Supriya Sharma

• Position: Special Correspondent, The Times of India
• Date of Fellowship: Hilary and Trinity terms, 2012
• Sponsor: Thomson Reuters Foundation

I began my career nearly ten years ago as part of the Mumbai reporting team of NDTV, India’s leading television broadcaster. When we were not reporting daily news, most often disasters – train accidents, terror attacks, floods, the aftermath of tsunami – we were looking for newer ways of telling compelling stories of a rapidly changing India.

This took me back and forth between metropolitan India and the rural hinterland to explore a diverse set of stories - child deaths in tribal areas due to chronic hunger; drought, debt and farm crisis; and a special investigation where my camera colleague and I posed as a Muslim couple hunting for an apartment, capturing on hidden camera the prejudices that underlie the cosmopolitan surface of a big city like Mumbai. 
 
In 2005, I found myself following a group of child workers picked up by the police from sweatshops in Mumbai and sent home to Bihar, one of the poorest states of India. This story eventually led me to move to Bihar for a year, cementing my interest in people and places that didn’t quite feature in the grand narrative of India’s rise as an economic power. 

Two years ago, The Times of India, the most widely read English newspaper in the country, offered me a job as their correspondent in Chhattisgarh, a state besieged by conflict, most notably the violent movement of Maoist rebels, throwing up a complex challenge to Indian democracy. This assignment turned out to be intense and challenging and I am glad to get an opportunity to step back, reflect and write about some of these debates, here at the Reuters Institute.

Research Project

Conflict Reporting: privileging violence over resistance

My project has emerged out of my reporting experience in Chhattisgarh. 
The state is part of the forest and mineral-rich belt of central and eastern India, where Adivasis or indigenous tribal people find themselves pitted against corporations eyeing land and resources.

It is broadly in this area that Maoist guerillas are taking on the Indian state, giving rise to the general belief that resource conflict and the Maoist rebellion overlap, and the former fuels the latter.
 
However, if you look more closely at Chhattisgarh, there is a geographical divide: the Maoists are confined to the south of the state, while the resource conflict is taking place in the north. The south has minerals too, but active mining is consuming more land in the north, more people are being edged out of their homes, and unlike the south where the Maoists have picked up arms, those displaced in the north are trying to resist using peaceful methods like protest and petitions. 

In my project, I explore the media’s coverage of mining unrest and the Maoists. More specifically, I try and contrast the coverage of armed conflict versus resource conflict in Chhattisgarh. I ask: Does the media give more attention to violent movements over peaceful resistance? Or to frame it another way, does it ignore voices of resistance until they turn violent?