For Malaysians, the more things change, the more they stay the same

May 9, 2013 § Leave a Comment

Post election opposition rally at Kelana Jaya Stadium in Kuala Lumpur. Photo by @PrincessJoLing

Post election opposition rally at Kelana Jaya Stadium in Kuala Lumpur. Photo @PrincessJoLing

I was born in Malaysia to a New Zealand father and a Chinese mother. That goes some way to explaining why I ended up in New Zealand after my early years growing up in Kuala Lumpur. Even today, the thought of the city fills me with the nostalgia for the country’s staggering diversity – of food, flora, and the people.  I went to multi-racial international schools and had classmates from all of Malaysia’s ethnic precincts.

Many of them were, like me, Eurasian, representing a blend of local with the expats that worked and lived there as diplomats and imported foreign talent (like my father who worked as a journalist for the New Straits Times) or hybrids of the three main ethnic groups that make up Malaysia – Malay, Indian and Chinese.

It follows that race is a significant feature of the country’s politics. The indigenous Malay people dominate the politics of the country but the Indian and Chinese minorities are influential in the business sector – especially the Chinese who make up about 25 per cent of the population. Race is a feature of governing Malaysia that needs to be managed with care. The institutional advantages that constitutionally favour the Malays is resented by the other minorities, but successive governments deemed them necessary to head off Malay disenfranchisement and race conflict, as happened in 1969 when 196 people died.

The Kuala Lumpur of my childhood in the 1960s and 70s is hardly recognisable today. There haven’t been any more race riots and the patches of the city that match my memory blueprints are few. But some of the old city is still recognisable – remnants that survived the unremitting modernisation and development that assailed Malaysia in the 80s and 90s.

Chinatown and Little India are now thriving tourist attractions and the Central Market building which used to be a wet market, is now an arts market. While the famous tourist draw, the Batu Caves, has changed little, the city’s signature silhouette is now the 88 storey Petronas Twin Towers, built to represent a new and self-confident Malaysia.

Despite the country’s obvious prosperity, or perhaps because of it, the politics is also very different today. The Barisan Nasional (National Front) governments which are dominated by Malays have governed for 44 years. But that all started to change in 2008 when the opposition coalition began to make significant gains in local and national politics. The Patakan Rakyat coalition fed off the public anger about cronyism, corruption, disparities in wealth, and an electoral system that was heavily loaded in favour of the incumbent parties.

All the signs pointed to last Sunday’s general election being a close run thing and indeed it was. While Barisan Nasional has returned to power, it has been acutely embarrassed. It won 60 per cent of the seats but the opposition won the popular vote – 50.37 per cent to 47.38 per cent.  Malaysians are now asking how can the winners claim to have won when by one significant yardstick, they lost the election.

There were many warnings in the lead up that the contest was shaping up to be an unfair one. Patakan Rakyat, led by the former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, has been accusing the government for months of gerrymandering electoral boundaries.

It was also up against the government controlled news media which it says is severely compromised by an obvious bias towards government candidates. The opposition used social media and the internet to counter the mainstream media to good effect. Opposition websites like Malaysiakini have been providing a counterpoint to the government perspective for years now.

The opposition also claim the government had organised charter flights for 40 thousand voters to travel to mainland Malaysia from the East Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah to shore up support in some electorates. These dubious voters were said to have been flown on the government owned national carrier, Malaysia Airlines. The government denies this and the electoral commission says the practice is permissible if it is paid and organised by private supporters.

On Election Day, there were also many accusations of electoral fraud. The indelible ink used on the index finger of a voter to indicate they had voted was found to wash off easily. The country’s electoral commission says that’s because the ink’s halal status – to make it acceptable to Muslims – compromised the strength of the ink.

