DEVARI, India — Somebody took a photograph on the side of a highway in India.

On a clearing of baked earth, a lithe, athletic man holds his friend in his lap. A red bag and a half empty bottle of water are at his side. The first man is leaning over his friend like a canopy, his face is anxious and his eyes searching his friend’s face for signs of life.

The friend is small and wiry, in a light green T-shirt and a faded pair of jeans. He is sick, and seems barely conscious. His hair is soaked and sticking to his scalp, a sparse stubble accentuates the deathlike pallor of his face, his eyes are closed, and his darkened lips are half parted. The lid of the water bottle is open. His friend’s cupped hand is about to pour some water on his feverish, dehydrated lips.

I saw this photo in May, as it was traveling across Indian social media. News stories filled in some of the details: It was taken on May 15 on the outskirts of Kolaras, a small town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The two young men were childhood friends: Mohammad Saiyub, a 22-year-old Muslim, and Amrit Kumar, a 24-year-old Dalit, a term for those once known as “untouchables,” people who have suffered the greatest violence and discrimination under the centuries-old Hindu caste system.

Over the next few weeks, I found myself returning to that moment preserved and isolated by the photograph. I came across some details about their lives in the Indian press: The two came from a small village called Devari in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. They had been working in Surat, a city on the west coast, and were making their way home, part of a mass migration that began when the Indian government ordered a national lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Despite our image-saturated times, the photograph began assuming greater meanings for me.

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It wouldn’t surprise anyone that Buddhism has a vast literature on suffering, rebirth, and karma, but I often meet people who tell me with great confidence that in Buddhism there’s no heaven or hell. In Buddhist cosmology, hell isn’t just implied; it’s a landscape, precisely and richly described. While there’s no Buddhist Inferno—the closest equivalent would probably be Wu Cheng’en’s sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, which takes its hero, the Monkey King, to hell for all manner of torments—systematic descriptions of the underworld are laid out in primary scriptures, which have been condensed, memorized, and recited to lay Buddhists in Asia for centuries, as well as dramatized in murals, sculptures, plays, and, more recently, Buddhist theme parks. A passage from the Lamrim Chenmo:

In the Hot Hell the hell-guardians throw the living beings into a hot, blazing iron kettle many leagues across and boil them, deep frying them like fish. Then they impale them through their anuses with blazing iron skewers, which emerge through the crowns of their heads; blazing flames leap forth from their mouths, eyes, noses, ears, and from all of their pores. Then they are placed either on their backs or face down on a blazing iron surface, where they are pounded flat with a hot, blazing iron hammer. In the Extremely Hot Hell the guardians force iron tridents into their victims’ anuses. . . . Their bodies are caught in a hot, blazing iron press; they are thrown head-first into a great blazing iron kettle full of boiling water and boiled . . . until their skin, flesh, and blood are destroyed and only their skeletons remain. Thereupon the guardians fish them out, spread them on the iron surface—where their skin, flesh, and blood regenerate—and then throw them back into the kettle.

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A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as

base as itself.” – Joseph Pulitzer*

         A media system set up to serve the needs of the Financial

Institutions will not serve the interests of the majority of population.

Media ownership, since the Bill Clinton deregulation, has been greatly

concentrated and globalised. 

*1. *Its relationship with the Neo-liberal global economy has been solemnised. It is as corrupt as any policy making medium in the West.  Public service broadcasting has all but collapsed. The remaining ones are actually in the grip of barely disguised corporate finance. Culture has been commercialised. The first amendment of the US constitution has been perverted to offer the corporations the rank of individuals and corporate leaders would not be held responsible for their acts. According to the latest US Supreme Court ruling, corporations can spend as much as they want in lobbying; it reinforces the Multinational Corporate (MNC) power and reach.

*2.*Internet, touted as beyond the reach of Multinational corporations is being incorporated in the commercial media systems.

