The novel has given many references of the method in which the media affects the outlook of Suranjan and the other fanatic by its illustrative and photogenic pictures of fundamentalists activities. Where at one point it acts like a redeemer it has also basically played a dual role of the slayer. It does guide us in our path of knowledge but impacting on our mind through their outlook. However, we tend to forget that they either side on one end and criticize the other or speak for both the ends and bring more disputes and tension.
On the television, CNN has shown in vivid detail the demolitions of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992. Scenes from the incident were still being shown
Instead of showing those scenes of demolishing of the Babri Masjid, the news channel should have come up with some means to improve the situation. However, it had always appeared that they are publicity hungry and also wants to make it worth watching by showing it from different angles. The detailed reports given by Nasreen shows that she identifies with media for being more elaborate and trying to get deeper in the case.
At two forty-five in the afternoon one of the domes was destroyed. At four, the second was smashed and by four forty –five the third dome was also broken to pieces by the fanatical kar sevaks.
The words in here spoke much more than the circumstances. That what one was suppose to know. When we read the sentence , it involves us in it and purge out the hatred filled against the horde who lead to this happening . This development from a common man into a fundamentalist fanatic is due to the media which works its wonders. A very gruesome act indeed of changing the peace loving civilians into mobs packed with their anti-religious thoughts for the other faith.
A banner headline creamed: BABRI MASJID DEMOLISHED.(2.3) On the television CNN continued its coverage of the 6 December disaster. However, the Babri Masjid was no longer shown, every time mention was made of it.
Only the right person who hardly has any impact of the media’s influence on him can understand the incidents and its consequences correctly. In this case we find Suranjan of his real best, he recognizes with the situation. It is through him that even the reader who has failed his secular thoughts and went haywire comes on the tracks. For Suranjan the demolition of the sixteenth century edifice had struck a savage blow to the sentiments of Muslims in India and elsewhere. The act of destruction had damaged the Hindu community as well , for it had attacked the international harmony. The news coverage has given a right attitude and reached the right audience . But while doing this the entire balanced of the social structure has collapsed.
As a political party, the BJP should have been responsible enough to realize that India cannot be isolated from the rest of the world.
It explains that media works on the similar level to politicians. The politicians wants votes while by coverage of some hot event media gets TRPs ,increasing their demand in the market and for politicians increasing their demand in the government .
It seems by the observation that Taslima Nasreen satirize the role that media played during the incident of Babri Masjid. A more close observation would be the judgment day of the Babri Masjid which happened recently was also supposed to create an environment of panic. The panic was a habitual creation of media, repeatedly asking the masses to stay at safe places as the moment seems to repeat itself.
However, simultaneously the position that media has in the world of politics and other fundamental and basic issue cannot be neglected. One has to at some point thank media for putting forth some questions which only a non biased institution can put out. Though Taslima doesn’t give a real approach to escape the situation, she uses media as a power to answer the Hindu fundamentalist in India.
The number of deaths increase by the hour. Did the devout Hindus, who were intending to look after the interests of their religion and their community, realize that there were almost twenty-five million Hindus living in Bangladesh too? Not only in Bangladesh, in almost every country in West Asia, there is a fair scattering of Hindus. Did the Hindu Fanatics ever consider what severe adversities they might have to face?
With each ban the government made sure that by whatever means the verdict should fall on their side. Similarly whatever happens media took advantage of the situation and exhausted it to the fullest. Each case of banning Nasreen’s book has spawned responses, both to the act of banning and to the book, in Bangladesh, and beyond Bangladesh, as it attracted substantial media and press coverage in India and the West. All these testify to the paradoxical nature of censorship. It is prohibitive in its attempt to circumvent the circulation of a text, but in doing so, quite inadvertently, it generates a string of discussions on that text, which, formulated in different ideological spheres, greatly subverts the intention of the state to invoke censorship in the first place. But we forget that this ban makes it look more important to the masses of reader to know the reason behind the ban. Media feeds upon this understand and critics the book in such a way. However when Taslima is confronted she hardly comments . It shows that the author is cornered while his work is promoted by illogical means. Given the enormous amount of curiosity sparked off by the very act of banning, a banned text, against the wishes of the state, does find a way of reaching its readers/non-readers, though often in a partial and limited manner. It achieves circulation in bowdlerized, pirated and fragmented versions sold at street corners, excerpts printed in newspapers, reported by word of mouth, and at times, through its publication on the Internet as done by Nasrin herself, in the case of two volumes of her autobiography.
The production of a reductive reading of the Nasrin canon by the censor did not, however, go unchallenged in Bangladesh. A number of public intellectuals, progressive newspapers, feminist activists and general readers voiced their legitimate concern over what they considered unjustified acts of censorship, visibly motivated by a skewed political ideology, to mute voices of dissent, especially that of women. Interestingly, the tenacity of the state censor in promoting a circumscribed ‘reading’ of Nasrin’s banned books has been replicated, if unintentionally, by various other entities, including the Western media and Nasrin herself. While critiquing the censor, these entities somewhat produce an unhelpful reading largely premised on the binary opposition between absolute freedom in the West and total silencing in Bangladesh. This tends to negate the structural complexities of the very act of censorship invoked against Nasrin, belittles the significant protest mounted by progressive factions, and runs the risk of producing a narrow reading of the affair.
The idea of Western freedom and non-Western non-freedom was writ large also in the representation of Nasrin in the Western media, which, to some extent, sought to suppress the cultural, religious and social specificities of Bangladesh in favour of producing a homogenized Muslim world. In selecting what was to be screened on television, in zeroing in on those aspects of the Nasrin affair, which had particular resonance for a section of the Western audience, the media produced its own version of the affair.
However, in performing a value-judgement of Nasrin’s work, in finding her work lacking in reverence for Islam, in defining literary freedom in implicit collusion with the idealist concept of literature, in selecting what was to be produced for the consumption of a section of the Western audience; the reading communities, located in different geopolitical spaces, ended up producing, if unwittingly, a partial reading of the affair, to meet some certain expectations, to generate a particular interpretation, or to correspond to a specific worldview held by them. The binary opposition between absolute freedom and total silence, a by-product of the affair, redefined Nasrin as a writer as well as Bangladesh as a nation state.
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