From one WhatsApp to every frontpage: How ‘sources’ dictated the Delhi blast coverage

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 13, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/11/13/from-one-whatsapp-to-every-frontpage-how-sources-dictated-the-delhi-blast-coverage

Every time a suspected terror attack takes place in India, you can be certain about how it will play out in the Indian media.  

Without waiting for verifiable information, there will be confident conspiracy scenarios spelt out, it will be pronounced as “terror” even before there is official confirmation, the neighbouring country will be blamed, and those whose names are put out as possible suspects will be broadcast as the perpetrators of the crime even before there is adequate and plausible evidence to charge them. With its desperate need to beat the competition over a 24-hour news cycle, the spin given based on few, or even no facts, by TV channels will send many heads spinning.

Additionally, in today’s divisive political atmosphere, if the suspects happen to be Muslim, then inevitably the hate and invective against an entire community will be aired without any compunction. 

That is precisely what we have witnessed, yet again, after the explosion that killed 13 people and injured many more on the evening of November 10 near the Red Fort metro station in Delhi.  

We know now that it was an explosion in a car. We are told there is certainty about the identity of the person driving the car. And after two days of speculation, hints by “sources” and conspiracy theories set out with great certainty by the usual suspects on mainstream television channels, the Modi government finally issued a statement saying that it was a “heinous terror incident” by “anti-national forces.” The anticipated accusation that Pakistan was behind it, something that has occurred so routinely as to be taken for granted, was not in the statement.

What one should note, however, is that in the preceding two days before this statement, neither the Union Home Ministry, nor the Delhi Police that was on the spot, has held an official briefing for the media.

The reason this stands out as unusual is because in the past, when such incidents took place, the media has been briefed officially, and not through unofficial sources.  

In Mumbai for instance, when serial blasts took place on Mumbai’s suburban trains on July 11, 2006, at peak rush hour, in which 209 people were killed and more than 700 injured, reporters were sent out to the blast sites to speak to survivors and gauge the situation on the ground. But at the same time, the police held official briefings giving out what information it had on hand. There was little room, or for that matter time, for speculation. Mainstream media at that time largely stuck to basic journalistic norms, “err on the side of caution and verify.” In today’s media sphere, that sounds like something in a foreign language. 

In the days following the Mumbai serial blasts, people were questioned, detained and some arrested. Those charged with what was seen as a “terror attack,” faced a trial, were convicted, sent to jail, and some even given the death sentence.

Yet, in July this year, 12 of these men who had been charged and convicted for the 2006 train blasts in Mumbai were acquitted by the Bombay High Court. The court held that the prosecution had “utterly failed” in establishing that these men had committed the crime for which they were charged.  

Indeed, one of the men acquitted earlier this year, Ehtesham Siddiqui, spent 19 years in jail, some of them on death row, before finally being acquitted. Although the Supreme Court has stayed the Bombay High Court ruling, those acquitted, including Siddiqui have not been sent back to jail. While in jail, Siddiqui wrote a book on his experience titled, “Horror saga”. His story is important at a time when once again, people are being interrogated, and some will be charged for a “terror attack”. 

Also worth reading is this article by Aditya Menon in The Quint about previous such incidents in Delhi.

To come back to the Delhi blast, a story that will continue to unravel in the days ahead, it is interesting to view the similarity of the reporting in the national daily newspapers following the incident. None of them could quote a single person from the government who was prepared to go on record. All the reporting was attributed to “sources” which, those who cover the central government will tell you, are based on informal messages sent out to journalists like this one: 

Sharing informally, kindly attribute it to sources: 

•⁠  Raids by security agencies across multiple locations in Delhi-NCR and Pulwama, recovering significant quantities of explosives, are believed to have led the suspect to act hastily under mounting pressure. 

•⁠  ⁠Earlier, during raids carried out on November 9 and 10, 2025, in Faridabad, Haryana, almost 3,000 kg of explosives, along with detonators, timers and other bomb making material were caught and confiscated.  

•⁠  ⁠The explosion was caused by panic and desperation due to raids carried out by the security agencies to nab them.

