Media fellowships and creative media workshop (2012) Outputs Achieved - The quantitative or qualitative deliverables or results of the project activities - i.e. what has actually happened? Plan of the Project/Workshop The three-day Workshop was planned in a way that would give the participants enough opportunity to get to know the victims of forced migration directly. Enough room was left for theoretical sessions as well as sessions based on practical experiences of the practising journalists. CRG had chosen the Tibetan Self Help Centre at Darjeeling and the Indigenous Lep cha Tribal Association at Kalimpong and an indigenous Lepcha village near Lolegaon as two sites for field visits. Accordingly, it was decided that the Participants (the Workshop as well as the Orientation Course Participants) would reach Darjeeling a day before the field visits, and have a pre-field visit orientation and a Round-Table discussion on “Between the State, Media and the People”. The next day was marked for two field visits by participants, who were divided into two groups. It was also planned that in the evening of the field visits (on return to Darjeeling), an interaction between the participants and the members of local media would be organised. It was also decided that some of the important local dignitaries should be invited to take part in that interactive session. On the next day, the participants were to visit the North Bengal University (NBU) at Siliguri, on their way back to Kolkata. There the participants would share their experiences of field visits with the students and teachers of t he NBU. The next two days were marked for the Kolkata Workshop, which would have presentations on different themes, round-Table discussions and a Special Lecture on the “Myanmar’s Rohingyas and Assam’s Muslims of Bengali Origin: Comparative Perspectives of Exclusion and Statelessness”. The Participants Many of the participants in the Workshop came directly from media world – some were senior, well-known journalists, some were bright young people, prepared to learn new things. Some of them were academics w ith research interests in media representations of forced migration. Among the seniors, Nirmalya Banerjee is a journalist of repute, presently working with the Times of India , Kolkata and has also worked with The Statesman , Kolkata for long. He is known for his sincere and objective reporting, especially about India’s Northeast, where he has worked for about seven years. Rajat Roy is a senior journalist and has worked for many Bengali newspapers, including Ananda Bazar Patrika , where he has served as News Editor for many years. Although a journalist by profession, he is a social scientist in mind, which is revealed in many of his non-journalistic articles in reputed ‘serious’ journals. Presently he is a media consultant working with Kolkata TV. Biswajit Roy is a senior journalist, at present working with The Telegraph , Calcutta. Popularly known as ‘Madhu’ in friend-circles, he is also a serious social activist, who has always tried to represent the voices of the underdo gs/marginalised. He is also associated with many radical journals and organisations working for the ‘peoples’ issues. Raghab Bandyopadhyay , a senior journalist, who has worked for decades in Bengali dailies like Ajkal and Ananda Bazar Patrika , is also known for creative (and ‘experimental’) fictions – novels and short stories – in Bengali. He has also written non-fiction literary texts and has pioneered what can be called social journalism. At 1 present he edits a Bengali intellectual journal, Charcha and runs a publishing house. Sohini Majumdar is an M.A in History from the University of Calcutta. She is currently pursuing an M.Phil in History at CHS, JNU. Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed works with Frontline , Bangalore. He has contributed to The Book Review , Biblio , Inf ochange Agenda , Deccan Herald , Tehelka and The Hindu apart from his regular reportage in Frontline. Nikhil Roshan is a photo-journalist working with The Bengal Post , Kolkata. Sabir Ahamed is the Research and Advocacy Manager (Minority Rights), SNAP, Kolkata. Vishü Rita Krocha is a journalist with The Eastern Mirror of Nagaland. She is also an author and commentator . Amitava Das is a journalist working with the Press Trust of India, India’s largest news agency or wire service. His responsibilities include writing and editing news stories and coordinating with the journalists of PTI working in east and north-eastern states of India. Chitra Ahanthem is a feature writer and columnist with the Imphal Free Press . She is also a freelance consultant working on documentation and analysis in the HIV/AIDS, armed conflict and gender sectors. Subhasish Chatterji works with the Bengali televis ion channel, Akash Bangla. He has made a documentary on the victims of Aila storm in southern West Bengal. Jayanta Kalita is the Assistant editor, Seven Sister’s Post , Guwahati. Besides the above mentioned media activists, there were 19 Orientation Course-Participants who also enthusiastically joined