Full volume on Op Sindoor, silence on the stateless

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 5, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/06/05/full-volume-on-op-sindoor-silence-on-the-stateless

While the Indian mainstream media remained obsessed about Operation Sindoor and reported uncritically even as the Prime Minister and members of his party made political capital from the recent Indo-Pak armed clash, a quiet, more insidious episode unfolded, largely unnoticed. 

The first to draw attention to it wasMaktoob Media, a digital news platform based in Kerala. Two days after the guns fell silent on the borders of India and Pakistan, it claimed on May 12 that around 40 Rohingya, who were registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees India and recognised as stateless, were literally pushed off a naval boat into the sea near the coast of Myanmar. The Rohingya, as is well-known, fled Myanmar in 2017 to escape persecution by its military junta.

The report alleged that, on May 8, even as the Solicitor General was assuring the Supreme Court that deportations would follow established procedures and the law, these men and women were first summoned to a police station, then flown to Port Blair in the Andamans and then blind-folded, shackled and put on a naval boat before being pushed into the sea. The group included elderly men, women and children, who had to allegedly swim ashore to safety. 

This was followed up by a story in Scroll that contained more details.

Mainstream media only woke up when Tom Andrews, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said: “The idea that Rohingya refugees have been cast into the sea from naval vessels is nothing short of outrageous. I am seeking further information and testimony regarding these developments and implore the Indian government to provide a full accounting of what happened.” 

The UN statement drew the attention of the international media with reports appearing in New York Times, South China Morning Post and Straits Times.

Since early May, there has been little by way of follow-up to this story or even comment on this except, predictably, in independent digital platforms. The most searing comment was this article by Harsh Mander in Scroll. He asks how India has become “a place in which exceptional cruelty, prejudice and a casual defiance of constitutional obligations and customary international law have become official state policy”.

Meanwhile, equally insidious and inhuman is the process that continues in Assam of “pushing back” suspected Bangladeshi nationals. 

Once again, as in the case of the Rohingya, the early reports appeared in independent digital platforms. The stories were heart-breaking. Many of those literally pushed back across the India-Bangladesh border were married women, who had not been able to prove their citizenship.

Read the stories by Rokibuz Zaman in Scroll: Of a teacher picked up and pushed out, of two women, Shona Bhanu and Begum, who were amongst the people pushed out only to be brought back because they are Indian citizens. 

These stories remind us again what was known ever since the Assam government undertook the process of the National Register of Citizens and set up quasi-judicial Foreigners’ Tribunals in 2019. Over time, lakhs of people have been declared “foreigners” by these tribunals leaving them no option but to spend time and money hiring lawyers and filing cases in higher courts. 

Also, as was evident almost from the start, the process has disproportionately affected the poor and unlettered, many of them married women. Read this article by Abhishek Saha, who followed the story of one woman, Manowara Bewa. Declared “illegal” by a tribunal in 2016, detained, sent to a detention centre and finally released on bail in 2019, she was picked by the police on May 24, and “pushed back” into Bangladesh despite her pending appeal in the Supreme Court.

In 2019, at the height of the NRC process, and soon after the tribunals were set up, the media did report on what was going on. Even then, it was evident that the process was unlikely to be fair to those who do not have sufficient documents, a reality facing millions of poor people in this country.

I saw this when I visited Assam in 2019. The sight of thousands of men and women, clutching plastic bags full of documents that they wanted to show lawyers who had offered to help is one that I cannot forget. Amongst them were many women who were completely bewildered and did not understand what was happening.

Even then, those who were following the issue could see the arbitrary way in which cases were decided in the tribunals. People travelled long distances to have their cases heard only to find that the date of the hearing had changed. Those who could not make it for a hearing often found that the tribunal had made a ruling ex parte. No outsiders, including journalists were permitted to sit through proceedings as they can in a regular court. This opacity made the process even more problematic. 