•⁠  ⁠The bomb was premature and not fully developed, thus limiting the impact.

•⁠  ⁠The explosion did not create a crater, and no shrapnel or projectiles were found.

•⁠  ⁠A major attack has been averted, credited to ‘pan-India alertness and coordinated crackdown’ on suspect modules.

Not surprisingly, the next day’s newspapers reported precisely what was contained in the message quoted above. Incidentally, the name of the suspect driving the car with the explosives, Dr Umar Nabi, was all over the media even before the DNA test had established his identity. As were the names of the other doctors who are suspects in what is being called a “white-collar terror module.” 

Perhaps, given the nature of the media today, with people looking to social media platforms first for “breaking news” followed by mainstream TV channels and only after that to the print media, there is little point in hoping that any of this feeding frenzy, especially after a “terror attack,” will ever change.  

Nor can we expect that this plethora of avenues for information and disinformation that exist today will disappear any day soon.

Reflecting in many ways the wishful thinking of those of us who still believe that credible journalism is possible and needed, Varghese K George, the resident editor of The Hindu in Delhi put out this comment on X after the Delhi blast:

“News cannot be, and should not be, a 24×7 affair. Can we turn back the clock and have news bulletins at periodic intervals? If not three times a day, perhaps four?

"The link between clean public information and democracy is a well-established fact. The positive correlation between misinformation and democratic decline is also an evident fact. Social media is often rightly blamed for this, but legacy media too is complicit in this decadence. At the core of the media’s collapse is the pressure for a constant, unending requirement for ‘updates.’

"The reality is that there is not, and there cannot be, and there should not be, minute-to-minute updates on any news – whether it is a Delhi blast or a Supreme Court hearing. 

"News should happen first, then be processed by experts, and only then transmitted to the public. That is what mediation of information should be about."

“Mediation of information.” Yes, in an ideal world, that is the job of the media.  But is that possible today? Can we really turn back the clock? Or has that train left the station, never to return?

Washington Post’s Adani-LIC story fizzled out in India. That says a lot

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 30, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/10/30/washington-posts-adani-lic-story-fizzled-out-in-india-that-says-a-lot

Whether the story had substance or not, it is intriguing that there has been little to no follow up in mainstream print media to the Washington Post expose about the Life Insurance Corporation’s investments in Gautam Adani’s companies, allegedly at the behest of the Modi government.

Or perhaps, given the current state of much of our mainstream media, we should not be surprised that a story like this, in a major international outlet, landed in India and created only a small ripple before it disappeared. The ripple was the result of the Congress demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee to investigate the allegations.

The tepid response in the Indian media cannot be dismissed merely by observing that given the media’s fixation with elections, currently the forthcoming elections in Bihar, there is neither time nor space to follow-up on the story. There is clearly more to this.

The Washington Post has alleged in its exclusive published on October 25 that a plan to invest $3.9 billion by the Life Insurance Corporation in Gautam Adani’s companies was overseen by officials of the Department of Financial Services.

The story states: “The documents and interviews show it was just one piece of a larger plan by Indian authorities to direct taxpayer money to a conglomerate owned by one of the country’s most prominent and politically well-connected billionaires. It is a vivid illustration of Adani’s clout within the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his longtime ally, and of how officials in New Delhi have come to see his business empire as central to the country’s economic fortunes.”

Newspapers did respond to this story, but with headlines that mentioned the denial by the LIC and little about the substance of the revelations in the article.

Here are some of the headlines the day after the story broke:

“LIC refutes Washington Post report on $3.9 bn Adani investment” in the Economic Times.

“Made investments in Adani firms independently, after detailed due diligence: LIC” in The Hindu.

“‘No letter written to LIC,’ Govt official rejects Post report questioning $3.9 bn investment in Adani Group,” wrote Financial Express.

“‘False and baseless’: LIC denies Washington Post report, says investment decisions taken after due diligence,” stated Mint.

Most of the other headlines were similar. 

