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

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on Jan 3, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”. 

Burning Manipur, silence in media: Northeast bias or self-censorship?

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 21, 2024

Another election cycle is behind us, almost. As I write this, the election results for the assembly polls in Maharashtra and Jharkhand are awaited.

But even as the results in one of the most confusing elections for voters in Maharashtra – with fractured regional parties and rebels and independents adding to the craziness – will dominate the news, I want to focus in this column on news that ought to dominate but does not.

More specifically, Manipur, which is burning – a fire that barely subsided for the last 18 months. Yet you wouldn’t know that if you were a reader of India’s mainstream newspapers.

Sporadic coverage. That’s the most generous phrase that can be used to define the coverage of the relentless ethnic conflict in Manipur since May last year. Predictably, when the security forces are involved, the story makes it to the front page and gains some prominence. When ordinary people are being killed in the internecine warfare between different armed groups in the state, the story, if reported at all, will be buried on an inside page.

As a result, people who still rely on newspapers as their main source of information would not be able to explain what lies behind the violence, despite the occasional “explainers”.  Manipur is relegated to the spot of the “troubled” northeast, where India must send “security forces” to sort things out. That decades of this strategy have achieved precisely nothing is, of course, not understood to a readership fed on morsels from that region.

There are exceptions to this rule, and every now and then one is surprised by a detailed report in one of our national newspapers where the reporter has visited the state. But these are too few and far in between, given the extent and the extended period over which Manipur has been literally on fire. 

As always, the independent digital platforms do much better.

There are challenges, of course, for all journalists covering a conflict zone. Which version of an incident do you report? Do you try to get all sides, or do you take the easier path of relying on “official” sources? This is virtually the norm. As a result, in a state so divided, the “mainland” media is viewed as being one-sided by the minorities, the hill tribes like the Kuki, and sometimes also by the Meitei.  

Journalists based in Manipur also get divided on ethnic lines. Those of us based outside the state might find this difficult to understand, but in small, ethnically divided societies, it is a challenge for journalists based there to do the balancing act. The ethnic filter is applied to all news and information. Its credibility is always questioned depending on the source and the antecedents of that source.

An example is two recent incidents that occurred in Jiribam district that borders Assam. 

Since November 7, Manipur has drawn some attention, at least in the print media.  On that day, in one of the more peaceful parts of the state, a 31-year-old Hmar tribal woman, a school teacher, was tortured and burned to death allegedly by members of the Meitei militant group, Arambai Tenggol. She is survived by her husband, a farmer, and three small children.

The retaliation was swift from the other side as a Meitei relief camp was attacked by suspected Hmar “extremists”, the term often used by the media. Six women and children were abducted. Their bodies were later found in a river nearby. According to the Hmar, these men were armed “village volunteers”.  

Ten of the Hmar attackers were killed by the CRPF stationed near the camp. 

This story is but one of many examples of the complex and layered reality of Manipur today. Whose version do you believe and report? Even giving both sides of the story does not necessarily provide a clear picture of what happened and why, but it is better than giving just one side.

For instance, Sukrita Baruah of Indian Express did attempt this in her front page follow-up story after November 11. It is heartbreaking to listen to the husband of the woman who was killed on November 7 and the loss of hope of a peaceful future.

However, it is Rokibuz Zaman of Scroll who provides us with the granular details and the context behind the killing. An obvious question is: why did the Meitei group Arambai Tenggol target the Hmar woman? A senior police official tells Zaman that the group wanted to send a message and “disrupt the peace” through what he called an “unprovoked” killing. You will not find this kind of detail in the few newspaper reports that have appeared on both incidents. 

A related question we must ask is whether mainstream or “mainland” media’s indifference to Manipur has played some part in the centre and the state government not feeling any pressure to act. In fact, it is only after these recent incidents in November that at least one newspaper, Indian Express, made a strong case for Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh’s dismissal. In its concluding paragraph, the editorial states:

“It is urgent that the trust deficit that has widened over the last one and a half years or so is addressed. But first of all, the Centre must remove the chief minister who has presided over the spreading and deepening conflict in his state. The Centre must ask Biren Singh to go — a decision it should have taken long ago. The time for excuses is running out.”

In fact, the time for excuses ran out a long time ago. And of course, given a tone-deaf government at the centre, which rarely heeds any opinion contrary to the dominant narrative in the media, such editorials, even if they come late in the day, are unlikely to be heeded. 