Today, more than five years after the renewed thrust to detect and deport suspected Bangladeshis took off in Assam, using Operation Sindoor as an excuse to prevent “infiltration”, the Assam government has stepped up its efforts by pushing out people “declared foreigner” by the tribunals despite their pending cases in other courts. As the article by Saha reminds us, “declared foreigners” are not “individuals who have been apprehended at India’s borders, attempting to enter the country without documentation on the sly. They are typically long-term residents with families and properties in Assam, who assert that they are Indian citizens.”

And he rightfully states: “The humanitarian crisis in Assam’s citizenship imbroglio begins here – neither India nor Bangladesh acknowledges the ‘declared foreigners’ as their own.”

While this story has failed to catch the interest of much of mainstream media, the one story that found prominent coverage was, not surprisingly, the official version of what happened last month. In response to reports about people being pushed back into Bangladesh, these reports quoted the Border Security Force saying they had successfully foiled “infiltration” from Bangladesh. Or this one that reports that 2000 “illegal immigrants” have been pushed back since Operation Sindoor and that officials claim some left voluntarily.

The story will not end today or tomorrow.  It is incumbent on the media to follow and report it, even if the place where the actual drama is taking place is the northeastern corner of India. 

For what this process shows us is how it becomes convenient for governments to pick on the weakest to show how decisive and strong they are. But physically throwing people off a boat or pushing a woman with an eight-month-old child across a physical border, leaving her and others standing through the night in a rice field, and for her family to not be told where she has disappeared, does not indicate a strong government. It only confirms one that it is indifferent to the plight of the most vulnerable.

The Ali Khan Mahmudabad case is free speech under trial

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 22, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/05/22/the-ali-khan-mahmudabad-case-is-free-speech-under-trial

The arrest and subsequent release on interim bail of Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad, and the discussions in and out of court that have followed, ought to concern journalists, or rather those who believe that in a democracy, journalists should question the powerful. 

Prof Khan was arrested by the Haryana police in the early hours of May 18 based on two complaints relating to his posts on Facebook a week earlier.  Both complaints were registered in the same police station in Haryana, close to the private university where he heads the department of political science. One was by a member of the youth wing of the BJP, the other by the head of the Haryana Commission for Women.

After two days in police custody, and after the lower court sent him to judicial custody, the Supreme Court granted Khan interim bail on May 21.

In the immediate aftermath of the arrest, several national English language newspapers made strong editorial comments against the arrest and the serious nature of the charges brought against Prof Khan, including sedition.

As the speed with which events occurred around his arrest, readers might have overlooked these editorials (which in any case are read by a small number). But for the record, they are worth re-reading, given what followed in the subsequent days.

The Indian Express, in its editorial headlined, “Amid government’s calls for unity, Ali Khan Mahmudabad’s arrest sends a chilling message”, went on to state that fear cannot enforce unity in an open democracy. It argued that the Prime Minister’s call for unity and the strategy to send all-party delegations to present India’s case abroad after Operation Sindoor did not sit well with such actions. 

Deccan Herald was more direct. It wrote that Khan’s arrest “is the State’s strike against the expression of a citizen’s right and it exposes the police and the government which acted against him as partisan, and even communal. It is almost certain that Mahmudabad’s name was the problem here and that shows.” The Times of India suggested that “all thinking Indians must also ask why a professor who praised, logically and cohesively, GOI’s military response to Pahalgam found himself behind bars.”

And The Hindu suggested that the Supreme Court “must reiterate the importance of the freedom of expression and come down heavily on law enforcement agencies that misuse powers to slap serious charges related to sedition, on frivolous grounds.”

We know from the proceedings in the Supreme Court on May 21 in response to Ali Khan’s bail application that nothing even vaguely resembling this has happened. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Given some of the remarks made by Justice Surya Kant, it appears that he has a different view of such rights. He was quoted as saying “everybody talks about rights…as if the country for the last 75 years was distributing rights.” Nor has the court ticked off the Haryana police for the alacrity with which it responded to the two FIRs.