For readers, who would not have accessed the original article, all they read was that the LIC had called the allegations made by the paper “false, baseless, and far from the truth.” This rebuttal also appeared as an unsigned statement on the LIC letterhead on X.

The Indian Express carried a report with more details about the original story and quoted unnamed officials “familiar with the matter” dismissing the allegations. While the Washington Post had claimed that the investment plan had been “crafted by officials at DFS (Department of Financial Services) in coordination with LIC and India’s main government-funded think tank, Niti Aayog,” and “approved by the Finance Ministry”, the officials who spoke to The Indian Express said that their department does not write letters to the LIC like the one quoted in the Post article.

To quote from The Indian Express story: “A government official told The Indian Express that DFS has not written any letter to LIC asking it to invest in the Adani Group. ‘The documents being mentioned in the media are not from DFS. It’s not true that DFS wrote to LIC to invest in Adani companies… DFS doesn’t write such letters to LIC,’ the official said.”

In other words, readers are being told that what the Washington Post has reported is baseless but no one from the government will go on the record to say so, leaving it to newspapers to quote unnamed officials as The Indian Express has done. How then as a citizen, or a reader, do you decide that this is, or is not, a major transgression by the Modi government to boost one particular business house?

Sohit Misra, who used to work with NDTV before it was taken over by Gautam Adani, but now runs his own YouTube channel, raises important questions about the coverage, or rather non-coverage by India’s mainstream media of this expose in this report. 

Misra takes us back to the pre-Modi era, when the media relentlessly asked the government led by Manmohan Singh tough questions about several scams that were exposed, like the 2G scam for instance. Even though finally these cases were dismissed as there wasn’t enough evidence, at that time the media was out in full force questioning the government and alleging large-scale corruption. 

As Misra points out, the contrast today is striking. Even if the story in the Post is speculative or even wrong, given that it involves the government and India’s richest man, is it not an issue that ought to be followed up independently by our media? Is it enough just to run denials and quotes from anonymous officials? 

Of course, the journalists who have relentlessly followed the Adani story, how his wealth has grown dramatically in the last decade, have been subject to innumerable court cases and harassment. Journalists like Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who holds that the Washington Post report is factual and substantive. 

This, in fact, is a story worth recounting because it illustrates how the job of investigating anything sensitive, that could land a media house in trouble, is now left entirely to under-resourced independent media platforms. 

Even as I write this column, another investigative platform, Cobra Post has come out with a story on the other big business house in India that is often in the news, the Ambanis. Given the response to the Adani story, if at all mainstream media takes note of this expose, the headlines in major newspapers will not surprise anyone. 

 

Taliban’s male-only presser: How media failed to fact-check Afghan minister’s pro-woman claims

Broken News

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/10/16/talibans-male-only-presser-how-media-failed-to-fact-check-afghan-ministers-pro-woman-claims

Published in Newslaundry on October 16, 2025

He came. He got his way. Then he relented, somewhat. And then he left.

I am referring to the events surrounding the recent visit of Amir Khan Muttaqi, the foreign minister of the current Taliban-led government in Afghanistan, to India. It will be remembered above all for a press briefing he held at the Afghan Embassy, which is still not officially under the control of his government, where women journalists were excluded.  

For general consumers of the media, perhaps this was not of much interest.  Although there was some mention in mainstream media, it was not considered a big deal. But social media, and statements of protests by journalists’ organisations (read here and here) made it clear that this was unacceptable. And that the government should have objected.

Our government claimed it had nothing to do with the decision. And Muttaqi insisted it was a “technical” issue.  Neither, of course, is true.

We are expected to put this controversy behind us because, finally, after the objections raised by several opposition leaders and others, the Taliban minister relented and held a press briefing where women journalists were prominently placed in the front row. And several of them asked relevant questions, such as why his government had banned women from accessing education. Predictably, Muttaqi obfuscated, claiming that women were getting educated in Afghanistan and everything was fine.