3.*Bill Clinton’ s deregulation allowed the takeover of CBS by Viacom. AOL swallowed Time Warner in the largest merger in history (valued at $160 billion). Time Warner merged its music operations with EMI, leaving 90% of the music market in the hand of four entities. The Tribune Company bought Times Mirror, making every major newspaper chain a part of a large media monopoly.

*4.*With corporate intrusions, the Public system-National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System is also now within the ideological confines of advertisement supported, profit-driven system. Local commercial media are consistently reluctant to offer critical analysis of powerful local interests, which are the major advertisers.

5.*In the spring of 2000, the Boston Herald suspended its consumer affairs columnist, Robin Washington for a series of articles on Fleet-Boston financial corporation, which not only advertised in the Herald, but also loaned funds to it. He was eventually reinstated because of public protest, but also because he was one of the four African American staffers in the large 235 person editorial staff.

*6.*Commercial media tend to provide favorable coverage to politicians, who offer them subsidies and favorable regulations. For his book, The Media Monopoly Ben H. Bagdilkian used the Freedom of Information Act to unearth the information that major media promised Nixon support in the 1972 reelection campaign if he supported the Newspaper Preservation Act

*7.*Corporations routinely get their local station managers to call on their congressmen to support the corporate position on media legislation. A top executive of the Hearst Corporation, owner of San Francisco Examiner, it was revealed under deposition, had offered editorial support to Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco, then up for reelection, if Brown would give his official blessing to Hearstâ’s buying San Francisco Herald.

*8.*The death of John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife and her sister in a plane crash was treated by the media as, “The return of the Messiah or intelligent life on Mars”.  *9. *The Seattle protest during a meeting of WTO four months later, was virtually ignored till the meetings had to be closed down.

*10. *Monica Lewinsky, who had a scandalous affair with President Clinton in the White House and O.J. Simpson a football player who was convicted of murder (and is currently being tried for rape, got much more coverage. A few outstanding journalists produce good analytic pieces, but they are published as a token of impartiality and are swamped by pro-capitalist writings. *

11.*The issue of military spending does not find adequate coverage as it offers corporate welfare, whereas spending on education and health are vigorously criticized. *12. *The widening gulf between the richest 10% who own 76% of the nation’s net

worth,

(*13) *half of which is owned by the richest 1%, whose income went up steeply in 1980’s and 1990’s

(*14) *and the poorest 60% whose income went down in the same period is not mentioned in the commercial press.

15. On the other hand the boom of the 1990’s is vociferously lauded.

*16.*The prison population in the US has more than doubled since 1980’s; it has five times more prisoners per capita than Canada and seven times more than Western Europe. *With 5% of the world’s population, it has 25% of the worlds’ prisoner population.* Nearly 90% are held for nonviolent offenses and cannot be tried as the legal system is swamped.

*17.*Capitalism has found a new source of income in privatization of jail service. A considerable number are actually innocent of any crime. 

*18. *About 50% are African Americans, who are about thirteen and a half per cent of the US population. The sentences are class based. In 2000, a Texan black young man got sixteen years for stealing a candy bar, while executives of Hoffman-LaRoche, who were found guilty of conspiring to eliminate competition in the vitamin industry, characterized by the Justice Department as the biggest anti-trust case in history, causing incalculable billions of dollars of losses to the public, were fined $75,000 to $350,000 and jail terms of three to four months.

19. Corporations are after the Internet. AOL made a deal with Time Warner to keep internet from competing with media. Thanks to Bill Clinton, we have an oligopoly of five corporations controlling 90% of international media of communications. Before him, eighty corporations owned the media.

*20.* Vital decisions are made behind closed doors outside the purview of public discourse. Federal Communications Commission wanted to offer diversity by means of Micro-radio, which could be used to transmit a high quality signal to large metropolitan areas. The Radio lobby went to work at the House of Representatives and got it to scotch the plan in April, 2000.

*21.* An article in New York Times in May 2000, regulators in Clinton years have signed off on big mergers, which would have been unthinkable a generation ago”. Clinton went further than Reagan did and Bush II could.

