From Vantara to forest reserves, photo ops trump journalism

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 13, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/03/13/from-vantara-to-forest-reserves-photo-ops-trump-journalism

Compared to the Trump Tsunami that has the US president literally flooding the media with new and almost always controversial statements every day, our leaders and their politics appear almost dull. 

Even as he announced drastic job cuts in his country and the stock market went into a deep dive, Donald Trump found the time to promote his close friend and confidante Elon Musk’s electric car, Tesla, on the lawns of the White House. The concept of conflict of interest clearly does not exist in the era of Trump that we have now entered. There may be a few parallels in India.

Meanwhile, in India, the stock markets have been volatile. And there are other raging controversies, such as on the language issue and delimitation. But our prime minister seemed unperturbed as he spent a day endorsing the efforts of Anant Ambani, son of Mukesh Ambani, in setting up an animal rescue facility and what some may call a private zoo – Vantara in Jamnagar. 

Modi posed, stroking a lion who was safely ensconced in a glass cage. He was also photographed feeding tiger cubs. And all this promotional material was amplified without a question by mainstream media. There were no queries about the facility, how many animals it had, from where these animals had been brought, at what price, and whether the environment in which they were caged was suitable for them.

One newspaper did raise some questions shortly after Modi’s visit to Vantara. The Telegraph ran a story quoting a report by the Wildlife Protection Forum of South Africa (WAPFSA) which raised some uncomfortable questions about Vantara. Strangely, that story has now been taken down. And the PDF of that report as well as the statement by WAPFSA has also disappeared from its website.

But before that happened, it was mentioned in reports in Down to Earth and in Scroll, amongst other independent portals. 

The PDF of the WAPFSA report, which this columnist accessed before it disappeared, pointed out that Vantara had purchased wild animals from South Africa, some of which were endangered.  

It stated: “According to published articles, between 2019 and present day, the Radhe Krishna Temple Elephant Welfare Trust and the GZRRC have amassed what is described as an extraordinary assemblage of wildlife, including multiple endangered species. GZRRC started, according to the exact terminology of a published article, with an opening ‘stock’ of 1873 animals and during one year 2022 – 2023 acquired a further 1946 animals.” 

GZRCC stands for Greens Zoological Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre, an affiliate of Vantara.

The Down to Earth story also mentions the animals in captivity at Vantara and quotes WAPFSA: “Most wildlife experts agree that placing animals in any captive environment is itself a form of mistreatment. A life in captivity in a zoo, no matter how advanced the zoo facilities may be, can never equal a life lived in natural surroundings. Captivity enforces conditions upon wild animals in which they are not adapted to thrive.” 

Earlier in the year, Deccan Herald carried a story reporting that activists in Assam were worried about the way 21 captive elephants had been transported from Arunachal Pradesh to Jamnagar for the Vantara facility.

But these are exceptions. No questions asked or raised, no effort to get the back story. That now is the dominant norm in most of mainstream media when it comes to anything endorsed by the prime minister or the government.

For instance, after Vantara, Modi visited the 58th tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh. An obvious question that any self-respecting media organisation should have asked is: how are the other 57 doing?

Tiger sanctuaries were enthusiastically promoted in the 1970s when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister. Project Tiger was hardly ever questioned except by a few journalists and activists. Anil Agarwal, the pioneering environmental journalist who set up the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), wrote this in “The State of India’s Environment 1982: A Citizens’ Report” about Project Tiger: “Project Tiger is a spectacular landmark in our efforts at wildlife conservation. A serious flaw in this approach, however, is highlighted by the situation in the Periyar Tiger Reserve. Here, several tribal villages were shifted out of the core zone. Dispossessed of their habitat, the tribals soon lost the little land they were given as compensation, and became pauperised. At the same time, the authorities did not remove four cardamom estates in the heart of the core zone”.

Since then, the rights of forest dwellers have found support, and the Forest Rights Act was passed in 2006. The law is not perfect but at least it recognises that forests are not just for animals but also for the people who have always lived there. However, as with so many reasonably good laws in this country, it is observed in the breach. Unless people protest, no one pays heed to such rights, particularly when the people involved are at the bottom of the economic pyramid. 

