Wisdom of people in remote border villages of Kutch regarding patriotism and national security concerns has kept alive a tradition which many newspaper readers would find boring and monotonous.
No newspaper in big cities and other urban centres would ever dare to publish the news of flag hoisting at every taluka and village continuously for a fortnight after the Independence and Republic Day celebrations are over.
But Kutch Mitra, a Bhuj-based Gujarati daily devoted to rural Kutch, was forced to publish the news of flag hoisting at Independence Day and Republic Day events at every village in the border talukas, a task that took a full page of the newspaper for the next 15 days.
It all began with a letter to the Editor from a reader, probably an urban one, pointing to the ‘uselessness’ and ‘monotony’ of printing pictures and news snippets of flag hoisting by different village sarpanchs for days together.
Responses to this letter from sarpanchs and readers in villages of border areas enlightened the Editor and the publishing house on aspects of journalism they had never thought about.
“The publication of small news and photographs about I-Day and R-Day flag hoisting at border villages is important from national security point of view and re-inculcation of patriotism among the locals,” said the readers, most of them semi-literates or school drop-outs.
Since these flag hoisting events are not Government sponsored or funded, the village sarpanchs and the teachers have to collect small funds for the programmes which are usually followed by distribution of sweets and small tri-colour badges or flag replicas.
Though the people pay their contributions primarily to see the names of their village and the sarpanch in the newspaper, the process gets the whole village involved in the celebrations of Independence Day and Republic Day in the remote areas bordering a hostile neighbour, argued the readers pleading against the proposed discontinuation of printing of news and pictures of routine patriotic events considered ‘mundane’ by urban readers.
If printing of such news is stopped, people would lose interest in the event and stop paying and ultimately the flag hoisting ceremonies in the border village would come to an end, the newspaper was told underlining the danger that such a situation would be relished by sinister elements in neighbouring Pakistan.
“This patriotic fervour and sense of national security of the barely literate villagers forced us to continue the printing of such news for the next three decades”, Kutch Mitra Editor Kirtibhai Khatri told The Pioneer on Sunday.
Khatri said that stress on rural reporting in the remote villages bordering Pakistan has not only contributed immensely to the cause of national security but has also helped in removing certain misconceptions about the minorities’ Trans-border loyalties, perceived or real.
Narrating an incident to prove his point, Khatri said when the paper’s rural reporting network was being set up in the late 1980s, one newly recruited reporter found that the Independence Day flag hoisting was taking place in village Golay of Abdasa taluka for the first time since independence. The phenomenon was naturally attributed to the pre-dominantly Muslim population who were alleged to have loyalties across the border.
But the newspaper was proved wrong, said Khatri, adding that the village school teacher, who had the responsibility of organising such events, used to go away to his hometown on every holiday. One teacher from Sodha community, Hindus who fled Sind province during the 1971 Indo-Pak war, was appointed in the village. Being single and without an immediate family to go to during short holidays, he stayed on and thus flag hoisting started on Independence Days and Republic Days, Khatri told The Pioneer on Sunday.