When such a press conference is reported, do you leave it at quoting what the minister said, even if it is untrue? Hardly any media outlet considered it necessary to provide a fact check in the report of the press briefing. That, in fact, since the Taliban took over Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, through a series of edicts – more than 100 – women have been barred from all educational institutions except primary schools, banned from working in several professions, and severely restricted in their ability to move around without a male escort.  

Given that there is little in our media about Afghanistan, except for a conflict such as the one with Pakistan in recent days, people would not know whether to take the word of the minister or not. That’s why it is incumbent that the media, in a country that swears by press freedom, takes the trouble to fact-check and inform readers and viewers of the harsh reality facing women in Afghanistan.  

Of course, perhaps it is asking too much of our mainstream media today to do this kind of fact-checking. After all, politicians, including the prime minister and home minister, routinely get away with stating their version of “facts” that are simply not true, such as the danger of “demographic change” facing India.  (The Quint published a much-needed factual piece on this recently.)

The second aspect of this controversy concerns women journalists. Today, they are prominent in Indian media as presenters, reporters, and analysts covering beats that an older generation of women journalists could not access. Foreign affairs, defence and even business and finance were beats where you rarely saw a woman journalist. Now that has changed, not necessarily because of the generosity of the men (and they are still mostly men) who run media houses, but because these women journalists have proven their worth.

As Aishwarya Khosla wrote in The Indian Express about the exclusion of women journalists from Muttaqi’s press briefing: “For women in journalism, the moment struck deeper than diplomacy. It touched a familiar bruise. We have covered wars, elections, and insurgencies. We have been silenced, sidelined, and still stayed in the room. But to be kept out by decree, in the national capital of all places, felt like a definitive punctuation – a full stop in a narrative that has been forward-looking.”

While the shock that the women journalists who routinely cover such briefings felt on October 8 is understandable, what is worse, in my view, is that not even one of the men who were invited to the briefing thought they should object. These women are their colleagues. Surely, excluding anyone based on gender, or anything else, ought to be unacceptable. Neither did the media houses, where these women work, officially raise an objection that their representative was left out. This tells you a lot about the state of our media.

By way of contrast, almost the entire mainstream media in the US has surrendered press badges to access the Pentagon because they were asked to sign an undertaking that went against their right to report freely and fairly. This kind of restriction by a government in a country where, under the First Amendment, the press is guaranteed its freedom is unprecedented.

The third aspect that this controversy throws up is the lack of coverage of events in Afghanistan that affect ordinary people. Of course, it is not just Afghanistan. We know little about the lives of ordinary people in our immediate neighbourhood because coverage centres around foreign relations and tensions. Only when there is a crisis, such as the one in Nepal recently or before that in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, do we get a glimpse of the perennial challenges facing people caused by government policies. This is the result of the fixation of the media with events, rather than the process. 

The takeover by the Taliban in 2021 was covered extensively, even by our media. It was dramatic, traumatic for those trying to escape and violent. But since that August four years ago, we know next to nothing about the condition of women under a government that makes excluding them part of its policy. 

As for women journalists in Afghanistan, according to this report by Reporters Without Borders, at the time the Taliban took over, around 700 women journalists were working in various capacities in the media. Today, there are fewer than 100.  And of these, only around 7 per cent can function, according to a more recent survey. Most of them have been compelled to seek asylum outside the country or stay at home and under the radar to escape punishment if they try to report for platforms located outside the country.

Given this reality in Afghanistan, all journalists, not just women, should be outraged that our government permitted, in a country that guarantees women equal rights, a press briefing that specifically excluded women. This was not a “technical” issue; it was a deliberate choice.  

Zahra Nader, the editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a media platform based in Canada that focuses on human rights in Afghanistan, argues this very point in this important article in The Indian Express. Under the headline: “Taliban leader in India: It’s complicity, not diplomacy”, she asserts, “As an Afghan woman journalist, I want to warn you what this message means. When the Indian government receives the Taliban without publicly challenging their record on women’s rights, it crosses the line from diplomacy into complicity. It lends legitimacy to a regime built on the exclusion of women and becomes a partner in the normalisation of their misogyny.”