And of course, only if people come out in substantial numbers on the streets does the media pay any heed to what they are saying.

Agarwal’s observations of the Periyar Tiger Reserve are echoed even today in other tiger reserves. Take this story by The Hindu’s Odisha correspondent Satyasundar Barik on tiger sanctuaries in the state. He points out that not only were the Adivasis forced to relocate but that out of four tiger sanctuaries in the state, one has no tigers and yet vast lands have been emptied out for it.

And this story in Down to Earth points out that even today, literally thousands of Adivasis are being evicted from lands they have occupied for generations by the process of creating inviolate spaces for tigers and other wildlife.  

“These evictions are affecting nearly 400,000 Adivasis, who are now fighting to defend their homes and heritage. Protests have erupted in major tiger reserves such as Nagarhole, Kaziranga, Udanti-Sitanadi, Rajaji, and Indravati. Demonstrators are calling for an immediate halt to what they describe as illegal actions by the government.”

You will not know any of this if you only follow mainstream media. Of course, there was a time when newspapers devoted space to environmental stories, even those that made the government or corporations uncomfortable. But that is in the past. In today’s media reality, the only environment that interests the mainstream is what happens in big cities. So, air quality, and sometimes water quality, will feature as environmental stories.

Meanwhile in the rest of the country, not only are thousands of Adivasis being displaced, but rivers are being poisoned, glaciers are melting, land degradation is evident, and the mad pace of infrastructure construction everywhere is turning cities, and even small towns into dust bowls.

US tariffs, impact on economy: USAID row helps bury the big questions

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on February 28, 2025

Link:  https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/02/28/us-tariffs-impact-on-economy-usaid-row-helps-bury-the-big-questions

Can the media avoid falling for the politics of distraction? Apparently not, as far as the media in India is concerned.

There is no better illustration of this than the recent controversy over an apparent US $21 million that USAID is supposed to have given to an organisation based in Washington DC to fund “voter turnout” in India.  This came up because US President Donald Trump has gone on something of a warpath against USAID, claiming it was wasting his country’s funds by giving money to countries for projects that were unsupportable.

If this was the case, then there was no story there. But the decision to cancel USAID for projects overseas took a turn in India that could have been considered funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.

Within days of Trump’s announcement about cancelling the $21 million for India, the blame game was in full swing. The BJP’s Information and Technology Cell head Amit Malviya called the Congress party “desperate” and accused it of routing the USAID fund through “various George Soros-linked fronts and a labyrinth of NGO structures to meddle with India’s electoral process”. Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh responded by pointing out that “USAID is currently implementing seven projects in collaboration with the government of India, with a combined budget of approximately $750 million. Not a single of these projects has to do with voter turnout. All of them are with and through the Union government.”

To add masala to this “unhinged public discourse”, as The Hindu termed it in its editorial, the originator of the controversy, Donald Trump himself, added to the confusion by first reiterating that the funds had been given because “I guess they were trying to get somebody else elected.” And then claiming the funds were going “to my friend Prime Minister Modi in India for voter turnout”, and then arbitrarily reducing the amount from $21 million to $18 million.

Meanwhile, the Indian media, especially television news that loves a good controversy, parroted all this without as much as a raised eyebrow. 

Fortunately, we still have some print media organisations that do what any journalistic endeavour should do: investigate and find out facts.

The Indian Express led with a front-page story that established that the magical figure of $21 million was the exact same as what USAID had given to organisations in Bangladesh in the run-up to the 2024 general elections. And the USAID website had no record of a similar amount going to India. So, did Trump get mixed up between Dhaka and Delhi? Or was this part of a deliberate strategy to stir up a controversy?

The controversy ought to have been settled after the Indian Express story. Subsequently more “facts”, rather than rhetoric, appeared in the print media when official government documents established that in the last four years, the government has received $650 million for a variety of projects as outlined by the fact-check site Boom. And that over the years, irrespective of the government in power, USAID has been funding official government projects in India – including healthcare, education and sanitation – as illustrated by this graphic in Times of India. 