In fact, just three years ago, in the case of the bail application by journalist Mohammed Zubair of the fact-checking platform AltNews, the Supreme Court had laid down that “Arrest is not meant to be and must not be used as a punitive tool because it results in one of the gravest possible consequences emanating from criminal law: the loss of personal liberty.” It also said, “Individuals must not be punished solely on the basis of allegations, and without a fair trial...when the power to arrest is exercised without application of mind and without due regard to the law, it amounts to an abuse of power.”  

Instead, in this case, instead of criticising the police for arresting a person “solely on the basis of allegations”, the court has directed the Haryana police to set up a Special Investigative Team “to holistically understand the complexity of the phraseology employed and for proper appreciation of some of the expressions used in these two online posts.”  This task has been given to police officers. How they are supposed to “understand the complexity” of posts that are written in reasonably simple English remains a puzzle. 

More alarming than leaving a team of the police to decide whether the charges against Khan hold is the last part of the order which states: “It is made clear that one of the objects of granting interim bail is to facilitate the ongoing investigation. If the SIT/Investigating Agency finds any other incriminating material against the petitioner, it shall be at liberty to place it on record and seek modification of the interim order.”

In other words, there is more to come in this unravelling drama.

Interestingly, in Zubair’s case, the UP government had argued that Zubair should be restrained from tweeting. The SC ruled against the request, stating, “The imposition of such a condition would be tantamount to a gag order... (which) have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech.”

In Khan’s case, exactly the opposite has happened. The court has restrained him from posting anything on the case, or “any opinion in relation to the terrorist attack on Indian soil or the counter response given by our armed forces.”

Khan’s case is one more nail in the coffin of the limits placed today on freedom of expression by this government.  

In his article in Frontline on the Khan case, Saurav Das writes about the “judicial choking of free thought”. Analysing the Supreme Court’s interim bail order in the case, Das doesn’t mince words in his critique. He writes:

“Mahmudabad’s case is a microcosm of sorts. It is a perfect example of how you make a nation of intellectually dead citizens, where critical inquiry is replaced by rote repetition and progressive voices are muzzled to make space for conformist, mediocre opinions. This is how a society dies, where the proliferation of free thought is choked, through a slow, judicially sanctioned suffocation of intellectual life.”

Perhaps free thought has already been choked, if you look at Indian mainstream media, especially TV news. There is precious little that is even mildly critical of recent government actions, even in our newspapers. Or questions, for instance, about how the all-party delegations, which have set out to foreign lands to explain the Indian government’s position on terror and Operation Sindoor, will explain the same government’s actions against minorities, especially Muslims, in India. According to to this piece in Article-14 by Kunal Purohit, there have been 113 incidents of “anti-Muslim hate crimes and hate speeches” since the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam. 

Despite this, every now and then, even TV news can spring surprises. Such as this interview by Preeti Chowdhury on India Today TV with Renu Bhatia, the chairperson of the Haryana Commission for Women who filed one of the cases against Ali Khan.  Chowdhury did what journalists are supposed to do. She firmly and politely asked Bhatia what part of Khan’s post did she think insulted the women in uniform who appeared at the briefings during Operation Sindoor alongside the External Affairs Secretary. Do watch Bhatia’s effort at explaining what cannot be explained. 

India’s fog of war: Print media treads cautiously, TV media loses the plot

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 9, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/05/09/indias-fog-of-war-print-media-treads-cautiously-tv-media-loses-the-plot

Illustration of an anchor shouting through a television while viewers cower on their couch. |Manjul

Subscribe nowIndia today is enveloped in a fog, the fog of war. It is so thick that we can neither see nor hear what is going on. We must wait patiently for someone in “authority” to tell us what is happening.

India today is enveloped in a fog, the fog of war. It is so thick that we can neither see nor hear what is going on. We must wait patiently for someone in “authority” to tell us what is happening.