Jimmy Kimmel to Kunal Kamra: Trump’s US follows a familiar playbook from Modi’s India

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 25, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/09/25/jimmy-kimmel-to-kunal-kamra-trumps-us-follows-a-familiar-playbook-from-modis-india

What do the current government of the United States, headed by Donald Trump, and the government in India, led by Narendra Modi, have in common?

I would suggest at least three aspects, although there are many more. One, an inability to tolerate criticism from the media, even as they declare that they head democracies, and second, a very thin skin that cannot tolerate humour.

The third, and in many ways far more insidious, is the attempt to control, regulate and even capture the media without making any changes in the Constitutional provisions that underwrite media freedom.

How do we define what has happened to India’s mainstream media, especially in the last decade? There have been various discussions whether we are living through an “undeclared emergency”, referring to the emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Such a comparison serves no purpose in trying to understand the process that has resulted in a flattened mediascape, where even the normal questioning that is integral to journalism in a democracy, is virtually absent in mainstream media. 

I think the term “media capture” explains best the situation of the media in India. This is a term that is being used by media scholars to explain recent events in the US under the Trump regime where we have witnessed a combination of defamation suits and pressure on media owners to fall in line.  

The most recent incident was the decision of the ABC television channel to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show. Although within a week, Kimmel has been reinstated, the very fact that the channel felt compelled to take this step led to much discussion about what this represents in terms of the future of the freedom of the press in the US. 

In an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, under the headline “Is the US media captured?” Joel Simon quotes several media scholars who have used the term to explain the state of the media in authoritarian regimes such as in Hungary, Turkey, or Mexico. It entails “government strategies ranging from manipulation of advertising to economic and regulatory pressure to the exploitation of informal relationships with media owners”, he writes. 

The article discusses whether such an eventuality of “media capture” is a possibility under the Trump regime, if it hasn’t already happened to some extent. Simon paraphrases a media scholar thus: “What’s unprecedented in the US … is the willingness of media companies to so transparently put their business interests ahead of their public interest obligations. When one corporation does it, another might pull back on critical coverage to avoid regulatory pressure—a kind of anticipatory obedience or capture in advance.”

Senator Bernie Sanders provides us with a useful illustration of what is meant by the term “media capture” in the context of the US.

In a post on X, he writes: “This is what American media looks like today: The wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, owns X. The second-wealthiest person in the world, Larry Ellison, owns Paramount, including CBS, and will possibly now be taking over TikTok and CNN. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and Twitch. Mark Zuckerberg owns both Facebook and Instagram. In fact, the five richest men in the world are ALL media owners or executives. When we talk about oligarchy in America, it’s not only income and wealth inequality. It’s control over the media and what the American people are able to see, hear and read.”

In India, the richest man owns NDTV, the second richest owns Network 18 Group, and the dominant media houses are all owned by businesses that must remain on the right side of the government, a “kind of anticipatory obedience” as mentioned by Simon in the article quoted above. The dividing line between editorial and management was erased well before this last decade but the results of that erasure are more evident today in India’s mediascape than earlier.

Just look at the print media on September 17, when the prime minister turned 75. Newspapers were replete with page after page of advertisements and signed articles praising Modi. As if this was not enough, a few days later, the government’s decision to lower GST rates, after the country had lived through eight years of much higher rates brought in by the same government, was also greeted with page after page of ads by businesses and corporate houses thanking Modi for taking this step. Such a display of obsequiousness to “the leader” would be considered an embarrassment in any country that claims it is a democracy and has a free press.  

In India, we’ve also had our Jimmy Kimmel equivalents. They do not appear on mainstream television but have a notable following. For instance, the stand-up comic Kunal Kamra has had multiple cases filed against him because someone, somewhere, was offended by his jokes. Or Munawar Faruqui, who was hauled off to jail during a performance in Madhya Pradesh in 2021 and finally acquitted after spending 37 days in jail.