There were also claims that many foreign migrant workers from the Philippines, Bangladesh or Indonesia had been issued with national identity cards and told to vote for the government. But at least one of these claims was found to be false when a photo of an ID card of an Indian looking man with a Chinese name circulated widely. A Singaporean pro-democracy blogger, Mr Brown, deleted a blog post, explaining “he is a real person and not a phantom voter”. It transpired that the voter in question had been adopted by an ethnic Chinese family.

A staggering 80 per cent of the 13 million eligible voters cast their votes in the Malaysian general election. It was a demonstration of how politically motivated Malaysians are now. It is also a manifestation of how a once passive electorate is becoming more rebellious. Young people, urbanites and most Chinese voted overwhelmingly for the opposition. The prime minister, Najib Razak, called it a ‘Chinese tsunami’ and some within the ethnic Malay UMNO party that dominates Barisan Nasional are playing the race card.

But a respected commentator and a former editor of the New Straits Times newspaper, A Kadir Jasin, rubbished the idea that the main swing away from the government came from Chinese voters. He says the shift in allegiance was reflected across all types of voters and points out that nearly three million young people were voting for the first time in their lives.

Is it not possible that this is not a Chinese tsunami or ethnic chauvinism but instead a Malaysian tsunami that is based on new aspirations and reality, especially among the young voters?

Things have now become very messy for the government and a restless thundercloud now hangs over the country. Two coalition partners have abandoned Barisan Nasional. To all intents and purposes, the government lost this election. Barisan Nasional has technically been elected to govern but morally, it has lost all credibility in the eyes of the majority of Malaysians.

The election watchdog, Bersih (Clean), says it is withholding recognition of the government to investigate claims of fraud. It is calling on members of the electoral commission to resign for failing to provide a clean and fair election. Other independent watchdogs say the election was not free and fair which the government claims, but was ‘seriously flawed’.

In the meantime, huge rallies are planned and the opposition will press the government to clean up the electoral system. Maybe proportional representation will become part of the agenda. Until the next election in 2018, Malaysia will continue to be a very polarised place and suddenly, the bucolic country I remember from my childhood seems very different.

Post election opposition rally at Kelana Jaya Stadium in Kuala Lumpur. Photo by @ADRIANNCF

Post election opposition rally at Kelana Jaya Stadium in Kuala Lumpur. Photo @ADRIANNCF

 

How the news flirts with disaster

April 17, 2013 § 1 Comment

Story category by area, total

Source: Selling the News by James Wendelborn.

As sure as night follows day, one of the things that happens when a natural catastrophe or act of terror or war happens is the scramble in news rooms to find out the nationalities of those killed or injured or who were there when it happened. It’s an automatic response. Journalists in news rooms hundreds and thousands of kilometres away from the epicentre look for the local area person or persons who may have been caught up.

The story priority cascades downwards from was a local area person killed; were they hurt; were they there but uninjured (can they tell us what they saw and did they have a lucky or miraculous escape). Bottom of the list as you drill down is did a local area person have a friend or in-law (a local area person of the said local area) who was directly affected by the tragedy and/or violence. If none of these apply, then the story is simply an international story that fails to make the crossover into national news.

When explained like that, it sounds faintly ridiculous but that’s how it works. It’s also how New Zealand news rooms would have responded to the Boston Marathon bombing this week and, given that the event regularly draws runners from all around the world, there would have been not unreasonable odds on there being at least one New Zealander taking part.

By the end of April 16, three people were dead and more than 100 people had been injured in what the American authorities are treating as a terrorist attack. To the relief of New Zealanders who may have had relatives and friends in Boston at the time, no Kiwis were seriously hurt. But the reaction of those New Zealanders becomes an important strand of the story here.

It was perhaps insensitive of me send a facetious tweet but this rush to action in newsrooms here to locate a New Zealander in the attack is its own way a fairly tasteless ritual. But it becomes more acutely so if the death or injury to a New Zealander is framed in sharp relief against the other casualties, making it seem as if those casualties mattered less.

tweet

At least one journalist took offence at my tweet but I think it’s a valid point expressed satirically. Journalists are not callous people unmoved by tragedy but the nature of the business can make them inured to the suffering of others and the old editor’s adage, if it bleeds, it leads, still holds true.

