How The Indian Government Is Silencing Journalists
Protests and a public health crisis have opened up a new chapter in a long fight for press freedom in India.
India’s prime minister, Narenda Modi, has not answered a single question from the media in his seven years in office. In the shadow of the pandemic and the socio-political turmoil of the last year, the government has stepped up its attempts at press suppression — part of an overt attempt to boost its own image and “neutralise” critics, as the minutes of a top-level ministerial meeting have revealed. The political upheaval and a public health catastrophe of the last year have opened a new chapter in a long fight for press freedom in India.
Take, for instance, the farmer’s protests. India has been roiled by ongoing demonstrations against a series of agricultural reform acts that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s ruling party led by Modi, passed in September 2020. Farmers’ groups have launched a massive movement to demand the withdrawal of the laws. Threatened by the level of support for the movement, the government has cracked down on media coverage of the protests.
In response to the protests, the government has cut off internet services to the protest camp, located at Singhu on the outskirts of Delhi, and targeted journalists reporting on the movement. Mandeep Punia, a 25-year-old reporter, was assigned to cover the protests for The Caravan, a long-form magazine that is one of the most critical voices in Indian journalism.
“On 30 January, BJP workers came to throw stones at the protesting farmers,” Punia says in an interview, speaking in his native Hindi. “I identified five BJP leaders who were involved, and made their names and photographs public.” He did so in a Facebook Live video that has since received 389,000 views. That evening, Punia was arrested on the charge of obstructing police work and locked up in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. “I was beaten up in police custody. I told them I was a reporter, but they tore up my press card and tossed it aside.”
Punia’s arrest sparked outrage. A large crowd of his fellow journalists, mostly from independent and digital outlets, protested outside the headquarters of Delhi’s police force, while senior politicians from the opposition Congress party accused the BJP of attempting to suppress both the free press and the voices of the protesting farmers. Punia, who was released on bail after four days in jail, says the sort of ordeal he experienced is becoming more and more common among India’s journalists.
Legal persecution against the press appears to be increasing. Between 1992 and 2021, no more than four journalists had been arrested in India each year. In January 2021 alone, police arrested five, including Punia, and initiated legal proceedings against at least eleven others, many on charges of sedition. Many of the charges were related to allegedly inciting violence through social media posts, or, as in Punia’s case, reporters’ alleged conduct while reporting.
The pressure on journalists and outlets covering the protests — now past its sixth month — is intense: the movement’s sustained nature, and the farmers’ deeply critical view of the BJP have clearly struck a nerve with the government. And for Punia and his fellow reporters? “It’s getting very difficult to report from the ground,” he says.
“Journalists in India have always operated in a bit of a difficult landscape,” says Aliya Iftikhar of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a watchdog in New York. Since 1992, 37 journalists have been murdered: Run down by an SUV for reporting on child marriage; shot dead for criticizing Hindu extremists; beaten to death for exposing political corruption, to name a few. But under Modi, the extent of press suppression in India has been stretched ever-further. According to the World Press Freedom Index, India’s ranking has slipped every year since 2017 and currently stands at 142.
“The environment for press freedom has drastically deteriorated,” says Iftikhar.
Modi’s second term, which began in 2019, has seen “a ramping up of every effort to suppress dissent,” says Hartosh Singh Bal, The Caravan’s political editor, speaking over the phone from Delhi. In his seven years as prime minister, Modi has given a single press conference — one where he did not answer any questions.
In the past year, a period of violent societal and political shocks, press suppression seems to have become a systemic and long-term facet of the government’s agenda. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, a veteran journalist who has faced legal action for his work reporting on the Modi government’s alleged ties to a powerful corporation, describes a bleak media landscape. Since Modi’s election in 2014, “Much of the mainstream media in India has become uncritical of the ruling dispensation,” he says in an email. “It can be argued that Modi’s political success has been assisted to a great extent by a compliant ‘fourth estate.’”