In addition to all this, in my view, the central government’s September 16 order asking 12 independent journalists and news platforms to take down allegedly defamatory content, which included 138 YouTube links and 83 Instagram posts, on Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL) removes even the chimera of pretence that it has any respect for the concept of freedom of the press. This order followed the September 6 ruling by a Delhi court, in response to a defamation suit by AEL against several journalists, asking them to take down content on AEL. The line between the government, and India’s richest man and a close ally of the prime minister, was erased by that one action.  

Although the matter continues to be heard in another court, the very fact that the government intervened on behalf of a private business, without allowing the matter to be assessed by a court of law, illustrates vividly the extent to which even the pretence of media freedom has been abandoned by this government. 

This has happened gradually over the last decade in a way that people have become used to a media that generally echoes the government’s line, questions only mildly, and stays away from any issue that could result in censure or loss of revenue.

The trajectory is now familiar. Get friendly industrial houses to buy media conglomerates. Then apply formal and informal pressure on those media houses that are still being critical. In time, mainstream media will be tamed.  

As for the pinpricks that constitute independent media, those not dependent on government advertising, or big business, you first ignore them because you think they don’t matter. Then you wake up to the fact that they do. You realise that technology has enhanced their reach. And the dwindling credibility of mainstream has further given the combined strength of many small platforms a reach that should not be ignored.

That is when you move against them. First, by protecting your main supporters, big business openly aligned with you. Then, by encouraging your loyal supporters spread across India to file cases against individual journalists or independent platforms under existing laws. These cases are filed in states where the party in power is the BJP. Hence, the police do not wait to even consider whether the complaint has any validity before they move. 

And all the while you keep assuring the rest of the world, and your followers in India, that this country is indeed the “mother of democracy” and that you are deeply committed to the Constitution and all the freedoms guaranteed in it.

The Modi government has provided a blueprint to other countries claiming to be democracies on how they can manage and capture the media.

Media spotlights leaders, but misses stories of those affected by their decisions

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 11, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/09/11/media-spotlights-leaders-but-misses-stories-of-those-affected-by-their-decisions

 

While Trump and tariffs continue to dominate our headlines, there is an important difference between why he is in the news, and why our leader, Narendra Modi, also continues to dominate the news. 

That the actions of the US President are headline news, not just in the US, but around the world is partly because of his open desire to be the centre of attention. He lets the media watch cabinet meetings, interactions with international leaders, and even going out to a seafood restaurant in Washington DC. As a result, he ensures that he is always in the news. You could argue that this demonstrates his commitment to transparency and democracy. Or that he is simply narcissistic and wants to stay in the limelight. Either way, no news organisation can avoid reporting on Trump. 

In India, in contrast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has successfully avoided any unscripted interaction with mainstream media after 11 years in office. Yet, he dominates the news in India, much like Trump. Every action, every reaction, every statement, all of them carefully scripted, are faithfully reported prominently by mainstream media. 

What’s more, op-ed articles, quite obviously written by his chosen speech writers, are sent out to all publications. Yet despite them being no more than press releases, several newspapers give these perorations pride of place on their edit pages, a space meant for exclusive contributions that are not offered elsewhere. This has become so routine that it fails to draw any comment. It is what it is, we are told. No point getting worked up.

But moving away from these attention-seeking political personas, the media can, and must, make space for the less prominent, the almost invisible, whose lives are being permanently affected by the policies propounded by the powerful.

Take the controversy surrounding the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Indian exports to the US. The news has dominated our front pages. Economists and experts have analysed the fallout. There are explainers with charts and figures spelling out the impact. 

Yet, the price for these policies is being paid not by those who find space in our media, but the voiceless, the millions of workers in the industries that have been hit by these policies.  The women who shell prawns for export, the women who work in the garment industry, the men who polish diamonds in Surat, the smaller home-based workers who do a part of the finished products. 

There have been some detailed reports in the English language media such as this one in The Hindu on the garment industry in Tamil Nadu. Many such articles focus on the owners of these industries without enough on the impact on workers, often women as in the case of the garment industry.

