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Massacres and Media Representations

This article examines the cultural politics of representations of violence in Assam. It shows how the 1983 coverage of the Nellie massacre provides the framework for all media coverage, and the media, along with the region, are both ‘identified’ in terms of violent representations. It looks at the depiction of massacres in the North-East (NE) of India in the media and suggests that both media and region are affected by this process. From the first visuals of Nellie featured in India Today in 1983 to the recent carnage in the Kokrajhar region reported widely in both print and visual media, the consolidation of an interpretative frame of violence for the region as it reels under the effects of insurgent activities seems to be attributable to the media more than to any other agency. This depiction I suggest feeds into the neglect narrative that has characterized the region’s perception of treatment by ‘mainstream India’. Studying the neglect narrative, the deployment of long-term and wider concerns and the production of a ‘representation effect’ that partially aestheticizes violence this article argues that the media is affected in its modes and rhetoric by its visual repetition of the violent incident and it also, in the process, helps to make the viewer immune and indifferent to such violence.