However, we must still question why the media has been so quiet and not stated the obvious, as the Indian Express has done now. If another state, not ruled by the BJP, had faced this kind of violence over an extended period, would the media have remained quiet? Would there not have been demands for dismissing the government and for central intervention? 

The absence of outrage underlines a couple of realities. One, that even the few newspapers that are occasionally critical of the Modi government continue to tread carefully on issues like Manipur. And second, that the very location of Manipur in India’s northeastern corner brings home the reality that people in the region have complained about for decades: that the tragedies that play out there do not arouse the “mainland”, including its media.  

 

Trump’s return: The threat to US press freedom runs parallel to India’s media crisis

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 8, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/11/08/trumps-return-the-threat-to-us-press-freedom-runs-parallel-to-indias-media-crisis 

The US presidential elections are done and dusted. We in India can now go back to our own election season, with the impending elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand at the end of this month.

Yet, one must admit that the world’s attention, including that of many in India, was drawn to the US elections. Not just because, as Americans love to remind us, it is the oldest democracy in the world, but because of the nature of the contest and the contestants. One has a controversial and colourful personality who has drawn attention to himself even when he was out of office for the last four years, and the other is a woman of colour, who had to step in at short notice and literally introduce herself to the American electorate.

In the end, the majority of Americans decided to go with the candidate they knew, Donald Trump. And they rejected the chance of making history by electing a woman, and that too a woman of colour, to the highest office. 

Entertaining and distressing as was the high-octane election campaign leading up to November 5, in the end it is not just the defeated Democrats who are introspecting about the reasons for their loss. The media too is beginning to ask how they missed the shift in American politics, where groups who were expected to vote one way voted another.

In India, we are familiar with this debate after the general elections this year, when the results threw up surprises, especially in states like Uttar Pradesh, where it was assumed that the BJP would do well, if not better than in 2019. That did not happen. And one reason was the underreporting of the extent of disillusionment amongst the large number of unemployed in a state where the government boasted about economic progress. 

In the US too, early analysis indicates that inflation and rising costs played a big part in voter choice and that even people who had earlier voted for Democrats switched this time.

Another interesting observation by commentators on various US television channels, relevant for us in India, is that the assumption that the “Latino vote” or the “Black vote” are monoliths and these communities vote in a particular way was wrong. It is evident that within these constituencies there is considerable layering and that voters make choices that are not necessarily based on their ethnicities. And the proof of that is the broad spectrum of support that Trump got in these elections, defying the usual calculations.

The Indian media too has been realising, especially in the last decade, that generalisations like the “Dalit vote” or the “Muslim vote” are irrelevant now. Caste, religion, gender, ethnicity, region – all these categories are now layered with many other factors, such as economic distress, for instance. 

The discussion in the US has now moved to how Trump will deal with his political opponents, having spoken openly of retribution during the campaign, whether his foreign policy will reflect his first term, and if his administration will deport illegal immigrants within his first 100 days in office, as he promised. Also, will his attitude towards mainstream media, which he has disparaged in no uncertain terms, be the same as in his first term. 

About the media, many dire predictions have already been made. Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review suggests that “Trump’s impending second term poses a credible and unprecedented threat to press freedom as America has known it”. Is this an exaggeration, an overreading of the president elect’s attitude toward the media? A day before the elections, in his last election rally, Trump referred to the media as the “enemy camp”. 

Most people in India might have forgotten Trump’s approach to the mainstream US media when he was elected in 2016. 

This paragraph, from an article by Kyle Paoletta in CJR sums it up: 

“Since he entered politics, a decade ago, Donald Trump has castigated journalists for their skepticism and independence, calling the media ‘the enemy of the people,’ a ‘threat to democracy,’ ‘fake,’ and ‘crooked bastards’ whom he vows to prosecute. Now that he has secured a second term, he will be free to make good on his promises. Already, during his first term, the Department of Justice conducted surveillance of reporters and charged Julian Assange with espionage; regulators seemingly sought to block a merger of AT&T and Time Warner as retribution for critical coverage by CNN; the White House arbitrarily denied access to veteran journalists. All of that fostered an environment of media suppression, leading to more than six hundred physical attacks on journalists nationwide in 2020 alone. Trump has welcomed the violence. ‘To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,’ he told a crowd in Pennsylvania this week. ‘I don’t mind that so much’.”

Some of this will sound familiar to those of us in the media in India – who have faced similar hostility, even if not openly articulated, for being critical of the BJP and especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

But what Paoletta goes on to write about the US media during Trump’s first term is even more reflective of what we have seen here. He writes:

“Perhaps the least palpable consequence of Trump’s return to the White House will be the most widespread: journalists self-censoring or otherwise altering their coverage. That phenomenon, which Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, has called ‘anticipatory obedience,’ is a feature of societies with repressive governments. With Trump returning to office, it is hard not to count ours among them.”