Times of India

In addition to this, it is entirely possible that some non-governmental organisations received funds from foundations or non-profits in the US that were partly funded by USAID.  Even if some did, we still need to establish if any of them were even remotely involved in something as political as enhancing “voter turnout”. Given that the Modi government has cancelled the FCRA (Foreign Contributions Regulation Act) licenses of thousands of NGOs, it is unlikely that any of those considered even remotely political would have survived the axe.

Apart from finding out the facts and reporting them, rather than routinely repeating accusations by politicians on both sides, what really needs to be investigated is why the BJP trumped this up as a major controversy for which predictably, both the opposition and mainstream media fell. And who gains from it.

This politics of distraction is now a well-known ploy. As Ravish Kumar points out in one of his recent programmes, while we were discussing many non-issues, the country’s stock markets were falling and no one was asking the government why this was happening. While the governments of Assam and Madhya Pradesh were hosting “global” investment meetings, there was hardly any discussion about the consequences of Trump’s threat that he would charge India the same tariffs as India charged for US imports. How would this affect the Indian economy and foreign investment? Did the Modi government have a strategy to handle the consequences of raised tariffs? These questions were left hanging in the air.

And as suddenly as it popped up, the USAID controversy has disappeared. The government has not confirmed or denied this mythical sum of $21 million for “voter turnout” despite making statements that it was concerned and was looking into it. And the Indian media has dropped the subject. 

Also, now that the Maha Kumbh has ended, even the controversy about the quality of the water in the Ganges in which millions of people took a dip, generated by the report of the Central Pollution Control Board, will not be discussed anymore even though the state of India’s rivers ought to be an urgent concern for everyone, irrespective of their religious significance.

To end, I leave you with this article by Shailendra Yashwant in Deccan Herald on the state of the Yamuna, one of the three rivers that form part of the Sangam in Prayagraj. It reminds us of the crisis our rivers face as they continue to be blocked by dams and barrages, slowing down their natural flow, and then treated as sewers along the way by every town and city on their banks until their waters are not only unfit for drinking but even for bathing.

A CM resigns, a journalist is abducted: The ‘war of narratives’ in Manipur

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on February 14, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/02/14/a-cm-resigns-a-journalist-is-abducted-the-war-of-narratives-in-manipur

On February 9, Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh handed in his resignation to the governor of the state. A little over a day later, 20 armed men barged into the home of a senior journalist in Imphal, abducted him, and held him captive.

These developments are possibly not connected. But the journalist was Yambem Laba, a familiar name in Manipur. He currently writes for The Statesman, Kolkata, and is known as a human rights activist. He’s also been an open and trenchant critic of Biren Singh. On the evening of February 10, he was a panelist on a local channel discussing Biren Singh’s resignation. He once again criticised Biren Singh and, in the early hours of February 11, he was abducted from his home. 

Laba was released the next day after he made a public apology to the suspected abductors – the United National Liberation Front, one of the oldest armed militant groups operating in Manipur. The trigger for the abduction apparently was Laba stating on TV that the group had “surrendered” when it signed a peace agreement with the Biren Singh government in November 2023. 

Whatever the truth, although the attention of the media is fixed on who will take Biren Singh’s place now that President’s rule has been declared, Laba’s abduction and subsequent release is a reminder of the precarious conditions under which journalists operate in Manipur, and elsewhere in Northeast India.

While the Northeast is often lumped as one “conflict-ridden” area by what people there refer to as “mainland” media, it is inaccurate and inappropriate to generalise because each of the eight states comprising Northeast India have distinct histories, politics, cultures and causes for current and past tensions. 

Manipur, of course, has been paralysed by the ethnic strife that has stretched over 21 months, killing at least 260 people, displacing an estimated 60,000 people, and leaving behind a mountain of distrust and hate between the warring communities that cannot be wished away easily. There is today a virtually unsurpassable divide between areas where the Kuki-Zo people live in the hills, and the Imphal valley inhabited by the majority community of Meitei. 