Ever since the launch of Operation Sindoor on the night of May 6-7, when Indian armed forces launched nine precision strikes that targeted what were suspected to be terror outfits in Pakistan, Indian media – or at least some sections of it – has gone ballistic.

As for Indian TV news channels (which gave up on doing any kind of serious journalism years ago), they had already launched their own “operation” against Pakistan without waiting for the Indian government to act. Indeed, within days of the terror attack in Pahalgam where 26 people were killed, TV anchors were not just demanding war, but even demonstrating how it ought to be conducted. (It’s worthwhile, even now, to watch this episode of TV Newsance by Manisha Pande to get a sense of the madness on television screens.)

The official start of the clash between India and Pakistan has now given these channels additional ammunition and the madness has reached a higher pitch. Disinformation, misinformation, drama and ear-splitting decibel levels are par for the course. If you watch Indian TV, you might say this is normal. But is it, when the country is virtually at war with its neighbour, when the government is putting out all kinds of advisories about misinformation and fake news? 

Why is it that no such advisory has been directed at these channels, not even a gentle rebuke, when the government has the power under existing laws to do so? Is it because the government finds it convenient to let them rant in contrast to its official briefings that are restrained and low-key? Is it important for this government to keep up the ultra-nationalist fervour without seeming to be doing so directly? These are questions that we must ask, even if the mere act of asking questions now is considered “anti-national”. 

On the day after Operation Sindoor, barring headlines and display, the news coverage in all major newspapers was almost identical. What was missing was the story of the price being paid by the Kashmiris living near the Line of Control. An exception was the Indian Express, which had a story on its front page giving the names and ages of each one of those killed in the firing across the border.  

But the press could have given a human face to this war by asking why, if the government knew that it was mounting this operation, was there inadequate effort to make sure the most vulnerable, the people living on the border, had shelters, or somewhere else where they could go? 

And why should the Indian media not ask these questions, as Kashmir Times has done? Despite its constraints, Kashmir Times has been putting out daily reports on the lives of the Kashmiris affected along the Line of Control. If you visit some of the villages in Uri district, you can see the other side clearly, across a deep gorge with the Neelam River that divides the two sides of Kashmir. People on both sides face cross-border firing whenever there’s a problem between our two countries. Yet, so often, their stories are never told, or only in passing. The real price of war is paid by such ordinary people.

Apart from not reporting on the casualties along the LoC, the print media is also not asking legitimate questions. For instance, when the defence minister states that 100 terrorists have been killed in Operation Sindoor, we need to know who they are, where they were, and whether they were at any of the nine sites that were targeted in Pakistan. Yet so far, such a question has not been asked, and it is highly unlikely if it ever will be. 

There are other questions, including Pakistan’s claims on Indian fighter jets, and photographs of alleged debris. So far, there has been no official response.

Clearly, print media has decided to tread cautiously because they know that unlike TV channels, this government is not going to be charitable towards them if they report without official confirmation. Any speculation, or source-based story is likely to be regarded as antagonistic.

And with the Indian government’s action of blocking the sites of even established Pakistan media such as Dawn or GeoNews, Indian journalists have to depend on international media houses like the BBC or news agencies like Reuters to get a sense of what is being said and reported on the other side. Surely, this is something that the media in India ought to be able to access. 

Clearly, print media has decided to tread cautiously because they know that unlike TV channels, this government is not going to be charitable towards them if they report without official confirmation. Any speculation, or source-based story is likely to be regarded as antagonistic.

Also, while Indian TV news continues unchecked with its dangerous theatrics, 8,000 accounts on the social media platform X have been blocked on the request of the Indian government. Ironically, X’s own Global Government Affairs account which reported that these accounts had been blocked without a clear reason for why this should be done, has also been blocked.

Strangely too, accounts of senior Kashmiri journalists like Muzamil Jamil from Indian Express, who is not particularly active on X, and editor of Kashmir Times, Anuradha Bhasin, have been blocked. Also, the Kerala-based digital platform Maktoob Media, even though it is reporting on the ongoing exchange between India and Pakistan much as mainstream media is doing. 

