What Bihar voter roll row reveals about journalism and India

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 11, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/07/11/what-bihar-voter-roll-row-reveals-about-journalism-and-india

 

If you are a newspaper reader in India, you would not have missed the biggest story that has dominated news space at least in one major national newspaper. The Indian Express has led the way by doing a special series “What will NOT count in Bihar” by taking a close look at the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls that is currently being conducted by the Election Commission (EC) in the state where assembly elections are due in November.

I have qualified this statement by saying “if” you are a newspaper reader, knowing fully well that the number of people who pick up a physical newspaper and read it is steadily declining in this country.

The SIR has been challenged in the Supreme Court on grounds that it excludes people, mostly poor, who cannot produce one of the 11 documents demanded by the EC. On July 10, a two-judge vacation bench of the court refused to stay the process underway but suggested to the EC that it include three documents that have been excluded from the list of 11 – Aadhaar card, election ID (that has been issued by the very same EC conducting the revision) and ration card (yes, these still exist).

This column will not argue the rights and wrongs of the process underway. That will be addressed later this month by the Supreme Court. Instead, I want to focus on the print media’s coverage. Do note that it is exclusively print media as our TV news channels as always are preoccupied with other issues.

The Indian Express has done the most extensive coverage although now that this has become such a talking point, and been taken by the apex court, other newspapers have followed. The Hindu had flagged the problems posed by the SIR and has published several follow-up stories like this one. 

Looking at the ground reports, analysis, backgrounders and opinion pieces that The Indian Express has published in recent days, there are several facts about the “real” India that shout out to a discerning reader.

For instance, one of the documents that the EC requires to determine whether you qualify as a voter in Bihar is a birth certificate. You would think that in the year 2025, when our leaders boast to anyone willing to listen that India is making rapid progress on all fronts, this would not be a problem. Yet in 2007, the year that people who are 18 now and would qualify as voters, only 26.2 per cent of people in Bihar had birth certificates. In other words, almost two-thirds of potential new voters would be excluded if this was the only criteria. 

You could still qualify if you had a passport. But barely 2 percent of people in Bihar have passports. Or if you had a school-leaving certificate. According to the 2011 census, only 23 percent of people in Bihar have completed high school. 

Each of these facts ought to be triggers for follow up stories. Why is it so difficult to get a birth certificate? Why is basic education still a distant dream in the second largest state in India? 

Even as these facts emerged, buried in the stories about the revision of electoral lists, another story was prominently displayed in many newspapers.

Apparently, the World Bank has concluded, in a recent report, that India is one of the most “equal” societies in the world and is ranked fourth in the world. Although economists have torn apart the basis for this conclusion, it is ironic that this story was displayed prominently in newspapers without too much discussion even as the facts, stated above, about Bihar were emerging. 

Incidentally, the fact-checking site AltNews has exposed how this story, based on a press release sent out by the Press Information Bureau (PIB), misrepresented the actual World Bank report.  This is indicative of the blind reproduction of government press releases by the media without doing their own due diligence.

In any case, you would need to be a journalist who keeps her eyes firmly shut if you bought into reports about India being one of the most equal societies. You don’t even need to step out of the comfort of a metropolitan city to realise how far that is from the truth.  

Read this story by Sabah Virani in Hindustan Times about one municipal ward in India’s richest city, Mumbai. It tells you how a garbage dumping ground continues to be the site where the poor are dumped. Not just today, but for decades. And yet the media in the “city that never sleeps” apparently rarely stirs to recognise that this too is Mumbai. 

Then take another boast, that of “Digital India”. There is no question that India has made great progress. Mobile connectivity is extensive, payment through digital platforms has taken off in a big way. But still, there are islands of disconnect that coincide with those that also face developmental neglect. The reporting on the SIR has exposed this because a newspaper has given space to such stories. 

Some of Santosh Singh’s reports in Indian Express on the SIR have been especially interesting. He spent a day and a night with one Booth Level Officer (BLO) tasked with collecting documents and data and uploading them on the EC app.  

The BLO the reporter followed is a 49-year-old schoolteacher. As he struggles to connect, he tells Singh, “The app rarely opens during the day and the internet slows down at night. The officers tell us to go where the network is good. Kya pahad par chadhun (Should I climb a mountain?” It takes him 20 minutes to upload the first of the 60 forms that he has. He manages to upload just 30 of the 60 by 2.15 am, having started at 10 pm after a day of collecting forms from individuals.

This graphic description of the process, and the reality it reminds us of, is the real back story of the SIR. Digital India works for those who can connect to this other India, that is apparently making great strides. But the one that cannot, or does so with difficulty, tells us another side of a story that always remains to be told. And that is what the media ought to be doing, did do at one time, and now does only sporadically.