An ecosystem of rabidly right-wing news networks dominates both the English and Hindi airwaves, pumping a steady stream of government messaging into the ears and hearts of Indian viewers: pro-Modi and anti-opposition, pro-Hindu and anti-Islam, following the core tenets of Modi’s Hindu-nationalist BJP. The mainstream media has been reduced to “the private propaganda tool of the government,” says Bal. “The questioning of the exercise of power, the mediation of the relationship between the voter and those elected, can now only happen through small independent outlets.”
Right-wing news outlets help bolster the government’s anti-protest stance. The sites were found to be distributing false images tying the largely Sikh protestors to the separatist Sikh-nationalist Khalistani movement, propagating a baseless conspiracy theory that had been loudly trumpeted by senior BJP figures. Pro-government channels also echoed government leaders’ claims that the protests had been infiltrated by the BJP’s traditional targets – Muslims – and used a video of an unrelated tractor rally in Germany to suggest that a terror attack by farmers was imminent.
The farmer protests have been occuring in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which reporting has also faced serious challenges. As many as 55 journalists were subjected to threats, assault, and arrest between March and May 2020, found a report by Delhi-based human rights think tank Rights and Risk Analysis Group. For reporting on the stories that emerged from this humanitarian disaster – covering protests by starving workers, the failure of local governments to provide food aid, the continuing operation of factories despite a lockdown-imposed ban – media personnel were arrested and beaten up, their property seized by the state.
Iftikhar points to the sweeping expansion of government powers that the pandemic has brought, such as India’s invocation of the Disaster Management Act and the Epidemic Disease Act, which has been used to silence critical journalism. After publishing a story covering the government’s failure to provide emergency food rations in a village in Modi’s parliamentary constituency, Scroll.in, one of India’s leading digital news outlets, was slapped with dubious criminal charges in a case that its founding editor Naresh Fernandes described to me as “completely spurious”.
In India’s notoriously sluggish legal system, a lawsuit or criminal charge, no matter how frivolous, near-guarantees years of expensive and onerous legal strain, says Iftikhar: “It shows anybody in the media community what they’re going to have to deal with.” Such harassment can lead to rampant self-censorship, particularly among small, poorly-funded outlets, as media critical of the government often are.
Beyond its press suppression techniques, the Indian government has also sought to expand its legal control over independent media. New internet regulations introduced in February would force digital firms to collect more of their users’ data and respond within 15 days to any content-related complaint filed against them, as well as subjecting them to a system that is entirely overseen by government officials. It also gives the government the power to immediately block any content that it deems to be inappropriate.
Most of India’s few independent news agencies are exclusively online. Outlets such The Wire, Scroll, and Newsclick have provided a steady stream of critical reporting in recent years. Bringing these portals under the government’s purview would mean closing the last remaining arena of truly free reporting in India. The content-moderation rules would also leave such websites susceptible to the BJP’s legions of internet trolls. “They could swamp us with complaints, and a lot of our time could go just dealing with these grievances,” Fernandes tells me.
The vagueness of the regulations leaves plenty of space for government intervention. “Our Twitter handle was taken down during the farm protests,” says Mr Bal, under a provision abstractly protecting ‘public order.’ Under the new rules, he says, “You can kill news you don’t like immediately, without explanation, for as long as you want.”
This specifically online form of press persecution has a severe impact on news reportage in India. The farmers’ protests have been extensively covered by audio and video journalists from independent digital news websites, as well as freelancers working for these outlets.
The new rules threaten to severely damage the ability of such outlets to report without fear of reprisal, and curtail the dissemination of their work.
“Freedom of speech, press freedom – these are pillars that are absolutely critical to having a healthy democracy,” says Iftikhar. “Unfortunately, right now, that’s simply not the case.”
Nevertheless, says Fernandes, journalists will continue to do their work. “You keep reporting the way you’ve always reported. You can’t let the chilling effect get to you – that’s exactly what they want.”
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