At the time of publishing this story, The Wire announced that its website was blocked in India as well. 

When strategic affairs are involved, especially between India and Pakistan, the media is flooded with comments by “experts”. On television news, the expertise of some of some of these men, and they are all men, can be questioned. But they provide the optics for the shouting matches that are always the norm, and more so when the issue is India and Pakistan.

Fortunately, print remains more sober, and one can read, or listen to, counter-terrorism experts who speak with the knowledge and insight needed to clear the fog of disinformation.

One such is Ajai Sahni. In this long, but frank, podcast with senior journalist Nirupama Subramanian for Frontline, Sahni speaks about how much of the government’s response after the Pahalgam terror attack is pure optics, and what if anything can be done to deal with the reality of cross-border terror. Without mincing words, he says that Pahalgam was a policy failure, a propaganda failure, and a political failure.

In the fog of war, disinformation from all sides is the virtual norm. We have seen that in abundance in the last few days. The night of May 6/7 will be remembered for the deluge that followed Operation Sindoor. Yet, it was the much maligned Mohammed Zubair of Alt News who systematically separated the wheat from the chaff so to speak, and revealed how handles pretending to be Indians, were Pakistanis sharing old videos to show the extent of the attack by India. Later he also showed how handles in India, and even TV channels, were using old videos to show what was going on that night.

The scourge of social media did not exist in the previous major clashes between India and Pakistan (although there is hope that this one will not escalate into a major clash). Today, it is something that is virtually impossible to control. As a result, responsible media platforms without independent sources of verification are left with no option but to stick to what is confirmed officially, even if this is not the whole story. However, even within these constraints, there are stories about people, and the impact of conflict, that need to be recorded and told. 

All this started in Kashmir, when 26 people were brutally murdered on April 22 by gun-toting men identified as terrorists. It is a region that has now been pushed back into a time of tension and sorrow. Do read this sensitive and moving piece by Mirza Waheed, Kashmiri journalist and well-known writer, in The Guardian lamenting that Kashmiri voices are still missing. 

 in The Guardian lamenting that Kashmiri voices are still missing.  

From Kunal Kamra to Mohanlal to a long-dead emperor, India is the Republic of Intolerance

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 31, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/03/31/from-kunal-kamra-to-mohanlal-to-a-long-dead-emperor-india-is-the-republic-of-intolerance

Mohanlal and Kunal Kamra, with Aurangzeb in the background.|Shambhavi Thakur

Between Aurangzeb and Kunal Kamra, we are now fully qualified to call ourselves “The Republic of Intolerance”.  

The month of March in Maharashtra has seen agitations and riots around a Mughal emperor who died 300 years ago. And a stand-up comic, who performed in Mumbai in January but released a video of his act in March, receiving threats to his life, several cases being filed against him, and a privilege motion against him in the state assembly. 

Meanwhile, it was almost comical to learn that the wrecking brigade of Eknath Shinde’s offended loyalists, who trashed the venue where Kamra had performed, expressed disbelief that he was not present when all of them had just seen his video! 

But jokes apart, the current generation must wonder whether there was ever a time when humourists and cartoonists could poke fun at politicians and not be slapped with cases, or be lynched, or sent to jail.

In fact, such a time did exist. As recently as 1975, just 50 years ago, the late Abu Abraham could draw and publish a cartoon in which he depicted the person holding the highest office in India, none other than the President, as someone sitting in a bathtub signing the declaration of the Emergency that Indira Gandhi had sent to the Rashtrapati Bhawan late on the night of June 25, 1975. Abraham did not have cases filed against him, nor was he sent to jail and the newspaper that published his cartoon, Indian Express, was not banned. And this even as Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency and placed curbs on the press.

The cartoon by Aby Abraham published in 1975.