There were, of course, New Zealanders in the marathon and they were able to tell their stories to the New Zealand media as you will have seen here and here. But as any news editor will tell you, if there was no local area angle to dig into, the story would have less of a connection to a local area audience. My big issue with putting a tight focus on our local area is how if the editorial process is handled clumsily it can make our news industry appear more parochial than it usually is.

How else would you explain that images of the All Black captain Richie McCaw are more likely to appear on the front page of the biggest daily newspaper in New Zealand than the prime minister by a ratio of 11 to four? This is one of the observations made in a study called Selling the News by an Auckland graphic designer, James Wendelborn.

James has spent a considerable amount of his time over the past 15 months classifying and displaying New Zealand Herald front pages. He’s illustrated and published the data on a Tumblr. It confirms what you might already suspect.

The infographic at the top of this post is stylised depiction of what a typical Herald front page might look like. Yes, really. And the four ingredients that top the list for space are crime, tragedy, advertising and sport. He observes that the Herald features an expected strong emphasis on New Zealand stories and that crime and tragedy stories occupy a disproportion amount of space to the frequency in which they appear there (and they appear often!).

And here’s what Herald front pages looked like throughout 2012.

Story category by area

Source: Selling the News by James Wendelborn

James has broken the stories down into three main categories – good news, bad news and neutral. One of his conclusions:

There’s a definite tendency to report ‘bad news’ which historically, readers will tell you they don’t want but editors will tell you that’s what sells.

This is supported by the probability that 43 per cent of the stories were in the bad news category, with good news at 27 per cent and neutral at 30 per cent. But wait, there’s more.

The Herald is much more interested in small, personal stories – the death of a teenager in rural New Zealand is always going to get the lead story over hundreds dying overseas. As they have no doubt discovered, this will be because that’s what sells – there is a well-established mentality of caring more about one local tragedy over many international ones.

James also notes that many important issues rarely get a look in on the front page. For example, environmental stories, and this includes that elephant, climate change, occupied 0.3 per cent of the front page acreage over the 12 month long study.

When climate change is such a major issue, only seven environment stories is kind of irresponsible. Richie McCaw shouldn’t be featured on the country’s front page more times than the Prime Minister. And I’m frankly over the paper’s infatuation with property prices and rugby players, although perhaps the country needs to get over those things first.

Draw your own conclusions. Visit Selling the News and connect to James on his Twitter or send him an email and let him know what you think of his work. He’s made a fascinating contribution to any discussion on what we as New Zealanders might want in our news and what matters to us as a society.

Death of a newspaper

March 27, 2013 § 5 Comments

capital times edit

The presses are to stop rolling for Wellington’s Capital Times and it is a moment for reflection. For as long as I have been a Wellingtonian, the free weekly newspaper has been taking the city’s cultural and social pulse. After 38 years, it more than qualifies as an inner city institution but there’s little room for sentiment in the economics of the digital age.

In matters of the life and death of a small, hard scrabble newspaper, nostalgia makes little difference if advertising revenue is tanking and last week, the owners of the Capital Times announced they had decided to call it a day. They could see no glimmer of an upswing for the paper and they are right.

The newspaper’s editor, Niels Reinsborg, says rival community publications owned by APN and Fairfax are slashing advertising rates by up to 50 per cent. While advertising remains steady at the Capital Times, revenue is down and costs are up.  The owners think the situation is not sustainable and the prognosis is not healthy. It simply doesn’t make sense to keep going.

 

 

The news has sadden many of its contributors and readers. Its long standing film reviewer, Dan Slevin, is disappointed. He thinks there’s a few more years left in newspaper that has carved a niche for itself as a metro giveaway with a heavy focus on the arts and entertainment scene. But even he agrees that the end will have to come – if not sooner than certainly later.