Most journalists reporting from Manipur used to be based in Imphal. In the past, they could travel and report on the other parts of the state. Today, it would be impossible for a Meitei journalist based in Imphal to travel freely in Kuki dominated areas to find out what is happening and report on it, and vice versa. 

 

As a result, the information coming from these two separate parts of the state are generated by people living in those areas. Given the distrust between the two sides, neither is willing to believe what the other side reports. 

An Imphal-based journalist pointed out that the only news sent to newspaper offices in Imphal from the Kuki areas comes through official channels, namely the Department of Information and Public Relations. Clearly, this government organisation is not going to issue press releases about the conflict. As a result, he said that “we have lost the idea of a neutral voice”, something that journalism is supposed to be.

Traditional media houses in Manipur, as elsewhere in the region, have been hampered not just by the lack of access to parts of the state, but also the financial reality of operating in a state where the only source of revenue is government advertising. Predictably, the narrative that is played out is one that is approved by the party in power, in this case the BJP. Going against it could mean cutbacks in advertising, or other pressures.

With formal media channels so restricted, most of the information circulating in the state is dependent on social media postings – some true, some partly true, and some blatantly untrue. Siphoning through this flood of information is difficult if not virtually impossible when the obvious avenues for cross-verification are unavailable. Who do you call to check? Every side, including the “authorities”, have their own version. 

   

While Manipuri journalists have been severely restricted in their ability to report, how have journalists from the “mainland” media managed? Local journalists often speak resentfully about “parachute” journalism and how they are used by journalists from the rest of the country to provide logistics, translation and contacts. This resentment is understandable, especially when such journalists fly in, embed themselves with security forces to gain access, and then fly out without gaining any real understanding of the complexity of the troubles that have overtaken the state.  

Most of the information circulating in the state is dependent on social media postings – some true, some partly true, and some blatantly untrue. Siphoning through this flood of information is difficult if not virtually impossible when the obvious avenues for cross-verification are unavailable. Who do you call to check? Every side, including the “authorities”, have their own version. 

It is such reporting, usually by television channels, that has added to what one journalist described as a “trust deficit”. As a result, even when independent journalists make their own way, depend on civil society and other contacts to access both sides, and report in as even-handed a way as they can, they also must overcome this initial suspicion from both sides. It is not always easy. Both sides have what this journalist called “gatekeepers”, who decide how much access to provide a journalist reporting on the conflict. Also, even if independent journalists are technically from the larger Northeastern region, they are still looked upon as “outsiders”.

Against this reality, anyone setting out to document the developments of the last 21 months in Manipur, using media as the “first draft of history”, would have a really difficult time. Although there has been some excellent reporting by a handful of independent journalists, who have persisted and returned to the state despite the difficulties they encounter, these are the exceptions.

Such in-depth reporting has been largely missing from “mainland” print media, again barring a couple of exceptions. Even those newspapers that have correspondents based in Guwahati often do not provide them the space, or the time, to do the kind of layered reporting that is needed to convey the reality of the conflict in Manipur.  

We are all the poorer for this.

Apart from Manipur, even in a state like Assam, where communal tensions simmer and sometimes boil over because of the blatant anti-Muslim rhetoric and politics of the BJP-led state government, some Muslim journalists say that their names, which reveal their religious identity, now hamper access. The people they call sometimes judge their line of questioning as hostile even if they are genuinely trying to get information. 

A brief visit to Meghalaya, a state that is rarely in the news, revealed another challenge that local journalists face. While journalists in Manipur are labelled as Meitei or Kuki-Zo, in Meghalaya the divide is between tribal and non-tribal. Within tribal, it comes down to their ethnicity – Khasi, Garo and Jaintia. It is assumed that as a journalist, you will not report or write against your ethnic group.

In 2018, Patricia Mukhim, editor of Shillong Times, was attacked, with a firebomb thrown at her house in the night because she had criticised a militant Khasi group. Mukhim is a Khasi. Despite this, Mukhim continues to be outspoken. She has campaigned against rat-hole mining, thereby angering powerful local interests in coal mining who demand that the 2014 ban on it by the National Green Tribunal be lifted. She has been trolled and vilified each time she writes anything critical about campaigns against so-called “outsiders” or non-tribals. Once again, her identity is sought to be reduced to her ethnicity, while she argues that she is doing her job as a journalist, calling the powerful to account and rejecting hate politics.  

