Cold War, Emergency, Hindenburg: ‘Foreign hand’ pretext to censor media criticism

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on December 11, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/12/11/cold-war-emergency-hindenburg-foreign-hand-pretext-to-censor-media-criticism

The ubiquitous “foreign hand” is back again. It has hovered over Indian politics for decades, especially when the party in power is criticised for its actions, or inaction. It has been particularly persistent in the last decade and more since Narendra Modi became prime minister.

At the height of the Cold War, the “foreign hand” was either the CIA of the United States of America or the KGB of the erstwhile Soviet Union, depending on your political leanings. Critics of Indira Gandhi were always accused of being CIA. In fact, Piloo Mody, one of the founders of the Swatantra Party and a parliamentarian known for his sense of humour, some of which was either misunderstood or not understood by his fellow parliamentarians, walked into the Lok Sabha once with a placard that read: “I am a CIA agent”. He was, of course, a trenchant critic of Mrs Gandhi and one of the opposition politicians imprisoned during the Emergency.

In fact, in a famous exchange in parliament with the then defence minister, Swaran Singh, Mody is quoted as saying: “What is happening in India is very well known to everybody else in the world except Indians. It is more known to everybody else outside the House than it is known to Members of Parliament.” He was referring to the government’s decisions on defence that he suggested required greater transparency.

Today, even the pretence at transparency has disappeared. Not only is the government getting away without being asked tough questions by the media but even the opposition is being stymied each time it wants to raise questions in both houses of parliament, thanks to the presiding officers. Every question by anyone in opposition is shut down. But when members of the ruling party hold forth, they are permitted to do so without any interruption from the chair.

So, on December 5, when BJP MP Sudhanshu Trivedi spoke in the Rajya Sabha and once again brought in the spectre of the “foreign hand”, he was permitted to elaborate on his theory by the chair. 

According to a report in The Hindu: “He cited examples pertaining to the past three years, including the Hindenburg report, the COVID-19 vaccine report, a report on Indian farmers, a BBC documentary, the Pegasus issue, and a video on sexual violence against women in Manipur.”  And claimed that “ever since India is emerging as a strategic, economic and diplomatic power, it has been seen that in the last three years, there have been attempts to attack India’s established systems and interests on economic and social fronts through activities from abroad.” 

Just to remind readers, the BBC documentary that Trivedi finds so offensive is the two-part series titled “India: The Modi question” released in February last year. It raised questions about the role of the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, in the 2002 communal carnage in Gujarat. Expectedly, the government banned the documentary even from social media platforms calling it "hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage".  

The ban was challenged in the Supreme Court. The petitioners argued that they had a “fundamental right to view, form an informed opinion, critique, report on and lawfully circulate the contents of the documentary as right to freedom of speech and expression incorporates the right to receive and disseminate information”. The case is due to come up for hearing again in mid-January. 

The Hindenburg Report on the Adani group of companies and subsequent exposes on the prime minister’s closest business ally have clearly put the government on the defensive. But given Trivedi’s intervention, it appears that the government has decided that any report critical of Adani from outside India’s shores is also part of the larger conspiracy to undermine the country’s progress under the Modi government. 

The question that no one is asking is why are these reports on India only on platforms outside the country? What does this say about our own media and why it cannot do such investigations? Especially, as we are constantly reminded by this government that India is the “mother of democracy”.

Under Indira Gandhi, media houses critical of her policies were viewed as part of a larger international conspiracy to undermine her government. During the Emergency, editors and journalists were amongst those put behind bars. The chief suspect then was the US. Some smaller publications were suspected of receiving funds from the US government via foundations. 

Almost every government since then, including some state governments, has trotted out similar theories.

Today, there are laws that restrict media houses from receiving foreign funds. Anyone seeking such funds must comply with the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) which was first brought in during the Emergency in 1976 and has since been amended. Any organisation or institution receiving funds from abroad must register with the government. Since 2014, thousands of non-governmental organisations, especially those working around human rights, have had their FCRA permission cancelled, thereby depriving them of crucial funds. 

Independent digital news platforms, that depend on grants, are also now facing problems getting funding and are under constant scrutiny by government agencies, especially if they carry investigative stories that make the government uncomfortable. 

We have the recent example of NewsClick where its editor Prabir Purkayastha was arrested under UAPA after a report appeared in the New York Times alleging that the funds received by his website were from a foundation abroad that was linked to Chinese propaganda. Purkayastha was released in April this year by the Supreme Court which ruled that his arrest by the Enforcement Directorate was illegal. NewsClick was one of the platforms that wrote consistently and critically about the Adani group.

The message from such actions is clear. The government is watching you and it has the power to shut you down in more ways than one.

The impact of such a message is evident in the silence on the Adani question in mainstream media even as the opposition tries in vain to draw attention to it in parliament.

That silence is broken thanks to the handful of independent platforms that continue to survive. You find through them stories that ought to have been front page news in our newspapers. Stories like this one by The Reporters’ Collective that finds: “Public debate has been focused on the role of state-level politicians and officials in the alleged bribery scandal. The Reporters’ Collective investigation shows the role of the Union government and SECI in crafting a solar power auction tailormade for the Adani Group and helping bag contracts for 8 GW of power supply where it had originally bid for only 4 GW of projects.”

The government will likely choose to ignore such charges to ensure that people do not read the story. Or it will try to locate even a tangential connection to George Soros, the 94-year-old Hungarian American businessman and philanthropist, who is now this government’s “foreign hand”. 