The end of the Capital Times – which has a circulation of 20,000 and a staff of eight – is another signpost on the breakneck road between traditional news business models and the increasingly digital, mobile, touchscreen, app driven world of publishing. Advertising is shifting online or being divided between the old and the new, making for a smaller pie from which all newspapers are trying to take a bigger slice out of. Caught in an advertising war for fewer dollars, the Capital Times was becoming increasingly vulnerable.

Factor in a wider business environment characterised by recession, job insecurity, redundancies, cautious consumer spending and a retail and hospitality sector that is, by and large, also pinching, and it all makes for a confluence of gloom for newspapers.

Advertisers are less reliant on newspaper advertising. They are learning that it is free to use social media and peer to peer sharing through online social networks. All of this makes it extremely difficult to keep a marginal, independent community publication going for longer when doing so would be postponing the inevitable.

While many publishers are attempting to future proof their publications by moving their content to the web, they are still baffled by how to make money from their online publications. Newspaper and magazine publishing is currently trapped in a kind of limbo between hard copy and digital and it is going to take deep pockets to persevere until the online rewards are realised.  The business model that works for a 24 page free community paper isn’t the same as for a local community news website that relies on volunteers, subscribers and donors to keep its costs down and augment any advertising it can attract.

By and large, the bells are tolling for the newspaper industry. It has been in a sunset phase for some time now.  It joins CD shops, postal deliveries, video game parlours, travel agencies, book and video shops in the endangered category. In the years ahead, we will be mourning the extinction of many animal species as habitat loss and poaching take their toll on the last wild Sumatran tiger or black rhino. To this melancholy list, we are also seeing the end of days for many brick and mortar businesses – to which I add newspapers. And that is cause of reflection.

The last edition of the Capital Times will hit the streets on April 10.

Forever dolphin love

March 1, 2013 § 2 Comments

Dolphins as seen from Oriental Bay. Photo by Steven Wong aka @winesentience.

Dolphins as seen from Oriental Bay. Photo by Stephen Wong aka @winesentience.

As news stories go, it wasn’t supposed to be much of a news story. Word on Twitter this week was that a huge pod of dolphins was churning its way around Wellington harbour. The Radio New Zealand news room ignored it because it is radio without pictures and, anyway, dolphins come into the harbour at least once a year on the hunt for schools of fish. I wouldn’t call them a common sight but you could say they are a regular sight.

But in no time at all, the Wellington twitterati was cooing with pleasure as more and more people from vantage points in office blocks overlooking the water witnessed the massive pod of up to 100 bottlenose dolphins turn the inner harbour into a banquet. They laboured their way in front of the skyscrapers that lined Jervois Quay like a peloton in a road cycle race and Twitter was positively radiating delight at the sight.

I could just make out the pod from a window on the third floor of the eastern side of Radio New Zealand House before it ploughed across to the Overseas Terminal and Oriental Bay. There they lingered a while, casting a spell in glorious sunshine in front of hundreds of Wellingtonians on the waterfront.  This was happening on a superlative summer afternoon – the latest in an unbroken series of beautiful days in what forecasters are calling the sunniest summer in a lifetime and longer.

There are photos from the Scoop team here and there’s raw video from TV3 here.

Twitter transmitted the excitement to those of us trapped in our workplaces. All the while I was thinking what an endorsement this was for our city, for the cleanliness of the water in the harbour and for their status as a protected species, that this unusually large visitation by one of the most recognisable ambassadors of the wild oceanic world should feel so at ease and at home so close to us.

If you’re wondering where the headline came from, here’s a video of the inspiration – Forever Dolphin Love by New Zealand’s own Connan Mockasin.

Heading towards catastrophe

February 11, 2013 § 1 Comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The economist and philanthropist, Gareth Morgan, is right. There are simply too many cats in New Zealand for the native bird population to prosper. The concentration of cats in our cities is completely at odds with an idealised view many New Zealanders have of their country as one that is clean, green and natural.

