It was media images that first captured the nation's attention and became a definitive aspect of the migrant crisis. The welcome address for the workshop was delivered by the President of CRG, Byasdeb Dasgupta. He pondered the uniqueness of it for this city as, to his knowledge, no workshop on the migrant issue, especially in relation to the media, had taken place in Kolkata so far.
The discussion helped to identify turning points in the metamorphosis of the media and its increasing role in catering to an anglicized middle class. Secondly, there was a lecture at the end of the media workshop which was attended by around 150 people. A debate arose when someone questioned the role of the media in traumatizing victims, in this question, rape victims.
There was one commentator, presumably a Maoist, who maintained that the idea of trauma was, albeit in part, a creation of the media. The eminent journalist Bharat Bhushan, who compiled and edited CRG's publication "Media on Migrants in the Time of an Epidemic: A Reader", gave introductory remarks on the media reader's schedule. Secondly, there was a whole shift in the guarantee of lockdown wages for the migrants and in the attitude of the Court in guaranteeing these wages.
The session concluded with the release of Shoaib Daniyal and her co-editors' book, Mss. He commented on the lack of mention of the lower castes in the cultural register and how the records overlooked the displacement of the noble classes. The role of the media has also expanded to cover and seek answers to these broader questions.
In the first case, when the migrants hit the roads, they attracted the attention of the media and therefore the attention of the nation. The role of the media in disseminating the knowledge that comes from the state cannot be undermined. She kept track of the policies declared during the pandemic and during the period she was traveling, the lockdown was declared.
He then elaborated on the role of the media during the long march and afterwards. At the beginning of the pandemic, the migrants were not represented by the media in any significant way. With this, Valay concluded his presentation on the nature of imagery in the media in the context of the contemporary social situation.
The work that Dalit Camera did during the lockdown was also representative of the images that emerged in the same phase.
Presentations by CRG Media Fellows
But this number does not include all the workers who came in different ways, mostly on their own initiative. Consequently, the total number of workers who have returned home is much higher than the official figure. The paper answered the following questions: what are the predominant types of housing for migrant workers living in Kolkata.
What access do migrant workers have to basic amenities such as drinking water, electricity and toilets? Some of the larger settlements are: legal slums, which are often ghettos, marked by caste-based occupation (tanner/sweeper/rag picker) & Illegal ownership/subletting within legal slums. The presentations were followed by an engaging discussion in which participants and panelists discussed the lack of data on migrant workers, which has been criticized by scholars, activists, politicians and the media since the beginning of the migrant crisis.
Moderator Suvojit Bagchi emphasized that there is no lack of data, but there is no data on how many migrants are leaving or coming to the countries.
Media, State and the Migrants
The lack of political agency that the media gave the migrants formed the framework for a large part of the reporting on the crisis. The first presentation was by Sudarshana Chakraborty from GroundXero, Kolkata, who spoke about the misleading nature of representation and lack of in-depth reporting on the migrant crisis by the mainstream media. She recognized the role of the media in bringing migrant issues to public knowledge and awareness.
But this shameful activity was rejected by the nation, which wanted to know the actual picture of the immigrants. The next presentation was by Shreya Ghosh, a JNU scholar and member of Migrant Workers. The presentation argued that this discourse environment was an important media (state) intervention to preclude the emergence of any rights-based framework for migrant workers in the country's public sphere.
Both experiences of dispersed workers highlight the production of desirable labor through an unregulated capital regime enabled by the state. In all this, the political invisibility of the migrant worker as a subject with certain rights only accelerated. The session began by welcoming the guests to the penultimate session of the two-day workshop.
There were several conceptual parameters that she discussed in order to understand the discursive construction of the "foreigner" as it is encountered in the media and political rhetoric. Apocalypse: Incoming refugees act as a tsunami and will lead to the degradation of the country they enter. The arrival of this in the mainstream was heralded by the coalition documents of the Conservative-Green coalition which again renamed refugee arrival centers to return centres.
The undisputed representation of such euphemisms by the media showed the changing nature of the media in Europe. Challenging constitutional democratic principles to attack the freedom of the press and other electronic media. Decisions on asylum applications were delayed for months due to the closure of public offices in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In contrast to the conservative media, he spoke about liberal media houses such as AFP, EuroNews and The Guardian portraying the migrant problems as humane and reflecting migrant suffering. It would be one of the media's key roles to create this kind of historical accountability in their own portrayal of the migrant crisis.