In 1987, in the same newspaper, the cartoonist Ravi Shankar drew the image of a worried Rajiv Gandhi, by then the prime minister, sitting in a big chair, shouting “Mummy”! Shankar too did not face any adverse reactions from the Rajiv Gandhi government. 

Today, we truly live in the “Naya Bharat”, the title of Kamra’s controversial show. Not only are politicians in the list of unmentionables, but even events from the recent past cannot be referenced. 

While Kamra refuses to apologise, the well-known actor Mohanlal from Kerala has done so with alacrity. He has agreed, after objections raised by members of the Sangh Parivar about scenes mentioning the Gujarat 2002 communal carnage in his new film Empuraan, to make “voluntary modifications”. 

It is not just actors and comedians who need to worry. Journalists, especially those who believe in doing the job for which they are trained, are in for tougher days given the rising temperature of intolerance in general, and specific statements and laws that several states are contemplating or have already enacted.

In Assam, Dilawar Hussain Mazumdar, who works for a digital platform CrossCurrents, was covering a demonstration outside the Assam Cooperative Apex Bank. He was detained, then arrested, then rearrested. Mazumdar and the platform for which he works have been critical of the ruling BJP in Assam. It is also not a coincidence that Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is a director of the bank before which the demonstration was being held. 

It is not just actors and comedians who need to worry. Journalists, especially those who believe in doing the job for which they are trained, are in for tougher days given the rising temperature of intolerance in general.

While Mazumdar has been granted bail, his detention is worrying not just for its arbitrariness but also because of Sarma’s remark that Mazumdar is not a “legitimate” journalist. In other words, if journalists who work for web portals do not get accreditation, they cannot be regarded as journalists. 

Then take Maharashtra, the scene of both the Aurangzeb controversy that led to a communal riot in Nagpur, and the incident involving Kunal Kamra who faces several legal challenges if he steps into the state.

The state government is in the process of setting up a Media Monitoring Unit at the cost of Rs 10 crore, ostensibly to check whether government programmes and policies are being reported accurately. But we know that “monitoring” the media cannot be that innocent.

Why does the government need a special media monitoring unit when it already has the Directorate of Information and Public Relations that does precisely this: it monitors the media, sends out press releases about government programmes, and informs those who run the government about the media’s response.  

Incidentally, it was the same Kunal Kamra, who challenged a similar attempt by the central government to set up a Fact Checking Unit. This was also supposed to monitor the media and deal with “fake” or “false” news relating to government programmes. Kamra’s challenge before the Bombay High Court resulted in a ruling that has stopped the central government from proceeding with this for now.

When governments decide to monitor the media, categorise journalists as “legitimate” or not, and introduce laws that increase their powers of arbitrary arrest, there is a reason to be worried. 

The Maharashtra government has reintroduced a law that lapsed last year before the state elections. In July last year, the government then led by Eknath Shinde, had introduced the Maharashtra Special Public Security Bill 2024. In December, the new government led by Devendra Fadnavis reintroduced the same bill. It is likely to come up in the monsoon session.

The ostensible reason stated for bringing in such a law is apparently to curb “urban Naxals”, a vague term that covers anyone or any organisation that is critical of the government. Additionally, it duplicates laws that already exist such as the UAPA and provisions in the criminal law that give governments the power to detain and imprison individuals on a whole range of grounds. Such laws have already been widely used in the last decade, including in Maharashtra. 

Therefore, we must ask why such a law, and why now? Editorials in several newspapers including The Hindu, Indian Express, Deccan Herald and Times of India have asked the same question. The Hindu writes:

“When existing laws seem adequate to tackle extremism, and the area affected by left-wing extremism is limited in the State, the only reason such a proposal has been made could be an oblique intent to crack down on lawyers, dissenters and human rights activists involved in taking up the cause of the marginalised.”

Needless to say, journalists and news portals that speak up on human rights issues would also come under the radar of such a law.

