’s announced  that  the process to bifurcate the state will be initiated and KCR withdrew the fast sparking frenzied protests against bifurcation. Nor does it include the continuing deaths and suicides in Telangana in protest against these other protests. If we include all those, the tally as on date may well be over a hundred.

What is striking about many of the reports is that most of the dead are reported to have been watching TV continuously before the death.  So if the TV happens to be covering YSR’s death at that time, then grief over the death of a popular leader is said to be the cause,  if the TV is covering protests in Telangana, then a desire for martyrdom in the name of Telangana must be the cause of suicide. So long as the death is attributed to a burning political issue, nobody can challenge the attribution of the cause. All parties are complicit in this silence.

It is not hard to explain how this works. There are some 20 odd Telugu TV channels now in Hyderabad. Each has  a political line and complex web of business interests which are served by its political affiliations. Most of them also have inexperienced production teams that have practically no aesthetic judgement.  The screen real estate is constantly split and striated- audio and visual tracks are frantically shuffled with three to four moving images and two or three scroll lines at any time. In addition, for every occasion – instant lyrics – very badly composed mournful songs with terrible music are endlessly streamed.  Not to be outdone by the visual media, the print media (all major newspapers also have TV channels) is plastering all available print area with gory images and shocking text.

I returned to Hyderabad nearly a month after YSR’s death. I still remember my bewilderment in the first few days. Many friends told me that they had all personally grieved for YSR.  They talked about how charming he was, how warm his smile was and how firm his handshake was. Some mentioned some of his schemes especially ‘arogyasree’ – a medical reimbursement scheme that benefited the poor and so on. Few of them seemed to remember our longstanding shared criticism of YSR’s business interests, his emergence from the bloody faction politics of Rayalaseema, and the unprecedented rise in the levels of corruption authorized by him,  and none at all seemed to notice that one of the largest beneficiaries of the ‘arogyasree’ program were the empaneled hospitals.

I still could not believe that the media could induce this kind of muddleheadedness among people whose critical sensibilities could hardly be doubted on other matters.  Since then I have caught perhaps 10 hours of TV in all. I can vouch for it – what the Television Channels are telecasting here is morbid  enough to cause serious psychosomatic disorders among the viewers. At the same time, the general state of the cultural economy in Andhra Pradesh is  dismal. Displacement of crisis from one sphere to the other, one place to the other, and one scale to the other has become the norm.  It is impossible to pin down any single source of the problem – so much so that I am tempted to conclude that ‘crisis’ has become political and economic strategy.  But what exactly is the media doing ?

The frenzy on the Telangana issue began with high drama over KCR, a man with known severe medical complications and alcohol dependency, threatening to go on a fast unto death demanding a separate Telangana. On Nov 29^th, the day this his fast was supposed to begin commence, his convoy heading for the venue in Siddipet, a small town in Medak  district of Telangana was diverted by a special police force. While KCR was kept captive in a town over a hundred miles away, at the venue itself – nearly 6000 volunteers with identity cards had thrown a security ring around Chandrasekhar Rao’s son in law and MLA, Harish Rao who was to join the fast. As the police broke the ring, Harish Rao doused himself with petrol and threatened to set himself afire if he is arrested.

Even as this drama was being beamed to us from TV channels, Srikanth Chary, a young college student rushed out of a building in the outskirts of Hyderabad completely doused in petrol and lit the matchstick. Images of Srikanth captured on a mobile phone began circulating in the channels. After four days of hospitalization, Srikanth died on December 3rd. Since the 4th of December, images of Srikanth began to appear in newspapers (were the first thing newspaper readers saw). Andhra Jyothy, a large circulation daily published a full page image of Srikanth burning and staggering. Meanwhile, KCR’s fast unto death took some unexpected turns. On the second day, TV channels beamed clips of KCR   drinking a glass of some colored liquid and withdrawing the fast. As news of this spread, campuses across Telangana erupted with angry students declaring that KCR was inconsequential now for the movement. They would take it forward on their own. However, within hours, there was news again that KCR clarified that he was made to drink the liquid – colored water by deception, that the clips were unauthorised, and that he was continuing with the fast. At this point, he was shifted to the superspeciality hospital Nizams Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad and kept on saline drip until he announced withdrawal of his fast after the Central Government’s announcement on starting the process for state bifurcation. Throughout this drama unfolding over several days TV channels were flashing hourly bulletins with KCR’s pulse rate, blood pressure and blood sugar on one hand and the tempers and passions of agitating youth in response to this on the other. KCR himself kept threatening to kill himself with broken glass or by jumping out of the window anyone tried to force-feed him. Telangana Rashtra Samiti MLAs kept issuing threats to set themselves aflame in the assembly. Nonstop discussions on different dimensions of this problem were beamed with just about anyone willing to show up at the studio – mostly people who had strong bias about the issue as well as those with hardly any understanding of the context. For the strategists of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti, who perceive the media as generally hostile to their cause (most of the big media is owned by non Telangana investors) the racy media production nevertheless was helpful in building up instant momentum and draw in new constituencies into the agitation.

But then, overall, the sense of urgency and crisis whipped up by the  media with panic being spread every minute about the potential repercussions of KCR’s death – produced what was indeed an absurd situation – millions of people glued to the TV and reading the newspapers and experiencing the urgency with no possible way of influencing the course of events. It was this helplessness, and the overwhelming morbidity of the entire production that, I suspect which triggered many of the heart attacks and suicides.

To me, the puzzle of media induced morbidity is captured most starkly in the brief report that appeared two days ago in many local dailies http://tinyurl.com/ygl4tbw

Piecing together information from various reports, one learns that Gajula Ramulu – a construction worker (name the place) with no political affiliations of any kind (whatsoever) had been continuously watching TV (continuously) for three days. Then on December 13th, he receives a couple of phone calls from relatives in Hyderabad about difficulties in the city due to trouble over state separation. He gets up, screams – “let Andhra be united” and slits his own throat with a razor blade and dies!! And the Telugu Desam,  the Congress and the Praja Rajyam Party leaders of the area take the body to the collectorate and shout slogans for united Andhra Pradesh holding the state government responsible for the death!!

The puzzle gets more confounded as I remember being shocked by a newspaper tally of suicides in Hyderabad in an year-ender in a local daily in  2005. According to the report, over 130 people belonging to all sections of society ended their lives in the preceding year by jumping into Husain Sagar alone, the four hundred year old lake which is the pride of Hyderabad. It was said at that time that the city police was seized of the matter and was considering setting up a mounted police squad and a closed circuit surveillance of the lake. I do not see any evidence today that these plans were implemented. Nor do I see anything in the city to reassure me that there is any abatement of the circumstances which prompt people to commit suicides – financial ruin, debt trap, domestic violence, alienation in all spheres of life, chronic illness, harassment by spouse or boss – you name it. Nor is there anything to indicate that there are fewer triggers or avenues to commit the act. Hyderabad unbenownst to us may very well have become the suicide capital of the country.

But more sinister, it seems that the media is peddling plain morbidity in small doses every minute of the day – feeding off and feeding into a social pathology from which evidently someone somewhere (perhaps us included) is benefiting. How else does one explain this piling up of silence over silence over silence?