Whether a state is torn apart as in Manipur, or tensions lurk just under the surface, journalists based in the region have to tread carefully, manoeuvring between state governments that want to push a particular narrative and their detractors, sometimes consisting of armed groups. It is, as a journalist reporting from the region pointed out “a war of narratives” in which journalists are caught.  

We in the so-called “mainland” should be concerned about the state of the media and the difficulties faced by journalists in the Northeast. Because if journalists cannot do what they are trained to do, to seek out information from all sides, verify it, and report as even-handedly as possible, and if on top of it, what we report is measured through the filter of our ethnicity or religious identity, then journalism as we have known it is in deep trouble.  

Bhopal tragedy, Delhi haze, Assam mine deaths: One thread binds them all

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on January 16, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/01/16/bhopal-tragedy-delhi-haze-assam-mine-deaths-one-thread-binds-them-all

A haze hangs over many cities in India, including New Delhi. It contains poisons that can permanently debilitate millions of people; in fact it has already done that.

But it is nothing like the haze, the cloud of poison, that enveloped Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh late night on December 2, 1984. That night thousands died even as they tried to escape the cloud to avoid breathing in the poison. And they fell as they ran, because the poison entered their lungs. Those who survived continue to suffer the consequences of that night.

What links the current state of Indian cities, some of the most polluted in the world, and that night in Bhopal are several factors: negligence, indifference of those with the power to make things right, and the fact that the worst hit are also the poorest.

We have been compelled to remember the Bhopal disaster, when deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC) escaped from the fertiliser plant run by the Indian subsidiary of the US-based multinational company Union Carbide because after 40 years of campaigning and judicial intervention, some of the poisons that remain in the soil of the abandoned site have now been moved out, 337 tonnes to be exact.

The fact that this waste had to be moved out of Bhopal to the outskirts of another city, Indore, tells us a story that has not been reported. That the long-suffering population of Bhopal, that has lived with the consequences of being present when one of the world’s worst industrial accidents took place, would never have permitted a waste treatment plant in the city to deal with these poisons. So accompanied by high drama, the waste was transported to Pithampur outside Indore. Only to be met by stiff resistance from the population living there. And with good reason as explained here.

For the media, the Bhopal story reached a crescendo in the immediate aftermath of the terrible catastrophe but then ebbed and almost disappeared. Thereafter, it raised its head only when the victims of the disaster spoke up, demanding the disbursal of compensation and medical assistance, or to expose the fact that the poisons in the abandoned factory site were polluting the ground water in the areas around, and affecting the health of more people.

The problem with reporting only events, such as the moving out of waste from the Bhopal plant, without informing readers about the context, is that our understanding of what the Bhopal disaster really represented remains limited. At a time of distraction and diminished attention spans, there are generations that have grown up without knowing anything about the Bhopal disaster. 

The Bhopal Gas Tragedy, as it is often called, was not just another accident. It was a story of negligence, exposed by brave local journalists like the late Raj Kumar Keswani, of the indifference of the state government in allowing people to inhabit areas around a plant using hazardous chemicals, and the shameful manner in which the central government reached a settlement with Union Carbide for what was considered even then a pittance: US $470 million. A powerful multinational company escaped criminal liability because it operated through a subsidiary in India. In the country of its origin, the US, it would not have escaped so lightly. 

Meanwhile, the media has dropped the ball on tracking hazardous industries as it did in the years immediately after Bhopal. Then you would see some investigative stories about hazardous industries. These reports exposed how many of these industries were getting away with discharging toxic effluents into local water bodies without being monitored or checked. Journalists asked questions of pollution control boards. They exposed how inspectors were paid off by small and bigger industries to give them a clean chit. Some of this did result in pressure on hazardous industries to conform.