International media including the BBC, Al Jazeera and DW have also carried detailed reports on export industries such as the diamond cutters in Surat. This detailed report in an independent digital platform, Behanbox, is one of the few that has focused on the impact of these tariffs on women workers. The reporter points out: “In the frozen shrimp industry, women constitute over 70% of the 8 million workforce, and they perform low-end processing jobs such as deheading, peeling and sorting shrimp in cold processing plants. In apparel and textiles, they make up almost 70% of the 45 million workers, while the electronics industry is known to largely hire young women because electronics manufacturing needs ‘small and soft hands for small pieces’.” 

But by and large, such reports are few and far in between in Indian mainstream media. As a result, the majority of readers of print media probably have not understood this human angle to the tariff controversy. 

An explanation for the paucity of such reporting is the perennial challenge facing the media: even as you cover an event, how do you also ensure that you report the process that resulted in the event. The former has immediacy, is often dramatic, and draws attention. The latter requires an understanding of history, politics, and society to ensure that there is context in the reportage. It can be done. It has been done. Yet, we see little space devoted to such reporting in mainstream media today.

Another example of the importance of understanding process even as you report an event is the coverage of the horrific death of a young woman in Greater Noida on August 21. Nikki Bhati was allegedly set ablaze in her kitchen, in the presence of her three-year-old son, because she failed to meet demands for more dowry in her marital home. Her death would have been one more statistic had it not occurred in a place within easy reach of so-called “national” media and that it was also spread via social media platforms. 

But what above all her tragic death illustrated was how even the most effective laws are ineffective in changing societal mindsets. Dowry was banned by law in 1961. The law was further amended, following widespread protests and demands by women’s rights groups across India, in 1984. Yet today, in 2025, the reported deaths of young women linked with the amount of dowry they did or did not bring into their marital homes is still shockingly high.  

Remember, that for everyone reported death, there are many more that go by unreported. And as this worrying piece in Hindustan Times points out: “Dowry is perhaps India’s most normalised illegal activity, going by anecdotal evidence, but credible data on the prevalence of this menace is hard to come by. Yet there is enough evidence to flag this as a major problem.”

It is the “process” story leading to these deaths of young women that needs telling not just when there is a dramatic incident that draws media attention, but at all times. Why, when there have been decades of programmes by the government and by non-profits, to “empower” women and the “girl-child” are we still at a place where women can be murdered with impunity even in our major cities for dowry demands? Why is it that even today, parents who know their daughters are victims of extreme violence in their marital homes, still send them back and ask them to “adjust”? 

At the height of the protests by women’s groups demanding changes in the dowry law in the 1980s, the print media – and at that time there was only print – did respond by conducting its own investigations. For instance, in 1983, Indian Express carried a front-page series by two senior reporters under the banner “Why women burn” where they followed up on the so-called accidental deaths of young newly married women in Delhi.  

Although the death of Nikki Bhati did provoke some media houses to do follow-up reports such as these in The Hindu, Times of India, and Mid-day, we are now back to reading what we used to call “crime briefs”, small items spread across a newspaper reporting horrific incidents of violence against women.  

Yet, as the article in Hindustan Times quoted above points out, dowry is perhaps the most “normalised illegal activity” in India today. It calls for more focus and more investigation, to remind Indian citizens that behind the bombast about how this country is progressing, the fact that women can still be killed for dowry is a necessary reality check. This is the story behind the headline that the media needs to pursue.

Bihar’s silenced voters, India’s gagged press: The twin threats to Indian democracy

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 28, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/28/bihars-silenced-voters-indias-gagged-press-the-twin-threats-to-indian-democracy

The Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, probably expected that his August 18 press conference would settle the controversy surrounding the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar and Rahul Gandhi’s “vote chori” charge. He was wrong. This is a story that has refused to die, notwithstanding Trump’s tariffs, or even the tragic floods in parts of India.  

In fact, it should not die as it is, by a long measure, one of the most important stories that any self-respecting media organisation needs to investigate. For it is more than evident now that the state of our electoral rolls, as exposed by the SIR in Bihar and subsequent media exposes, raises many important questions about our electoral system and our democracy.  