Why Disha Ravi’s arrest should worry independent media platforms

 Broken News     

Published in Newslaundry on Feb 18, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/02/18/why-disha-ravis-arrest-should-worry-independent-media-platforms

We should not have been surprised that the Delhi police arrested a young environmental activist, Disha Ravi, on February 13 for helping put together a “toolkit” in support of the farmers protesting against the Narendra Modi government’s new agriculture laws. An early warning that something like this might happen had been given by no less an authority than the prime minister himself.

Speaking in the parliament, Modi denounced “andolanjeevi” who spent their time protesting and agitating. The country needed to be protected from such “parjeevi”, or parasites, he declared. Narrowing the definition further he said it was the Foreign Destructive Ideology – FDI – to which such people adhered that posed a danger to the country.

As the columnist Sugata Srinivasaraju rightly observed, young Disha fits the definition perfectly. She is an “andolanjeevi”, in that she is known to participate in protests, particularly those connected to the environment and animal rights. As part of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for the Future movement in India, Disha has been active in campaigns around climate change. And her link to an international movement sets her up to be part of Modi’s version of FDI.

Given this statement by the prime minister, it is not surprising that the Delhi police went ahead with their far-fetched conspiracy theory. They were following the playbook, or should we say “toolkit”, that has now been publicly endorsed by Modi. Whenever there is dissent, agitation, protests against the government, seek out “andolanjeevi” and spin a conspiracy theory about what they had planned. It doesn’t matter if they were even present when the supposed crime took place. Moreover, in this era of “atmanirbharta”, or self-reliance, any association with a “foreign” organisation automatically makes you a suspect.

The international conspiracy theory, or the omnipresent “foreign hand” from Indira Gandhi’s days, is nothing new in India’s political discourse. What is new, and ominous, is the determination with which it is being pursued by the government. Even young environmentalists, expressing their concern for what ought to be non-controversial, that is the advent of climate change, have now come on the radar.

While the media has still to fully unravel how the Delhi police zeroed in on this “toolkit” to fashion its case over the January 26 violence at the Red Fort, the most remarkable story of the last fortnight has to be the investigation by Meghnad S and Shambavi Thakur of Newslaundry into the Hindutva toolkit. This is not a figment of the imagination. The two journalists successfully infiltrated chat groups set up by the BJP’s Kapil Mishra and exposed how that toolkit works. It comes as no surprise, but is worrying because it functions with impunity, confident that there will be no case against the perpetrators of this hate machine.

The media will also have to think about the real import of the 113-hour raid by the Enforcement Directorate against the digital news platform NewsClick. Was this a one-off action? Or is it a precursor to more such moves against the dozen or so other independent digital platforms?

In a media landscape where much of the mainstream media is either choosing to remain uncritical or believes wholeheartedly in this government, the few spaces left for dissenting voices, for reports that seek to present what ordinary people feel, and to raise critical questions are on a handful of digital news platforms.

Over the last decade, digital news organisations such as NewsClick, Newslaundry, Wire, Scroll, News Minute and others have carved out a space that’s different, and far more independent, than the mainstream media. Even with their relatively meagre resources, they are often ahead of their larger, older counterparts in print.

In some ways, these platforms have become the equivalent of the smaller newspapers and magazines that were able to question the Indira Gandhi government during the Emergency of 1975-77 despite censorship. They could do so because of their ownerships. They were either run by small trusts or by individuals who were prepared to take risks. In some senses, they were islands of independence in an authoritarian sea. Today, that is what some of these digital platforms represent.

Their existence is always precarious because of their financial structures. Yet, so far, they have survived and even grown, suggesting that there is a demand for an independent and courageous media.

Although there have been hints that the government plans to bring in regulation that will restrict and control these outlets, so far this has not happened. In fact, it was this possibility that led some of them to come together to form the DIGIPUB News India Foundation last year with the aim to “help ensure the creation of a healthy and robust news ecosystem for the digital age”.

The challenge posed by these organisations is neither their size nor their reach. It is the fact that they can choose not to toe the government line, as much of the mainstream media is doing. And they can also report on matters that are ignored or overlooked by the legacy media.

As a result, these portals have created an invaluable digital record of recent people’s struggles such as the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act through late 2019 and early 2020, and the ongoing protests by farmers.

Furthermore, these reports and records are available to anyone outside the country looking for an independent account of such movements. Researchers as well as mainline media platforms abroad regularly cite work done by these digital platforms. That is something this government does not appreciate as currently anything critical written anywhere in the world about it is considered an international conspiracy to tarnish India’s image.

You would think that a party with such a comfortable majority in the parliament and with a leader who apparently remains popular despite disastrous policies – demonetisation, the new citizenship law, the manner in which the lockdown to check the spread of Covid was implemented – wouldn’t worry about these news outlets.

Yet, as the events since January 26 have shown, the government is rattled. Its totally illogical actions, culminating in the arrest of a 21-year-old climate activist for an imaginary “international conspiracy”, suggest precisely that.

This is why the few remaining independent spaces as well as independent journalists have something to worry about. For there is no doubt that this government has a clear strategy to silence or subvert independent and critical voices, as outlined by Kavitha Iyer in Article 14.

One way to rein them in would be by mounting the kind of attack that was used against NewsClick where, as the editor Prabir Purkayastha pointed out in an interview with Caravan, the very process is the punishment. Organisations with little to fall back on in terms of finances can be finished by protracted court cases. It’s the simplest way of dealing with them.

The last two weeks have made it clear that it is not just “andolanjeevi” that need to be worried. Any media platform that dares to interrogate, expose, or simply do the job of honest newsgathering is being closely watched. What NewsClick went through could be the precursor for more such actions given the heightened and visible paranoia of this powerful government.