So, is this just a coincidence that several states are bringing in similar laws, and closely monitoring the media, either through new structures as in Maharashtra, or through their existing bodies? Or does it suggest that the Modi government has decided to let the states do what it hasn’t managed to do yet, especially in controlling the media that is still independent and continues to be critical?

I would suggest it is the latter. To the world the Modi government can claim India is a democracy, that freedom of expression is guaranteed. In fact, through existing laws and new ones being introduced at the state level, every attempt is being made not just to curb civil society groups and dissenters, which would include writers and journalists, but also to keep a closer eye on media and journalists. 

Labour: Indian media’s blind spot

 Written By Invitation in The Migration Story

Link: https://www.themigrationstory.com/post/labour-indian-media-s-blind-spot

Five years ago, India came to standstill.  Not because it wanted to but because it was told that it had to. That this was the only way to check the spread of a deadly virus that was already raging around the world.

The national lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 24, 2020, at 8 pm on television, did little to assuage the growing anxiety about the spread of the Corona virus.  Instead, it will be remembered for forcing our poorest, most vulnerable and hard-working citizens to flee our cities and make their weary way back to their homes thousands of kilometres away from their places of work.  

The four hours’ notice for a national lockdown led to a panic, especially amongst the urban poor. For them a lockdown meant not safety but the loss of jobs as all work stopped. So, they picked up their belonging and left the city -- by train, truck, bus, or even on foot.

The images representing this exodus from our cities five years ago, of an estimated 10 million people, ought to have woken us up to the reality of informality, of the existence of the virtually invisible men and women who build, and service our cities. But did it? 

To what extent has mainstream media been responsible for moving the focus away from this reality once the millions forced to leave their jobs and their homes stopped moving? Do we know how many survived, how many came back, did they find work again, have they recovered from the financial loss they must have incurred?

I would suggest that the main reason mainstream media in India covered the “great exodus” from our cities is because it was a spectacle that could not be ignored.  And it was taking place within easy reach of where media houses are located, in the metro cities, in state capitals.  It was one of the rare occasions where the poor and working class made it to the front pages of newspapers and on television screens.  

If, as in the past, mainstream media houses had continued the tradition of having a “labour” beat, we would have known the answer to these questions. 

A part of reporting on labour was news about trade unions.  Today, many of them have downsized or virtually disappeared. Even if they exist, media rarely gives space for their views. This has contributed to the invisibility of working-class problems including those that face the informal sector. 

Also, covering “labour” included reports on closures of factories, strikes by workers like the textile strike in Mumbai, unsafe work conditions, and the precarity faced by the growing sector of informal and unorganised workers.  Today, such stories are rare although the ground reality remains the same.

Looking back at those two years, 2020 post the lockdown, and 2021 when a new, and more virulent strain of the virus hit the country, a study of what grabbed media attention and what was ignored tells us a great deal about the state of the Indian media.

Remember that in the years preceding the pandemic, mainstream media in India had decided that it was better to promote the narrative set by the government rather than question it. Much of mainstream media had already set aside a basic journalistic norm – that even as you report what the government says, your job is to try and independently verify the facts and separate fact from fiction.

Also, six hours before Modi announced the lockdown, he had summoned over 20 prominent media owners and editors.  According to this report by Sagar in Caravan magazine, “The prime minister’s website reported that the journalists committed to ‘work on the suggestions of the prime minister to publish inspiring and positive stories’ about COVID-19.”

Once the lockdown was announced, the images of millions of poor people leaving cities in a panic, dragging their meagre belongings, carrying small children, helping the elderly to walk with them certainly did not constitute a “positive” story. But this was a story that even the most pro-government media simply could not ignore. And so, despite themselves, and the suggestion by the prime minister that they focus on “positive stories”, mainstream Indian media did report it.

But once the stream of displaced migrants thinned out, so did the media focus.

In fact, within days of the lockdown, mainstream media and particularly television news became obsessed with a manufactured controversy. 