“Anticipatory obedience.” Such an appropriate phrase for what we have witnessed in the mainstream Indian media in the last decade. Although here we also have “voluntary obsequiousness” in our media, especially in television channels.

There is another aspect of Trump’s attitude towards the US media that has some parallels here. In his first term, Trump was willing to engage with the mainstream media and appeared on various talk shows, although his preferred choice was always Fox News, the Murdoch-owned cable channel that was openly supportive.  During this election campaign, barring the two debates, one with President Biden and the other with Vice President Kamala Harris, he has kept away from mainstream TV.  

Instead, one gathers that on the advice of people like his 18-year-old son, he chose to appear on popular podcasts, such as the one by Joe Rogan, which was viewed by millions of people. An article in the New York Times on Trump and the media points out that this strategy gave Trump a way to “sidestep more confrontational interviews with professional journalists, where he might face tough questions, fact-checks and detailed policy debates. The influencers he met with rarely challenged Mr Trump, and often lavished him with praise.” 

This sounds familiar if you look at Modi’s record with the Indian media. To date, he has not held a single press conference or given an unscripted interview to any mainstream media, television channel, or newspaper. Instead, his preferred channel of communication to the electorate was radio, through the monthly broadcast “Mann ki Baat” and his party’s deft use of social media to spread his message. Mainstream media played its role by accepting scripted interviews and reporting without fact-checks and uncritically, anything Modi said publicly. Not a single other politician has managed to get that spread and reach through the media.  

If there is one aspect that stands out as different between the mainstream US media and India, it is the issue of official endorsement. In the US, major newspapers have historically endorsed one or the other presidential candidate. Such endorsement appears in the form of an editorial. It is argued that the editorial stance of a newspaper does not reflect or affect its news coverage. That is debatable, but this is how leading newspapers like the New York Times justify endorsing a candidate.

In India, there is no such tradition. Yet, even if our most widely read newspapers play a balancing game, the bias comes through. Perhaps not openly, but anyone who understands how the print media works would know that the importance given to some news, the placement of news, or the absence of some news indicates a newspaper’s political leanings without stating it in so many words.  

To argue that the Indian press does not lean one way or another when it comes to political parties is nothing short of hypocritical. When the Washington Post decided this year not to endorse either of the presidential candidates, there was a considerable stir in the US and some minor ripples here. The only Indian newspaper to respond was the Times of India in an op-ed written by the “Editorial Team”. 

I quote below one of the more extraordinary paragraphs from the piece:

“TOl’s principle of neutrality is rooted in a long tradition of Indian philosophical thought – be cognizant of all ideas and perspectives, don’t tie your identity to any one of them. To hold on to, to endorse, an ideology championed by anyone is the equivalent of intellectual baggage. In Indian philosophy, the same holds, even more so, when it comes to heroes. Picking and sticking to a hero or a role model is essentially an act of intellectual self-harm. It closes your mind.”

How wonderful it would be if the Indian media followed this! 

No guarantee of protection or change: What the stories of 3 journalists tell us this month

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 17, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/10/17/no-guarantee-of-protection-or-change-what-the-stories-of-3-journalists-tell-us-this-month

Journalism and journalists have made news this last fortnight.

The recognition by the Supreme Court of the work done by a journalist in exposing the way caste operates within our prison system is significant for several reasons. It underlines the importance of this kind of deep-dive socially relevant journalism, it illustrates the process that journalists must follow to ensure that their revelations make a difference, and it reminds us that unfortunately, ultimately one must often turn to the highest court even though the matter could have been settled outside the judicial system.

Sukanya Shantha wrote a revelatory article for The Wire in December 2020 that exposed how caste-based discrimination in allocation of work in Indian prisons is endorsed by official prison manuals. Shantha spoke to former prisoners and examined whether the problem was restricted to a few states. She found that it was virtually universal, in that all states in India followed this norm. Prisoners from marginalised castes were given work like sweeping, cleaning toilets and even sewers while the more privileged castes were assigned duties as cooks or in the office.  

The court ruled this unconstitutional and directed that it be removed from prison manuals. It also ruled that the caste of prisoners should not be recorded when they begin their incarceration, something that the petitioner had not asked for. It remains to be seen whether the spirit of the judgment will be followed in prisons or if jail authorities will find ways around it.