*22.* Corporate capitalism has consistently subverted the liberal tradition, leaving them with little choice between becoming openly anti-capitalist or caving in. Most of them have adopted the latter course. All the so called liberal champions, Carter, Clinton and Gore have built their careers in the service of corporations. The law Professor Lawrence Lessig, acknowledged authority on the Internet, asserted that it was the right of people to adopt whatever system they liked the best. Since we all dislike government interventionism, we could not demand intervention in the corporate drive to internet domination.

*23.* The main faction of conservatives in the US (and the West in general) is a proponent of the right of corporations to dominate the World without popular protest. The other is the religious establishment, which works assiduously to link evangelical Christianity to the agenda of the pro-market right.

*24. * Before the 1940 s, a substantial number of conservatives were against large military, secret police and intelligence establishments. Today the topic is off limits.

*25. *They now comprehend the utility of the services for controlling 75% of the physical assets of the world. Offering invaluable assistance to the capitalist society, the corporate media is indispensable to depoliticisation of the society. The coverage NGOs get is just one facet of the scheme.

*26* Jean Kirkpatrick, the arch deaconess of Neo-liberalism justified the US support of brutal totalitarian societies on the ground that they protected capitalism.

*27. *We are fortunately entering a new era of politicization. Students unions are being re-energized and protests are exploding.

*28.* And it is not just the students who are waking up. Movements against police brutality, racist discrimination, women’s rights, environmental depredation, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation, and the World Bank machinations on behalf of corporations and sweat shops are gathering strength.

*29.*  Ref:

1.      Telecommunication act of 1996, introduced by Larry Pressler, March

13, 1995, passed October 12, 1995, signed into law by Bill Clinton February

8, 1996 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996.

2.      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood_debate

3.      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media

4.      ibid 1

5.      medialifemagazine.com/ex/reporter-cbs-news-reluctant-criticize/.

6.     www.bostonphoenix.com/archives/features/00/05/04/DON_P_QUOTE_ME.html

7.      www.timesfreepress.com/news/2012/feb/25/corrupting/super/pacs/

8. www.sfgate.com/news/article/Full-Text-Of-Judge-Walker-s-Ruling-2712167.php

9. www.bing. com/videos/search? =jfk+plane+crash+treated+like+a+huge+media+event&qpvt

10.   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests

11.radgeek.com/gt/2010/05/13/free-market-anti-capitalism-is-this-all-just-a-semantic-debate/

12.   www.navalreview.ca/2014/05/federal-defence-spending  -versus-federal-health-and-education-spending/

13.www.holtz.org/Library/Social%20Science/Economics/Economic%20Inequality%20in%20the%20United%20States.htm

14.   Ibid

15.   money.cnn.com/2012/09/12/news/economy/median-income-poverty/index.html

16.   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_United_States_boom

17.www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/federal-prison-population-n-2638844.html

18.   Ibid

19.   www.commondreams.org/views/041100-106.htm;

www.lawyersandsettlements.com/settlements/03452/vitamin.html?opt=b&utm_expid=3607522-6.CQR-xUqRR1-q6QXM51tyxA.1&utm_referrer=htpp%3A%2F%

<http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/settlements/03452/vitamin.html?opt=b&utm_expid=3607522-6.CQR-xUqRR1-q6QXM51tyxA.1&utm_referrer=htpp%3A%2F%25>

20.   Ibid 1

21.   Ac-journal.org/journal/vol3/Iss3.rogue4/highspeed.html

22.   Ibid 1.

23.   www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2003/Lessigcopyright.html

24. www.christianpost.com/news/an-anti-cronyism-and-free-market-agenda-119209/

25. www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-invisible-government-revealed/

26.   www.ngopulse.org/category/tags/media-coverage

27.   En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism>

28. www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer/sheet/wp/2014/04/15/testing-resistance-movement-exploding-around-country/

29.   www.twnside.org.sg/title/peop-cn.ht.

S. Akhtar Ehtisham M.D