Danish Siddiqui and his journalism – a non-hagiographical account

Reuters photojournalist Danish Siddiqui on Friday was killed by the Taliban terrorists in the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar after he had been embedded with the Afghan special forces to cover the clash between forces and Taliban fighters. Immediately after Danish’s death, his left-liberal cabal comrades coalesced together and instead of calling out the Talibani terrorists, engaged in petty squabbling with the Internet trolls and dubbed them as the reason for his untimely death.

Moreover, the brigade, much like it does with every one of its kin, started to make a hero out of Danish. The photojournalist knew the risks of going to the battlefield where the enemy didn’t care if a journalist succumbed to death as the collateral damage. It was the occupational hazard of the job and props should be given to him for having the steely nerves to continue reporting from such dire conditions.

However, Siddiqui is not the first journalist to have died while being on duty and certainly not the greatest journalist that the country has ever produced, as the left through its hagiographical obituary posts wants the general public to believe.

A quick glance over his work reveals that Danish used the misery of the people during the peak of the second wave of the pandemic to increase his business. At a time when India was reeling with the unprecedented surge of the delta variant of the virus, some self-loathing Indians enrolled on the payrolls of ‘vested interests’ foreign publications, resorted to their usual style of reporting by painting a dystopian reality using aesthetic drone photos of crematoriums to drive their agenda. And not surprisingly, the said aesthetic photos were clicked by Danish.

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Danish’s photo of Rohingya refugees appears to humanize their illegal entry into the country. And while detractors might say that Danish was simply doing his job, no one has batted their eye for reporting the photo of a migrant family leaving the city on foot to reach their village during the first lockdown. The mass exodus of migrants happened but again it boiled down to the apathy of the state governments, more than the centre as the likes of Kejriwal pushed them out while a leader in Nitish Kumar refused to accept them.

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However, when photos of North East Delhi riots pre-dominantly aim to target a particular community, one tends to question if the camera shutter only worked when pointed at Hindu miscreants or it just stopped enigmatically when the perpetrator was a Muslim. This is where Danish’s legacy as a photojournalist was sealed.

After Danish’s death, the photo of his dead body started traversing the realms of social media platforms, and few liberal elites who had openly endorsed the publication of pictures from the crematorium demanded that netizens not share the pictures, as they didn’t have the permission of the family.

However, flummoxed by the duality of the liberals, netizens started sharing sensitive photographs to expose the hypocrisy. A funeral is a close matter for any family, not for a journalist only. The same decency needed to be extended when funeral pyre photos were circulated with much vitriol.

An old tweet of Danish has also surfaced where he can be seeing cussing Hindus for celebrating Diwali as the ‘crackers’ were ‘killing’ him.

However, in what can be termed as a cruel turn of fate, Danish’s grieving family and its pictures are being sold on Getty images for a price as high as Rs 23,000. Perhaps, it might explain to fanatics on both sides of the political spectrum that the death and misery of one is profit for another. And those sneering and jeering at the photos of crematoriums and now Danish should get their act right.

There is no nobility in standing down your fellow human beings. If Danish had kept the ethics of his profession alive and refrained from publishing the contentious photo, he would not have received such divisive goodbye.