BHUBANESWAR: People are not voiceless unless they are dismissed on the basis of different reasons and agenda, opined writers and journalists Ipsita Chakravarty, Neha Dixit and Divya Kandukuri on the concluding day of the Odisha Literary Festival in Bhubaneswar on Sunday.
Speaking on the session, ‘Margins to Mainstream: Chronicling Invisible Lives’ moderated by journalist Lovely Majumdar, they urged counterparts to record the voices which are not easily heard.
Chakravarty, who has authored the book, ‘Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s conflict’, said a journalist should also be a good listener. “When I go to a place, I am a listener. I am creating a voice for the people through my writing,” she said.
She revealed she did a lot of reporting from Nagaland, Mizoram and other northeastern states which are considered to be border regions. “But people from those areas do not think they belong to border areas. They think they are the centre, a completely different worldview,” she said.
Chakravarty further added that writing a book and a report are different things. When writing a report, some journalistic rigours like fact-checking are followed and there is some kind of distance from the subject which makes it credible.
Author of ‘Many Lives of Syeda X’, Neha Dixit agreed with Chakravarty that everyone has a voice. She added that journalism is not to give voice to the voiceless but to give a diversity of voices which in ground reporting is always considered the best. “One does not differentiate between opinions in ground reporting. There is not just one side to a story, there can be five different sides,” she said.
Recalling her experience on reporting about women facing sexual violence during the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh, she said, “I realised once they came back after filing cases in court, they have to work with those in the field who inflicted that violence.”
Writer Divya Kandukuri said there was a need for alternative form of expression as the mainstream media always prefers not to carry stories and highlight issues concerning the backward classes and dalits.
“A study carried out by Oxfam found that in 2019, 106 out of 121 upper castes had leadership position in media houses while in 2024, out of 218 leadership positions, 191 were held by upper caste people,” she added.
Kandukuri said there was a need for an Ambedkarite media as the mainstream media does not look at issues and problems concerning the SCs, STs and backward classes. Kandukuri has founded the Blue Dawn, a mental health support group which provides accessible mental healthcare services for oppressed and marginalised communities.
“The reason behind the mental problems among the backward people is structural inequality existing in society,” she pointed out.