The India that dominates news space is the one that is entitled. There is another India that comes into view, often coinciding with elections, that is starkly different. Any respectable news organisation in this country ought to accept that both are legitimate areas for reporting and coverage. Yet, that these glimmers of the other India emerge so sporadically is a reflection on the state of our media.

From Bilkis Bano to Zakia Jafri, the media needs to ‘keep the pot boiling’

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 25, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/08/25/from-bilkis-bano-to-zakia-jafri-the-media-needs-to-keep-the-pot-boiling

August 15, 2022 will be remembered. Not for the flag-waving or declarations made by the prime minister from the Red Fort, but for the fact that, on this day marking 75 years of India’s independence, 11 men convicted of a heinous crime were granted remission from their life sentences.

Even as the prime minister spoke of women’s safety and empowerment, his home state of Gujarat released these 11 men from Godhra sub-jail. The crime for which they were convicted is horrific, even in the retelling today. Worse still, the survivor, Bilkis Bano, is now condemned to relive it. Yet, as these men emerged from jail, they were greeted with sweets and garlands by members of the prime minister’s party, the BJP.

The Bilkis Bano case is one that should never be forgotten. Soon after dark on February 28, 2002, a five-months pregnant Bilkis, 21, and members of her family left their village of Randhikpur in Dahod district. They hid in fields, hoping to escape mobs that had descended on the village following the Godhra train burning the previous day.

But they could not escape. On March 3, a group of 20 to 30 men carrying swords and sickles assaulted them. They raped Bilkis, her mother, and three other women; and killed her three-year-old daughter Saleha and most of the others in the group of 17. Only three, including Bilkis, survived.

The fact that we remember this case is because it is emblematic of the horrific communal violence that took place in Gujarat, where Muslim women were the targets of the most repulsive acts of sexual violence and assault.

We remember it, but not because the media continued to report it. Some journalists did persist but after 2019, when the Supreme Court asked the Gujarat government to pay Rs 50 lakh compensation to Bilkis, the media lost interest. The only reason it is still remembered is because of this woman’s singular courage and determination to continue her fight for justice with support from civil society organisations.

For the media, the Bilkis case holds out several lessons.

We remember it, but not because the media continued to report it. The only reason it is still remembered is because of this woman’s singular courage and determination to continue her fight for justice with support from civil society organisations.

We have to remember that today, there is an entire generation that has grown up since the Gujarat communal carnage of 2002. They would not have known about Bilkis or the other atrocities during that period. Thus, the significance of this particular case, and the context in which it took place, bears repeating.

If this story had been left to television channels, we would have heard a lot of noise but very little by way of factual background or context. Barring exceptions like NDTV, mainstream TV did not give the recent release of the convicts the attention it deserves. As a result, the significance of what has happened in the context of today’s communal politics, and the historical details that are essential to understand this, would have been lost to most consumers of mainstream media.

Fortunately, the print media in India is not yet extinct and hopefully will continue to survive. Mainstream newspapers, or at least the English papers I looked at, did provide explanatory stories to fill in details that many would either not have known or forgotten. It is interesting that so many mainstream newspapers are now doing explanatory journalism – it seems that there is a demand for this that is unfulfilled by reporting and commentary.

More importantly, newspapers also reported not just what Bilkis and her husband Yakub Rasool felt, but also the response of now retired Bombay High Court judge UD Salvi, who gave the original ruling in 2008 against these men. Justice Salvi also spoke to several television channels and independent YouTube channels, like Barkha Dutt’s Mojo Story. He was clear and unequivocal in all these interviews, stating as he does in this report in Indian Express, that “if it is being said that they are innocent, they did not commit the crimes and hence they are being honoured, it is defaming the judiciary which gave the judgments convicting them”.

There were also disturbing follow-up stories that need to be noted for the record. For instance, Indian Express reported on how the released convicts had been out on parole several times while serving their sentences. Several people living in Randhikpur, who had testified in the Bilkis case, had filed police complaints of being harassed and intimidated by these men during those periods when they were out on parole.

...if it is being said that they are innocent, they did not commit the crimes and hence they are being honoured, it is defaming the judiciary which gave the judgments convicting them.

Justice UD Salvi to the Indian Express

Even more disturbing is this Indian Express report about Muslim families leaving Randhikpur and seeking shelter in a relief camp in Devgarh Baria, where Bilkis Bano and her family have been living since 2017. One of the women arriving at the camp said, “None of us has the kind of courage that Bilkis has shown in the past two decades to fight. On our way here, we came across a huge convoy of the ruling party near Kesharpura and were petrified. I held on to my daughter tight.”