Forty years later, we do not read such stories. Does this mean industrial pollution has disappeared? Are our water bodies, especially in rural areas away from the media spotlight, free of such pollution? If people in these areas ask questions, or protest, do we hear about it?

These questions appear almost rhetorical because the answers are obvious. In small print, inside the city pages of some newspapers, you sometimes read stories about how in industrial estates, surrounded by settlements, there has been an explosion, or a leakage of hazardous chemicals. The locals protest. There is minimal coverage. And then nothing more. Was the company fined? Taken to court? Who inspected the factory? Why was the leak not detected? Who is responsible for the negligence? Was there any accountability? 

Once again, the answers to these questions are obvious. Forty years after Bhopal, we have laws like the Environment Protection Act 1986. We have systems to check hazardous industries like pollution control boards. But essentially, it is business as usual.

Apart from the continued indifference of governments, at the state and central level, what remains true today as it was 40 years ago is that without civic activism and an empathetic media, nothing changes.  

The other incident that ought to set off some introspection in the media is that of the tragic accident in Dima Hasao in Assam where nine miners were stuck inside a flooded “rat-hole” coal mine.

The description of such a mine, a “rat-hole”, illustrates the callous, almost murderous method, of retrieving coal because using machines is too expensive. Men are pushed down these holes with barely space to move and must manually dig out the coal, the black gold that will make some people rich. But in the process, these men, desperate for any kind of work, risk life and limb without much by way of compensation.

In 2014, the National Green Tribunal banned such rat-hole mines. There were no ifs and buts. They were banned. And yet, today we are reading about yet another disaster. As with Bhopal, in the post ban period, were there investigative stories to expose whether the ban was being observed at all? Were state governments doing anything to stop it? 

Does the media always need a disaster, or the intervention of the court, to report on such environmentally dangerous and callous methods of mining? Will our media take its gaze away from politics and politicians for a moment to think about the continuance of rat-hole mining and what this means for the families of the men who drowned in the Dima Hasao rat-hole coal mine? 

This column has asked questions because I believe that is the media’s job, one that it is barely doing today. The absence of such questioning reflects the same indifference for which we blame governments. 

As always, there are honourable exceptions. But glance at your daily newspaper, and if you have the stomach for it, watch news on any television channel, and you would have to ask: Is there nothing else happening in India for the media to report apart from elections, politics and the exhortations of politicians? 

 

The 2024 election didn’t change the media much. But readers can hope for better this year

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on Jan 3, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/01/03/the-2024-election-didnt-change-the-media-much-but-readers-can-hope-for-better-this-year

New Year resolutions are made to be broken, we are told. And hopes and expectations for the New Year are also, probably, destined to lead to disappointment. But there’s no harm in hoping that some things will change, as far as the media is concerned, even if much remains the same in 2025.

Will Indian mainstream media, that has favoured the prostrate pose by and large, sit up even a little in 2025? Is that expecting too much after a decade of being mostly supine? Let me start with one example that holds out a sliver of hope that perhaps something is stirring. 

On New Year’s Eve, Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh “apologised” to the people of Manipur. He said he wanted to say sorry to the people of the state for what had happened since May 3, 2023. “I really feel regret and would like to apologise to all natives,” he said. But he then went on to say, “Whatever happened has happened. We have to forgive and forget the past mistakes and make a new beginning.”

Manipuris on all sides cannot forget leave alone forgive a government that has looked the other way for 20 months as hundreds have been killed and thousands displaced in the ethnic conflict that has paralysed this northeastern state. 

Singh’s apology drew sharp editorials in leading English language newspapers, including Indian Express, The Hindu, Times of India, The Telegraph and Hindustan Times. However, while all said that the apology was “too little and too late”, it was The Hindu that called out the culpability of the central government.   

Referring to the annual home ministry report on the northeastern region, which attributed 77 percent of the increase in violence to Manipur, the paper reminded the government that while acknowledging this is a beginning, it is not enough. 

Furthermore, by declaring in the report that the Northeast was on the path to peace, the home ministry was effectively “burying its head in the sand”. 

Perhaps this is just a nuance, but it is interesting that while all the newspapers criticised Biren Singh, only a few underlined the role of the central government in the on-going strife in the state. 

