WEST BENGAL

 A Campaign Of Lies And Half-Truths

B Prasant

OVER the past weeks, the corporate media, with almost no exceptions, have been engaged in a furious and organised campaign of lies and half-truths against the CPI(M) and the Left Front government in Bengal. The tirade of hatred spewing forth is aided and abetted by the parties of right reaction, notably the Trinamul Congress and the BJP, with the Pradesh Congress pitching in with whatever little resources it has at its command. 

The aim of the hate campaign is to garner popular sympathy for the ‘victims of the Communist rule in Bengal.’  The area of operation has earlier been around the Kolkata high court judgement (subsequently stayed) that sought to ban rallies and processions in the daylight hours and on weekdays.  When that particular peg fizzled out, the corporate houses trained their guns on hospitals and health centres in the state sector.

When a small child tragically died recently of what the medical authorities suspected of complications arising out of pneumonia-related breathing troubles, a frequent cause of child mortality when signs and symptoms are not heeded in time, a huge uproar was let loose in the corporate media—but only after the scions of the media came to know that the child had died on the day the Left student-youth organisations had taken out a procession in protest against the HC order banning rallies.

Indeed, we found out that in their quest (‘hunt’ would be a more appropriate word) for a ‘story’ that would be able to divert attention of the people away from the struggle launched by the Left Front against attacks on people’s fundamental rights, scribes of the corporate controlled media were desperately looking for an incident, any unhappy incident, that had happened, and not even by coincidence, during or after any rally or procession organised by the CPI(M) and/or Left mass organisations.

It is gruesome to relate how a child’s death, a tragedy of the highest order in any circumstances, came in handy for the snoops of the media, and how they gleefully splashed huge headlines the next day proclaiming that the child had died because of the procession.  How could such a thing take place?  Well, had not the parents been ‘detained during their way to the hospital?’

It was pointed out that the route that the couple with the ailing child had taken was far away from that announced and stuck to by the processionists, the  corporate media quickly changed tack and the new tirade was a chorus against the ‘mismanagement’ in hospitals.  Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has ordered a full probe into the circumstances of the child’s unfortunate demise and the results are awaited.

Opening another ‘front’, so to speak, against the CPI(M) and the Left Front government, the corporate media then switched track to run headlines to try to focus the attention of the reading public to yet another death in a city hospital.  A young girl has died of henox purpura, an uncommon and usually fatal genetic disorder.  In the present set up, it is conveniently forgotten, hospitals, in Bengal and elsewhere, are not centres of cure-all capacity and neither is this within the realm of possibility.  Mortality rates in state-run hospitals and health centres in Bengal, one needs to remind the corporate houses that run the big media and patronise the rightist political outfits, continue to be among the lowest in the country, and that 90 per cent of the patients go to the state-run hospitals for cure and rehabilitation. 

Death is always a tragedy and as state secretary of the CPI(M) Anil Biswas said on October 22, all efforts should be made by the Left Front government to try to find out whether any lacunae on the part of the hospital management had complicated the case of the young girl who tragically died. 

Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has met the parents of the girl, and has already spoken of meting out strict disciplinary measures to anyone found guilty of mishandling the critical case.  The state health minister, Dr Surya Kanta Mishra has visited the residence of the young child who had died earlier, staying there and offering heartfelt solace to the dispirited couple.

Having been deprived of ammunition, and sensing the popular rage slowly building up against the continuous bombardment of lies and distortions on the front pages of corporate-run newspapers, the scions of the ‘fourth estate’ have now started to run stories on any and all hospital deaths, trying to relate them desperately to the CPI(M) and the Left Front government. 

The campaign of hatred is expectedly running low on fuel and the recent fulmination of Mamata Banerjee (back from Delhi where her ministrations for a ministerial berth has, yet once again, failed to cut ice) assuring the public about continuous programmes of ‘disruptions in hospitals’ notwithstanding, things are going back to normal and for the scribes in the pay of corporate capital this is bad news.