the Workshop, made the field visits, and took part in the discussions. Among them, two Participants especially chose the ‘Media Module’, and thus made presentations in the media workshop. The younger of these two was Debraj Deb . He is a graduate in Humanities from Tripura Central University, majoring in English and pursuing a PG degree in Journalism and Mass Communication. He has started working in the local media in 2008. And the other was Dr. Sudeep Basu. He is currently working as Assistant Professor at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR), Ahmedabad. A sociologist by training, Suddep’s Doctoral dissertation was on refugee diasporas, which involved an in-depth study of a Tibetan refugee settlement in eastern India. Apart from the above participants, three eminent journalists also joined the Kolkata-Workshop (12 & 13 October) as ‘invitees’ and actively took part in it. Among them, Subir Bhaumik was with BBC for several years. Very recently he was Editor, Seven Sisters Post , Guwahati, and now a freelance journalist and independent researcher. In the journalists’ as well as the academics’ circles, he is recognised as an expert on the North-eastern region of India. He has edit ed/written a good number of books and contributed to several journals on this subject. Sopan Joshi has worked in many media organizations in Delhi, Including Tehelka . He is now a freelancer and also works with Gandhi Peace Foundation. Anirban Roy is a senior journalist, at present Executive Editor, The Bengal Post , Kolkata. He has vast experience in the issues relating to India’s northeast. 2 Project Activities (I) Pre-Field Visit Presentations and Discussion The Pre and Post Field-Visit discussions took place at Hotel Cedar Inn, a beautifully designed hotel on Jalapahar Road facing the magnificent snow-peaks of Kanchanjungha. Participants reached Darjeeling on 9 October, in the evening. Dr. Anasua Basu Roy Chaudhury, Research Associate, CRG, and co-ordinator of the Orientation Course warmly welcomed the participants. Then, after a brief round of self-introductions, Dr Sibaji Pratim Basu, Faculty, Sree Chaitanya College and Member, CRG (and also Co-Coordinator of the Media Workshop) explained the particip ants the need and importance of holding such a Workshop. After his brief comments, two papers were presented on Darjeeling (its problems and possibilities as a town of the migrants) and the Lepcha tribe (one of the aboriginal groups of Darjeeling) by Dr. A nup Shekhar Chakraborty and Dr. Padam Nepal respectively. Dr. Atig Ghosh, Research Associate, CRG, and Faculty, Orientation Course was in the chair. In his paper, Dr. Anup Shekhar Chakraborty described how the British colonial encounter led to the develop ment of the Darjeeling region as a sanatorium and a military depot, an educational centre and a plantations area for tea. Darjeeling as a hill station became a bastion for colonial activity. The British incorporated the natives such as the Lepcha and the Bhutia within the greater colonial framework and the people found them in a new set up merged with the flow of migrants from surrounding regions. Dr. Chakraborty pointed out that after independence the ethnic minorities of North Bengal have been gradually rallying around issue of their identity against the silhouette of ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘step-motherly treatment by the South’. The prominent ethnic forces in the hills of Darjeeling have been demanding a separate state of Gorkhaland. Since 1980s, Darjee ling Hills for instance, has invited much attention both at home and abroad not just for the natural beauty and tea but also because of the protracted ‘sometimes dormant, sometimes active’ Gorkhaland movement, which is also interpreted as the triumph of Gorkha nationalism over the ‘other’ namely the Bengali and the state of West Bengal. Acording to him, the push and pull factors for outmigration from Darjeeling Hills could be identified as additional reason for socio-political unrest in region, which has e ffected economic development, employment opportunities and educational system in the region. The mobility and the fluidity of the geo-political space gets further complex with the gradual rise of trafficking of bodies and material. Employment opportunities being limited with few private sector and non-governmental initiatives in the North-East region in general and Darjeeling District in particular the geo-political space remained deeply disgruntled. Dr. Padam Nepal, on the other hand, narrated how, the Lepchas, an indigenous tribe of the Darjeeling region gradually became a ‘minority’ in its own homeland and slowly pushed almost out of the region. Dr. Nepal’s paper discussed several myths of the Lepcha people, who are now mostly concentrated around the Ka limpong hills, about 60 kilometres from Darjeeling. He argued that since the beginning, the Lepchas were averse to work as ‘coolies’ in tea gardens. To fill this void of labour force, the foreign planters encouraged or allured people from Nepal to come and settle as tea-labourers.