The centre has not just failed to haul up the state government but has continued to treat the ethnic violence in the state as a law-and-order problem and refused to acknowledge the partisan policies of the state government. 

This hesitation to call out the centre and the prime minister, who has continued his silence even as a state in the union continues to burn, suggests that mainstream print media continues to tread carefully. One had hoped, given the results of the 2024 general elections and the BJP’s reduced numbers in the Lok Sabha, that national newspapers would have felt more confident to be critical of the central government and its policies. That they would have followed up and investigated how the content of the boastful advertisements from the central and state governments that they willingly carry does not reflect the reality on the ground. This has not happened and as of now, looks unlikely that it will.

Therefore, my new year hope that mainstream print media (in English) will develop something of a spine is probably misplaced.

The other hope is that the government will junk the Broadcasting Services Bill, which has now been pushed onto the backburner.

That too might be wishful thinking as the very fact that such a law was formulated in the first place indicated an intent – to curb the few independent spaces that exist online. There is no sign that this intent has changed so far. 

So, one can expect that in one form or the other, the pinpricks by independent digital media will be sought to be checked or squashed by the central government and some state governments.

Will independent journalists, those who dare to speak out or write critically, and the platforms that carry their reports and comments be spared the rod in the form of threats, arrests, income tax raids etc that have been the norm in the last years?

We can always wish and hope for a change of heart in the government but again, as with the broadcasting bill, there is no indication that the intent to hound critics has disappeared. It might be somnolent at this moment. But probably not for very long. 

As for journalists in jail, of the seven who are still in prison, the majority are from Jammu and Kashmir. I am thinking of Asif Sultan, former editor of Kashmir Narrator, who was rearrested after spending five years in jail. There is Sajad Gul of Kashmir Walla who was arrested in 2022 but released on bail in October last year and Majid Hyderi and Irfan Mehraj who are still in jail.

Despite elections having been held in the union territory, here too there is little to indicate that the elected government led by Omar Abdullah of the National Conference will make any difference to the future of these journalists. In fact, one of the few reports in a mainstream newspapers that tells us about the powerlessness of the Abdullah government is this report by Peerzada Ashiq in The Hindu where he writes: “It is becoming more and more evident that Raj Bhavan and the Chief Minister’s Office are not just two power centres but two different ideological forces.” And the power centre that remains dominant is controlled by the Centre. 

Despite all this, we can and should hope for better times. Not because we believe that there will be an unexpected change of heart in the men who run this country. That they will realise the importance of a free, critical and independent media in a democracy. But because despite intimidation and lack of resources, independent media still survives, and courageous journalists still go out and do stories that the government would prefer are never told.

Here are a couple of the many stories that are noteworthy from recent days. Take the time to read them to realise the vast difference between what is dished out to you every day in the newspaper that you read, that is if you read one at all, and the kind of journalism that is needed for democracy to survive in this country.

Omar Rashid, who was once The Hindu’s UP correspondent, has written this fascinating report in The Wire.  He exposes how the UP government is literally spoon-feeding the media on the kind of stories it ought to be doing in the lead up to the Maha Kumbh Mela. This includes suggesting who should be interviewed and the angles that ought to be explored. A letter from the publicity department of the state government to the media spells out no less than 70 story ideas, something even an experienced editor would be hard put to assemble. Having read this, it would be interesting to see what the media does report on Maha Kumbh Mela.

The other noteworthy story is this two-part series by Shreegireesh Jallihal of the Reporters’ Collective. It exposes how the Modi government has gone about “fixing” global indices such as the Global Hunger Index, in which India was ranked an unflattering 102 out of 171 countries. The strategy involves going beyond dismissing them as inaccurate or discrediting them, which the government does each time a global ranking is announced. Instead, it is developing its own ranking based on what it claims is accurate data.  

In the end, rankings are supposed to represent a ground reality that the media must explore. It rarely does. Here is one reality check provided by the digital platform Article 14 where three elderly women workers speak about the struggle to access security schemes announced with so much fanfare by the UP government, and amplified by the media.