But to come back to the journalistic work of Shantha, her investigative story is the kind that requires time, work and investment. She was able to devote seven months to the story with the support of funding from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. The platform for which she writes, The Wire, would not have had the funds to support such journalism. 

However, well-endowed media houses do have the money to invest in such reporting but do not bother in the current mediascape that prevails in India. They hesitate either because they are playing a balancing game to ensure that the government stays off their backs, or for crass commercial reasons where there’s place only for news that sells their product. The conditions of poor, marginalised caste prisoners are obviously not a selling proposition.

Shantha’s story did not go entirely unnoticed. Within a few months of it appearing, the Jodhpur bench of the Rajasthan High Court took suo motucognisance of it and asked the state government to make the changes in its jail manual. A couple of other states, such as Goa, also did this quietly.  

While Shantha had hoped that some of the groups concerned with prison reforms might follow up by taking the matter to court, this did not happen. 

That is when she decided, in December last year, to file a petition in the Supreme Court. Fortunately for her, she had lawyers willing to fight the case pro bono. 

What this case, and the Supreme Court’s ruling illustrates is that doing a well-researched explosive investigative piece for an independent platform is not enough to lead to policy change. Perhaps, if one of the national newspapers had published her story, there would have been a quicker response. But that too is not guaranteed given the tone-deaf attitude of most governments to media reports on social and human rights issues, particularly when they touch on caste. 

In the 1980s, in the post Emergency period when the Indian media woke up to human rights issues, some of the journalists who broke these stories also followed up by petitioning the Supreme Court. For instance, in 1984, well-known journalist Neerja Chowdhury filed a case against the Madhya Pradesh government based on a series she did on bonded labour. 

While Sukanya Shantha is in the news for exposing caste-based discrimination in Indian prisons, another journalist was fleetingly in the news for something more superficial. Abhishek Upadhyay reports from Uttar Pradesh. An FIR was lodged against him by another journalist, Pankaj Kumar, for a post by Upadhyay on social media platform X alleging that the state government favoured people from a particular caste. 

On the surface, this seems a petty matter. But Upadhyay had to turn to the Supreme Court for relief. In its October 4 interim ruling (the case is still being heard), the court stated: 

“In democratic nations, freedom to express one’s views are respected… The rights of the journalists are protected under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India. Merely because writings of a journalist are perceived as criticism of the government, criminal cases should not be slapped against the writer.”

This appears like stating the obvious. Yet, the very fact that the highest court in India has to reiterate this illustrates the constant hazards journalists face if they choose to criticise the powerful, even casually.  Even if nothing comes of such cases, the process itself is the punishment. The only way to escape this is to keep quiet, and not stir the waters. 

The third journalist in the news is senior assistant editor and Gujarat correspondent of The Hindu, based in Ahmedabad, Mahesh Langa. On October 8, he was remanded to 10 days in police custody for alleged involvement in a GST scam. Langa is a well-respected journalist who has filed stories on Gujarat that have exposed the hollowness of some of the state government’s claims. While this case is still unravelling, it was notable that Langa was picked up even though his name is not mentioned in the FIR. While several journalists organisations issued a statement saying that his 10-day remand was “judicial overreach”, his own paper was more cautious in its response. 

The reason for concern in Langa’s case is obvious. Given the past record of the BJP-led central government and its counterpart in Gujarat, journalists can be charged with crimes that have nothing to do with their work but can tie them down to a point that they cannot continue to work. 

What these three disparate stories tell us about the status of journalists in the media today is that you have to be persistent and committed to ensure that your exposés lead to change, that even casual criticism of the government in some states, like UP, can lead to legal tangles, and that even if you work for a leading national newspaper, you are not protected from the State if it wants to send a message.

A noisy Indian media ought not to distract us from the reality that journalists trying to do real journalism face every day. Their freedom to report without fear or favour extends only to the boundaries set by those in power. 

I end with a quote that relates to another country, the United States, but could well apply to us here.

In a newsletter sent out to subscribers of New York Times, investigative reporter Michael Schmidt quotes Ian Bassin, executive director of a nonprofit group called Protect Democracy. In the context of the attitude of former President Donald Trump, and currently a candidate in the upcoming presidential elections, towards his opponents, Bassin told Schmidt: “The very definition of freedom is to be able to do those things without retribution or even just fear of retribution by the government…Once the government has made clear it can and will attempt to use the awesome power of the state to seek to punish you based on who you are, what you think, how you’ve exercised your rights or whether you’ve shown sufficient fealty to the leader, you are no longer truly free.”