Morgan has started a campaign to make New Zealanders think again about being a cat owner. His website Cats to Go sets out the arguments as to why cats are menace to native fauna – not just birds, but skink, gecko, frog and insect species.

In 2011, New Zealanders owned 1.4 million cats and that number corresponded to one in two households owning at least one cat. On his website, Morgan quotes studies that show cats have contributed to the extinction of nine native bird species and raised the risk of losing another 33 native birds.

But for suggesting that people should think again about being a cat owner, Morgan has become a lightning rod for cat lovers, many of whom are in denial that their little Tiddles is a pathological killer of native wildlife.

It’s interesting that some of the reaction has come from people who seem to be in complete denial that their cat is a top of the food chain alpha predator because, apart from dogs, cats have no natural enemies in New Zealand.

One of the arguments used by the cat protection lobby is that cats also control rodents but as this science blog post points out, with fewer cats, we humans would simply raise own game to keep the numbers of rats and mice down, as we already do with possums and stoats.

Morgan’s position has also been subject to a number of distortions, some funny memes, Facebook pages like this one and this one.  But he never advocated for the destruction of pet cats but makes a case for destroying feral cats – as we already do to rabbits and possums – because he argues that the trap, neuter and release (TNR) programme employed is not effective in preventing the carnage caused by cats.

The science is unequivocal. As this study shows – and this one and this one – cats are responsible for an enormous slaughter of small birds and animals. The danger is that cats are killing off the native birds at rates that are higher than they can replenish their populations or even grow their numbers.

If Morgan’s campaign gets people thinking about whether they will replace their ageing moggy when it finally passes on and hangs up its claws or to choose to have only one cat, that’s got to be more compatible with efforts being made by the Department of Conservation, local authorities and dedicated individuals who are working to protect New Zealand’s natural wildlife.

For the record, I feel it is necessary to mention that our household has a cat. She is lethal to the local rat and mice population. But she has brought home the occasional silvereye, weta and skink. I’ve come around to the pleasure of native birds because our home in Wellington’s Aro Valley has become a drop in centre for these guys.  That these three kaka or native New Zealand bush parrots are in our neighbourhood is tribute to the work done by the Zealandia wildlife sanctuary.

Zealandia provides a safe, predator proof environment for native birds – a kind of fenced land ark which is repopulating the surrounding Wellington suburbs with birds that filled the pre-1840s tree lined natural landscape.  The kaka, tui, morepork that are seen and heard on a daily basis in our immediate neighbourhood have only been made possible because they are able to breed in complete safety from cats and other predators within Zealandia’s fortified 225 hectare valley.

As Morgan’s Cats To Go website puts it:

Imagine a New Zealand teeming with native wildlife, penguins on the beach, Kiwis roaming about in your garden. Imagine hearing birdsong in our cities. Sure, we are seeing more tui and kereru these days, thanks to some good work on rat and possum control in some areas. But many other species are still endangered; such as the cheeky kaka, beautiful kokako and curious weka. These birds once ruled this land. Some species can’t coexist with cats and rats at all, such as mohua, saddleback and robins, so they rely on a few pest free refuges for their survival.

The call to reduce cat numbers in New Zealand has caught the eye of a number of international media outlets, including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Atlantic and online websites like Russia Today and Boing Boing. While Morgan is described as a cat hater by Boing Boing, none of the others beats this indecent, over-the-top report from Taiwan’s tabloid NMA animation studio video. Enjoy but remember this is a bizarre and entertaining distortion and not an accurate reflection of the arguments.

Media freedom in China goes south for the weekend

January 10, 2013 § Leave a Comment

The news out of Hong Kong is that the Southern Weekend newspaper strike is over. It ended quietly and some kind of agreement has been reached with the journalists angry at having their independence threatened by provincial propagandists in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.