Clearly, this is a story that has not yet ended, not just in terms of legal challenges to the release of the convicts but also the renewed fear in Muslims in a state that is heading for an election. For them, the memories of 2002 have not faded.

Surveys have suggested that editorials in newspapers are not widely read. Yet they are important as a record of the stand a newspaper takes on a particular issue. In this instance, both Indian Express and the Hindu carried strong editorials on the release of the convicts and their subsequent felicitation by members of the BJP and its affiliate organisations. The editorial in the Hindu concluded: “With an Assembly election due in Gujarat at the end of the year, it is difficult not to read political significance into this decision. The sight of the released convicts being greeted and feted on their release will not sit easy on the country’s conscience.”

The other lesson for the media is the importance of memory, of reporters recalling what they reported. For instance, one of those who diligently covered Bilkis Bano’s case, when it was shifted at the behest of the Supreme Court from Gujarat to Maharashtra, is senior journalist Jyoti Punwani. She was able to remind us that the attitude towards these 11 convicts even in 2008, when they were sentenced to life imprisonment, was no different to what it is today. She writes in the Deccan Herald:

“It's not the first time these men, who gang-raped women and killed 14 innocents, including Bilkis Bano’s infant daughter, are being honoured. The day they were sentenced to life in Mumbai in 2008, this reporter saw people touch their feet in the trial court. The courtroom was packed with villagers from Randhikpur, the mood overwhelmingly sympathetic to the guilty. Snide remarks were made against the alleged ‘bounty’ given to Bilkis (there was none). Even others present in court for unrelated matters muttered that shifting the case from Gujarat to Mumbai was a ‘conspiracy against Hindus’. One of those sentenced even declared that he’d done what he had ‘for God’, and that it was ‘a crime in Hindustan’ to belong to the Vishva Hindu Parishad.”

The Supreme Court, in its judgement in the Zakia Jafri case challenging the findings of a special investigative team into the attack on Gulberg Society in which Jafri’s husband was killed, used the phrase “keeping the pot boiling” while referring to those who helped Jafri. As we now know, that particular ruling resulted in human rights activist Teesta Setalvad and former senior police officer RB Sreekumar being taken into judicial custody. Their bail hearing is before the Supreme Court.

I would argue that it is the job of the media to “keep the pot boiling” on issues like the communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002, the continuing attacks on Dalits and minorities in many parts of the country, the human rights violations in Kashmir and the Northeast, and much more. If the media does not do this kind of follow-up, the memory of these atrocities will fade and ultimately disappear, especially when the justice system also often fails.

 

Why Indian media’s coverage of Sri Lanka crisis is partial

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry.com on March 31, 2022

It has taken a while but the Indian media, or at least some of it, has finally woken up to the immense financial and human crisis facing our southern neighbour Sri Lanka.

We have read more about the Russian invasion of Ukraine in our newspapers. Indian Express even managed to send a correspondent there whose stories have been front page.

As for our television news channels, their coverage of Ukraine, sitting in their studios, has been so remarkable that it has caught the attention of some international media. This story in Washington Post points out that while there have been some questions in print media on India’s stand on the war, “on mainstream talk shows and in the pages of magazines popular with Modi’s right-wing base – a far larger audience – it has mostly been fire and fury directed toward the United States, portrayed as the culprit and instigator of yet another international conflagration".

Unfortunately, the Sri Lanka story does not lend itself to such “fire and fury”. Hence it is virtually forgotten.

Our southern neighbour has been in a state of economic emergency since last September. Today, there are extended power cuts, there is no fuel, people cannot buy food even if they have money, newspapers have had to stop printing because there is no paper, and school examinations have been cancelled because the question papers cannot be printed. All this in a country that had the best social development indicators in the region.

If you search for stories on Sri Lanka in the Indian media, you will notice a sudden spurt in the last week or so. Coincidentally, India's External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has been on a visit to Sri Lanka, and geopolitics always trumps all other media coverage in our region.

A few days before Jaishankar's visit, distressing stories popped up in a couple of newspapers, principally The Hindu which has continued to have a correspondent stationed there, and also in Indian Express, of Sri Lankans crossing the narrow strip of water dividing the two countries and landing up in Tamil Nadu. Even if they had money, they could not find food for their children, as reported in this story. Many took the risk of being caught by the Indian coast guard. These stories give you a sense of the desperation that is growing amongst ordinary people in Sri Lanka.

Senior Sri Lankan journalist Nalaka Gunawardene, who lives in Colombo, describes to me what is happening in his country.

