ROLE OF MASS MEDIA IN CRUSADE AGAINST TERRORISM
33478 04/28/2016 Education 284 /Terrorism can be defined as a group of people violently killing other innocent human beings to fulfill a regional, territorial, economic or religious demand that they feel they cannot successfully ask for through democratic, peaceful, legitimate and electoral means and methods.
The basis of terrorism is a demand or an ideology which is being sought to be projected as ‘legitimate’ by the terrorist organization and by its sponsors. Mass Media is an important tool in the ‘crusade’ against terrorism because Electronic Mediacan be used to hit out at the legitimacy of the demands as also the methods of terrorism.
Gramsci spoke about the hegemony of the ideas propagated by the mass media and he was quite accurate in his analysis. If mass media can be effectively employed by the government and the civil society of peace-loving citizens to whittle away the desire for terrorists to be seen by its ‘target audience’ as legitimate, it can go a long way in winning the security battle against terrorism.
Al Qaeda, and especially ISIS, have worked very hard to spread terrorism and recruit terrorists by effectively using the mass media including new media. To defeat them effectively, we have to defeat them at their game of using the media of propaganda.
It is said that all battles are won or lost first in the realm of ideas and ideology and finally on the ground. Mass Communicationhelps the public to debate and discuss issues so as to form their own opinion and viewpoint that terrorism is unfair, brutal and indiscriminatory in its targeting of innocent civilians including unarmed women and children. Therefore, terrorism also disobeys all rules and laws of lawful combat as laid out in the Geneva Convention. The role of mass media is to educate the public in its crusade against terrorism and drive home the point that that the latter is a socio-political cancer that has to be cut out from the body politic.
In the case of India, mass media and journalismhelps to bring home to the people of India that cross-border terrorism that is directed against India is actually a low-cost proxy war being waged by Pakistan hiding behind a nuclear shield since India’s nuclear doctrine explicitly and publicly mentions ‘no first use’ and promises ‘massive retaliation’ in case of an attack against India, its people or its armed forces using WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) – nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons. India’s nuclear doctrine commits the nation to a credible and minimum deterrent. Pakistan uses this fact to bolster its case of the empirically failed two nation theory on the basis of religion since in 1971, the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan rose in battle against the Punjabi Muslims of West Pakistan and approached the Secular and Hindu Majority state of India for help. This effectively demolished the very theory of Jinnah on the basis of which some Muslims of Pre Independence India had demanded a separate Pakistan – namely the Two Nation Theory. The Mass Media needs to popularize among the people of India and South Asia the fact that a Bengali Muslim is linguistically and culturally closer to a Bengali Hindu than he is to a Punjabi Muslim. There are many fault-lines that run through a nation – religion is only one of them. The others are language, dialect, region, state, sub-region, culture, food, festivals,ways of dressing, ethnicity, race and many more. A nation is a joint enterprise in living together in diversity and celebrating our diversity under one unifying Republic and Constitution. Once mass communicationis able to popularize this ideology, it would prove to be the death knell for the many terrorist ideologies and terrorist organizations that bedevil our beautiful land.
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