How a caste-oppressed journalist became ‘The Mooknayak’ of the voiceless

 

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Left out of livelihood, ignored and unaddressed by the society, deprived of government benefits is another identity of Dalits or untouchables of our society; which are the result of India’s hierarchical caste system.

Our constitutional provisions have always talked about the protection of Dalits and other backward groups, but is the ground reality the same? The answer is a 'no'. Even our media organizations give very little information about the issues of Dalits or deprived groups of people.

Even with a president from the marginalized group, India's 300 million Dalits still face widespread abuse and violence. According to the United Nations-nearly a third of the Dalit community, or some 100 million people, still live in poverty and face discrimination and violence.

Despite decades of constitutionally enshrined protections and affirmative action, violations of their fundamental human rights are still rampant, thousands of untouchables still victims of crimes including rape, torture, acid attacks and murder.

To expose such injustices against the underprivileged, 32-years-old Dalit journalist Meena Kotwal, founded a news outlet- ‘The Mooknayak’, which means "Leader of the Voiceless", that covers such stories that impact marginalized groups and focus on social justice for them. Meena Kotwal comes from a family of manual laborers and grew up in a Dalit neighborhood in the Indian capital of New Delhi.

It is named after a biweekly newspaper founded more than a century ago by Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, whom scholars have sometimes compared to Martin Luther King Jr. He helped draft the nation’s Constitution, which enshrined a formal ban on caste discrimination.

The Mooknayak is an online news media launched in 2019 by Meena Kotwal, herself a Dalit. Along with 14 journalists coming from diverse social groups in India, Kotwal aims to highlight stories of Dalits and other marginalized groups that go unreported in mainstream media.

The news outlet publishes articles in both Hindi and English for wider reach. They shoot videos for their YouTube channel, aiming to cover stories that others do not, including the atrocities and social injustices faced by Dalits.

After becoming a journalist, Meena worked for several mainstream media outlets. However, her experiences as a young journalist made him realize that a large section of Indian society was being overlooked by our media. Today, Kotwal runs her news platform from Pushpa Bhavan, the Dalit neighborhood in Delhi where she grew up.

How did The Mooknayak started,

The journey of becoming ‘The Mooknayak' for these voiceless was not that easy as our mainstream media still behaves disrespectfully towards journalists from backward communities, such correspondents often face multiple challenges in and outside the workplace. From their gender identity to their race, their religious expression to their opinions about social issues all of them are used by trolls to target them online and off-site. Not only this, they are instructed to hide their identity at the workplace.

Something similar happened to Kotwal when she  briefly worked for the BBC in India, where she reportedly faced "public humiliation and discrimination" on the job.

Which led her to start a news outlet called 'The Mooknayak' that focussed on marginalized communities as she knew "there were millions who desperately needed their stories told".

“I started a Dalit-centred newsroom because there is very little representation of Dalits in the Indian media. There are very few organisations which give space to journalists coming from the marginalised and underprivileged section of the society. I have faced discrimination while working for an international news outlet and have been called out for my caste so I thought of starting Mooknayak and I was able to start it with my savings in 2019,” she says.

Meena Kotwal, the founder of The Mooknayak, at the news outlet’s office in New Delhi.

Kotwal narrated her experience of working at the BBC in New Delhi in its Hindi-language service in 2017, which she described as the beginning of "public humiliation and discrimination at work." "The honeymoon did not last long. A dominant-caste colleague (at the BBC) nudged Ms. Kotwal to reveal her own caste, she said, and then outed her to colleagues. It was the beginning of what she described as public humiliation and discrimination at work," according to the New York Times.

This is not the first time a journalist from a Dalit minority face humiliation in workplace. Over the years Indian media has left little or no space for Dalit journalists. Our newsrooms are not inclusive of marginalized communities. Some well-known Dalit journalists like Rajendra Gautam from Lucknow, Ashok Das now runs 'Dalit Dastak' (magazine and website of the same name), Shravan Kumar, Babita Gautam who runs 'The Voice of India' (YouTube channel) always felt that being a Dalit journalist in India is a tough job. The extent to which Dalits are isolated or under-represented in the Indian news industry can be gauged from the fact that they are often subjected to harassment by upper-caste journalists because of their appearance, dress or background. In fact, some upper caste people cannot see someone coming from a downtrodden society trying to fill that space.

Dalit journalists at India’s mainstream newspapers and television stations said that they felt obliged to hide their caste identities at work, they were sometimes asked about it during job interviews.

According to a survey conducted by Evidence, 97% of respondents reported that they are subject to discrimination in their workplaces. Of these respondents, 37.6% were subject to work disparity, and 29.8% were discriminated against based on their physical appearance, giving an argument on the lack of Dalit narratives and voices in the mainstream media.

In 2019, there were zero journalists from SC or ST backgrounds in leadership positions in India’s mainstream media newsrooms, spanning print, broadcast and digital. Four years later, that number still stands at zero. This is one of the findings of Who Tells Our Stories Matters: Representation of Marginalised Caste Groups in Indian Media. The report studies the representation of people from different caste groups in the Indian media. It documents who has a seat at the table and whose voice has a chance of being heard. The aim is to open a critical dialogue about the limited representation of marginalised caste communities in the media’s work and workplaces, and its impact on viewpoints that inform and shape the news discourse- according to a report by Newslaundry.

Even though Dalit voices are mostly left out of the mainstream media, digital platforms like ‘The Mooknayak’ and ‘Khabar Lahriya’  are acting as a leader for them.

However, this portal to report daily atrocities on untouchables was not started with any commercial purpose, now its viewership is growing steadily and now its website gets around 50,000 unique visitors per month. It runs on crowdfunding readers who have donated phones, small amounts of money, even a motorbike and grants. The Mooknayak has received more than $12,000 from Google and roughly $6,000 as part of a training program led by YouTube, which helped fund salaries for a team of 11, as well as to pay for a teleprompter and office furniture.