“Sri Lanka is in the midst of probably the worst economic crisis after independence, which is now creating a humanitarian crisis as hunger and poverty rise due to lost livelihoods and collapsing small enterprises. People are literally collapsing and dying in long fuel lines, and many public hospitals have run out of medicine and are accepting only emergency cases.

“Looking at Sri Lanka’s deteriorating economy from afar, it can look like a debt problem leading to a balance of payment problem. The COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated the situation, but the real roots of this crisis lie in malgovernance and economic mismanagement over the years by successive governments.”

I asked him about media coverage of the crisis, including by the Indian media. Gunawardene points out that “global wire services have been generating impressionistic coverage from Sri Lanka in recent weeks”. An example is the often used short-cut, blaming the “Chinese debt-trap” for the country’s current problems. He points out that this is “simply not supported by data: international sovereign bonds issued since 2007 make up over a third of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt, and borrowings from multilateral agencies are larger than from any bilateral source”. Reducing the explanation to either blaming one country, or the pandemic, paints a very partial picture.

Additionally, Gunawardene says, “I so wish the Indian journalists and broadcasters who visit Sri Lanka for short periods of time on crisis coverage would expand their circle of sources beyond the usual suspects in official and cocktail circuits. We are tired of seeing the same few (well-connected) academics and activists giving the same or similar soundbites for years. Sri Lanka now has a new breed of smart and articulate younger economists, political scientists, international relations analysts and others, who offer refreshing new analyses of entrenched problems. Why not seek out and capture their views, too?”

Indeed, why not? Because when journalists are sent for a short period, without fully understanding the context, they stick to the known sources, rather than dig deeper. The excuse is always time, and the space allotted to such stories.

For those interested in deeper analysis of the Sri Lankan crisis, there are several good articles and interviews available. I found this long interview with the Jaffna-based political economist Ahilan Khadirgmar in Himal South Asia particularly perceptive. He emphasises that the current crisis can be traced back to 2009 and the end of the civil war.

The noticeable neglect in Indian media coverage of the crisis is part of a larger story of how we cover South Asia.

In the 1990s and until about a decade back, several news organisations had correspondents based in different countries of South Asia. The Hindu had reporters in Sri Lanka and Pakistan and a senior Bangladeshi journalist reporting exclusively from that country. Indian Express still has a correspondent in Nepal but none in the other countries.

The reciprocal arrangement between India and Pakistan, whereby both could appoint two correspondents, one from a newspaper and one from a wire service, ended in 2014 when the Pakistani government asked the correspondents of The Hindu and PTI to leave.

Since then, most newspapers use western wire services for news from the region, including Pakistan, as is evident from the coverage of the current political crisis unfolding in that country.

Admittedly, the withdrawal of foreign correspondents, including those reporting from countries in South Asia, has coincided with the decline in the profitability of print media. One of the first cutbacks was, inevitably, the number of journalists posted abroad.

Yet, while western news organisations and syndicated services do provide well-written reports on these countries, often written by local journalists, there is a difference. And that is the filter used when reporting. When your principal audience for stories is in the west, you are bound to pick stories that will interest that part of the world. Hence, natural disasters, wars, terror, and political turmoil get reported.

Also, it is not just the choice of stories, but how they are reported. Hence, the crisis in Sri Lanka is reduced to the “Chinese debt-trap” rather than explaining that it is a consequence of decades of misgovernance and poor economic choices.

Apart from crises that cannot be ignored, there is so much more to report from this region, which shares not just geography, history and culture but common challenges, such as climate change, or tackling disease and poverty. You can run Indian media coverage through a sieve and you will not find any reporting of this kind from any of the countries in South Asia.

Given the current state of the media in India, perhaps there is no immediate option as few media organisations would be able to post permanent correspondents. This is a pity as not only are we deprived of perspective that comes from journalists who have spent time in a region to understand nuances and context, but also we learn only about a few select subjects, and little to nothing about concerns of the citizens of this region.

To conclude, here is a suggestion from Gunawardene that we, in the Indian media, ought to consider:

“To be sure, there is a strong geopolitical dimension to Sri Lanka’s current crisis and, indeed, in its trajectory of post-war development. Different governments in Colombo have tried different approaches to balancing relations with India and China. These factors no doubt form the backdrop of Indian media’s coverage of Sri Lanka in crisis. But this island is much more than an arena for geopolitical posturing. There are crises within crises that manifest in various ways. The former conflict areas of Sri Lanka’s north and east still bear a disproportionately high share of poverty and other socio-economic issues. How much more authentic would the Indian media’s coverage of Sri Lanka be if it considered not just the Colombo-Delhi politico-diplomatic nexus, but also the distinctive perspectives from Jaffna, Batticaloa or Nuwara Eliya?”