So far, only one mainstream newspaper, The Indian Express, has put its heft behind investigating the many lacunae in the SIR process in Bihar. More granular details have emerged from the stories done by independent platforms and journalists. 

Here are links to several important investigations carried by independent platforms, with several of them collaborating and pooling their resources. 

Journalist Ajit Anjum has assiduously followed up on people declared as dead in the list of 65 lakh people who have been struck off the electoral rolls. So has Saurabh Shukla of The Red Mike. 

The women and men declared dead are very much alive, as you will see in these reports. The common thread that runs through them is that these are poor people who are not even aware that the one right they have, to vote, has been denied to them because some official has decided they are dead. 

Others who have pursued this story include independent news platforms like Reporters’ Collective.   

While Reporters’ Collective found that an incredible 80,000 voters had been clustered together at addresses where 20 or more of them were supposed to be living in just three constituencies that they investigated, the latest report in Newslaundry goes further to show that even in places where people live separately according to their caste or religion, over 100 voters belonging to different castes and religions are shown as living in the same house.

For readers who would have missed much of the action because of the neglect of this story by mainstream media, it is worth taking the time to read these detailed reports and watch the videos. They tell us not only about the way this particular exercise is being conducted in Bihar but the reality of India, where despite boasts of “digital India” and elimination of poverty, millions of poor people do not have the proof that is demanded of them to establish that they exist.  

Interestingly, the latest story in the series in The Indian Express on SIR in Bihar tells us that out of 36 assembly constituencies in three districts, in 25 of them, the number of voters whose names have been deleted exceeds the margin by which the candidate elected won. Of these 25 seats, the governing alliance of the BJP and JD(U) won 18 seats. The story also shows through its data that women have been particularly disadvantaged. 

These stories graphically illustrate a very real problem we are facing, one that cannot be obfuscated the way the CEC attempted to do in his press conference. And as I have argued earlier, it is a legitimate story that the media, in a democracy, must pursue. 

Another development that has drawn attention to the importance of independent media is the series of cases filed against three prominent independent journalists, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire, Karan Thapar, whose weekly interview programme is widely watched, and Abhisar Sarma, a former mainstream TV anchor who now runs his own YouTube news channel. 

All three have had cases filed against them in Assam, a state governed by the BJP. And at least two of the people filing these cases are affiliated to the BJP or ABVP (read here).

This development tells us two things. One, that even if the government might dismiss these independent news platforms as being limited in their reach, it apparently is concerned about their reporting. Otherwise why bother to charge them. 

The second point this development illustrates is the strategy this government is following with impunity: label journalists who question as “anti-national”, or “urban Naxals” or “terrorists sympathiser” and then file cases against them, or even jail them as in Kashmir. 

Incidentally, Israel follows a part of the same strategy. It also labels Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives. It’s another thing that it even proceeds to eliminate them in targeted attacks. Most recently, five Palestinian journalists were killed even as they were reporting. 

There will be long-term consequences for freedom of speech, and the media, in India if this strategy being used by the government is not challenged and checked. The most persuasive argument on this has been made by retired Supreme Court judge, Justice Madan Lokur in an op-ed in The Hindu.

Justice Lokur points out that this government has weaponised a provision in the law that was supposed to have replaced the previous colonial sedition law. He suggests that Section 152 in the BNS is nothing more than sedition in “sheep’s clothing”, and that while the earlier law had a chilling effect on freedom of speech, the new provision has a “freezing effect”. 

Going further, he spells out what the deliberate misuse of this provision means for the future of freedom of speech in India: 

“Try and imagine any journalist or anybody in a panel discussion on television or otherwise having the courage to be critical of anything to do with any policy of the Government of India. Somebody can misinterpret it and bring national security into play, and the police can take cognisance and summon the alleged offender. Freedom of speech can be bulldozed or demolished because one individual out of a billion anywhere in the country believes (without evidence) that national security is in danger or that the armed forces are demoralised or that dissent is ‘strategic subversion’ undermining the sovereignty and the integrity of India.” (Emphasis added)

This then is the future we are looking at in India as far as freedom of the press is concerned.