It’s a no brainer to see how this brush fire over freedom of expression had the potential to become a conflagration for the Chinese authorities. Journalists generally stand shoulder to shoulder with their colleagues around the world, especially those who, by and large, believe in protecting the independence of their profession from controlling governments, big business and other powerful influences.

By their curmudgeonly nature, journalists hate interference and, most of the time, this works well in many countries as a check on abuses and corruption. The news media exposes corruption, waste and abuses of power and that in turn makes governments and corporations more accountable and transparent.  That’s the theory and often the practice.

It is also one reason why the News International phone hacking story in Britain is so shocking.  Instead of holding those in influence and power to account, it was the media that were committing a terrible abrogation of their responsibilities.

But that’s not the case in China where the Southern Weekend, a reform leaning newspaper that has carved out a reputation for integrity and independence, has been at the centre of a censorship row since last week. While it may be the latest in a string of clashes it has had with the authorities, for Southern Weekend, this is arguably the most important so far.

Here’s a New York Times article to help sketch you an idea of the newspaper’s crusading pedigree. That article is from ten years ago. It was breaking stories through its investigative journalism then, and has been a constant thorn in the side of the provincial Guangdong government.

Guangdong is not just any province. It is a key economic driver of the Chinese economy. Home of the Cantonese speaking diaspora, if Guangdong was a nation, it would be on a GDP basis the 13th largest economy in the world.

What happens in Guangdong matters a great deal to the rest of China. And news of any unrest, as in the case of the Wukan village strike, soon reaches Hong Kong and the news media there, unlike many of its counterparts in the rest of the mainland, is free to report it.

When the Guangdong propaganda ministry instructed its Communist Party representatives within the Southern Media Group (the company that owns the Southern Weekly) to publish a pro-government New Year editorial in the newspaper on January 3, it was duly done. But it was printed without the agreement of the newspaper’s journalists who rebelled after the fact and went on strike over what they viewed as an egregious breach of the newspaper’s editorial independence.  Look here for a detailed breakdown from the University of Hong Kong’s excellent China Media Project on what went down after the editorial was published.

News of the strike and protests then sped through Chinese internet. There’s also been some spill over on Twitter which some Chinese netizens access by circumventing the Great Firewall. The Southern Weekend journalists may even have been emboldened to strike because of the support shown by many Chinese internet users.

In what has become a very familiar scenario in a much bigger struggle over information, the so-called ‘sensitive keywords’ are being scrubbed from the Chinese web by China’s state censors and by self-censoring micro-blog platforms.  Check out the China Media Project’s Data Journalism Lab for a rundown on what is getting censored on weibo (a direct Chinese translation of the word micro-blog).

It’s all a bit like whack-a-mole. I have previously written about the war for information that is being waged on the Chinese internet.  Blogging, micro-blogging and mobile telephony have exploded the old information monopoly once completely owned and controlled by the state. Information on the internet now flows from many to many and it’s a very different information environment from when the government was able to broadcast information in the legacy media landscape that existed before the internet.

As an aside, there is one common tactic that Chinese netizens use to circumvent the censorship – the use of homonyms.  In Mandarin, Southern Weekend is nanfang zhoumo which is abbreviated to nan zhou. A homonym (same tones but different characters) for the abbreviated name of Southern Weekend is southern porridge and this innocuous phrase is doing the rounds on Chinese micro-blogs.

Photos of the demonstrations outside the Southern Media Group building in Guangzhou can be found by searching under the hashtags #nfzm and #nanzhou.

These two men have placards urging the protection of news media freedom.

The striking journalists and supporters did not have it all their own way. Here’s a counter demonstration by a group of Maoists.

