29.9.2020
Taiwan
Abhay Chawla was one of six speakers at webinar organized by Global Research Forum on Diaspora and Transnationalism with the main focus on media narratives on migrants during COVID-19. Chawla is a lecturer at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication.
In his speech, Chawla discussed misinformation in Indian news. As an example, he mentioned the story about 13 years old girl, who cycled from Gurugram in Haryana state of India to Darbhanga in Bihar state of India. This story was covered by mainstream media outlets written by male journalists. Chawla stressed out, that this was not the only girl, who travelled hundreds of kilometres to get home, there were more girls, even younger, who walked or travelled in order to reach their cities, which few of them died. However, Indian media decided to pick up particularly this story, published by BBC Hindi. Interestingly, they changed some facts.
“Indian media picked out the BBC story and her age increased from 13 to 15, and very categorically, they said she cycled 12 to 15 hundred kilometres. So I actually I checked it and found how far is Gurugram from Darbhanga. It is about 950 kilometres”: Abhay Chawla.
He also noted that the Indian media is short on facts and quite often skews the narrative.
Even more, as he noted, thanks to the COVID-19, anybody in India knows about migrants. This was caused mainly by the increased volume of publications about internal migrant workers traveling from urban to rural areas, as they lost their jobs. However, Chawla compared the narratives about the migrants in Indian news outlet to class thing.
“The migrants on the road are almost like them, rather than all of us being migrants”:Abhay Chawla.
Michal Tengeri, PhD Candidate in Asia-Pacific Studies at National Chengchi UniversityTwitter: @Michal8810