Perhaps one of the most shaming episodes as far India’s mainstream media is concerned is the way it played a role in spreading Islamophobia in the early days of the outbreak of the pandemic by suggesting that the surge in Covid cases was due to a gathering in New Delhi of the Tablighi Jamaat.

As this piece in Article-14 points out, until March 29, the media focused on the exodus of migrant workers from our cities.  On that day, there was news of a spike in Covid cases.  Within three days, official statements suggested that the spike was linked to the Tablighi Jamaat gathering in New Delhi that included many followers who had travelled to India from other countries.

This was the signal that sent some sections of mainstream media into overdrive with terms like “corona bomb” and “superspreader maulana” being liberally used. 

Even if the Islamophobia eventually died down, the seeds of hate and suspicion that already existed were further nourished by this shameful media campaign. 

Although the lockdown finally ended in May 2020 after several extensions, the suffering of those who had been forced to flee certainly did not.  But their stories were not top of the news anymore as the migrants had disappeared into their villages. And mainstream media concedes some space to rural India only if there is a disaster. 

A few newspapers did report on the discrimination migrants faced when they returned to their homes as they were seen as carriers of the virus.  But after that, there was little by of follow up reports on how people survived without an income for so many months. Such stories are not dramatic like the exodus or heart-rending like the image of the child pulling at a blanket that covered his dead mother on the railway platform in Muzaffarpur. 

Unfortunately for the government, and fortunately for people, some of this information did come out, through reporting by independent news platforms.  It is here that we read stories of the events post the initial exodus.

In fact, if there is one lesson to be learnt from the coverage of the pandemic by mainstream media in 2020 and 2021 it is this: that even if they choose to ignore the reality, the real news will find its way thanks to independent media as well as social media.  

The more virulent strain of the virus that hit India in 2021 brought with it another set of challenges for the media.  For instance, this article in Scroll tells us about the telling gap between official figures of Covid deaths in Gujarat and the reality. The facts became known because some media houses did what journalists are supposed to do: Verify and double check the authenticity of official figures. Local newspapers sent reporters out to crematoria to check how many bodies were being cremated each day. The numbers were very different from the official data.

The gap between fact and fiction was even greater in Uttar Pradesh where the Yogi Adityanath government continued to claim that the situation was under control.  Yet here again, reports such as this in Newslaundry exposed the substantial discrepancy between official claims and the reality. 

This kind of coverup of actual data, especially in UP, was finally exposed when the gruesome images of shallow graves on the banks of the Ganga emerged as well as stories about overworked crematoria that could not deal with the flood of deaths.  

Among them, was Hindi newspaper Dainik Bhaskar which stood out with its front page photos of burning pyres and investigations that put a hole through official claims on death counts. Its coverage drew praise not just from other media organisations but it also won awards.

The tragic stories of poor families who had to abandon their loved ones on the banks of rivers because they could not afford the costs of cremation were a stark testimony to the deadliness of the second surge of Covid, but also of the mismanagement by governments.  There was no “positive” spin that could be given to this story. 

As for the back story that was not followed up in adequate detail by mainstream media, Supriya Sharma rightly points out in her piece in Scroll: “If the lockdown last year came down as a hammer, this year, it feels like a thousand cuts. Obscured by the dramatic and distressing images of death in the second wave of the pandemic, a slow drip of distress is going unnoticed, not just by the government, but even by other citizens, leaving the urban poor to fend for themselves.”

It is only because India has independent news platforms that we saw some reports on this “slow drip of distress”. Such stories ought to be part of routine journalism, not an exception. 

Yet over time, the space for such stories, the time and investment that is needed to investigate and write them, has virtually disappeared.  Instead, for mainstream, it is news that sells their “product” that trumps all other criteria. And how poor people survive, or rather do not, is not a selling proposition

It is now five years since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in India.  The questions that arose then are still relevant. Have the conditions under which the millions employed in precarious and uncertain jobs, who formed part of that exodus, improved? If not, why not?