If the news today is accurate, the fixers have had their day and the embers of rebellion are being dampened down. A truce is in place and the Southern Weekend has resumed production.  But for a while, the state authorities had a migraine and the authorities in Beijing were starting to get the headache too. The Southern Weekend showdown – and an associated kerfuffle at the Beijing News – is happening at a time of political transition for China. The country’s new paramount leader, Xi Xinping, is taking over from the incumbent, Hu Jintao, and it’s a sensitive time for China’s leadership. Once upon a time in China, it was possible to kill the rooster to scare the chickens but the internet makes it so much harder to clean away the mess and close the cooking pot.

Rest in peace, Nirbhaya

December 31, 2012 § 3 Comments

Anti-rape demonstrators in New Delhi.

Anti-rape demonstrators in New Delhi.

There’s been anger, sadness and shame in India over the ordeal of a young woman who was raped and critically injured by a gang of men on a bus in the capital, New Delhi. This shock reached an apogee on Saturday, December 29, when the unnamed 23 year old medical student died of her injuries in Singapore 12 days after being attacked.

The outpouring on social media has coalesced around a number of hashtags on Twitter including #delhigangrape, #delhirape and #braveheart. The Indian news media have christened her Amanat, Damini and Nirbhaya. Each of those names have been trending and now one of the most used hashtags is #RIPNirbhaya.

The Times of India says it started the trend to call the young medical student Nirbhaya which in Hindi means ‘fearless’. The other translation is ‘braveheart’ and she’s being called India’s braveheart which lends itself to being another of the trending hashtags used to express the grief and rage of many Indian Twitter users.

Facebook which is used by 60 million Indians has also been a venue of similar sentiments. This Times of India article shows just how many Indians have taken to the Internet to demonstrate their feelings and another TOI report says many Indians have turned their social media avatars to black in sympathy.

One tweet aggregator and tracking website, Twee.dot.co, says #RIPNirbhaya tweets ranked seventh in the world on December 29 when the word from Singapore’s Mount Elizabeth Hospital where she was being given specialist care was that she had passed away. The news burst onto Twitter and within hours, using Trendsmap, it is possible to see where the majority of #RIPNirbhaya tweets were originating.

As seen in the screen grab below, taken early on Sunday morning New Zealand Time, the main sources are the major cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Also featured are Hyderabad, Chennai and Calcutta.

Trendsmap image of #RIPNirbhaya hashtag tweets in India.

Trendsmap image of #RIPNirbhaya hashtag tweets in India.

Here is a sampling of some of the tweets.

There are tweets from celebrities, prominent media figures and even foreign diplomats. The actors, Shah Rukh Khan, Sonam Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan, the tennis player Sania Mirza, the cricketer Yuvraj Singh, and the CNN-IBN television anchor, Sagarika Ghose, are among those that tweeted their tributes to the young woman.

If the reaction on Twitter and other social media platforms is representative, this crime that has convulsed India is to become a rallying point for changing attitudes in what is ostensibly a chauvinistic and patriarchal country. As one woman protestor told the BBC World Service, the movement sparked by this terrible news story is not just a protest but a revolution.

Many fair-minded Indians will be hoping that this crime will be, in the words of one Indian commentator, an inflexion which marks a turning point towards achieving a society that eventually values baby girls as highly as boys. This in a country where ultrasound and foeticide are commonly practised to ensure the greater likelihood that a baby is a boy.

In India, sexual harassment is commonly known by the euphemism ‘eve teasing’ which makes it seem almost a playful activity.  But the death of the young woman that has galvanised Indian society has shown the phrase to have a sinister edge and shone a spotlight on the issue of sex crimes – most of which go unreported in India for a range of reasons. These include the reluctance of victims to report rape because the authorities are unresponsive and if the case goes through the legal system, it may be years before it comes to trial. Even then, conviction rates are woefully low.

Perhaps #RIPNirbhaya will go some way to changing India’s sexual inequality despite the depressing reality that there are untold Nirbhayas who will remain far from the public gaze. But for a short time at least, the news media will be looking to tell their stories and the government will be keen to demonstrate its willingness to listen.

Postscript:  Since I wrote this, Google India has created its own tribute.

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