Nepal flash floods: When disaster becomes content

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 10, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/09/10/nepal-flash-floods-when-disaster-becomes-content

 August 26, 2026, will be remembered by the people of Nepal for a long time, a day when a wall of water, rocks, ice, and cement cascaded down from the mountains and swept away bridges, hydropower stations, settlements and thousands of people living alongside the Trisuli River. The death toll continues to rise even as hope flickers when we read dramatic stories of people found alive after many days.

For Indian journalists assigned to report on a disaster like the one that occurred on the Nepal-Tibet border on August 26, there are specific challenges. 

First, if you’re parachuting into another country, take a little time to understand the history, geography and culture of the area you’re sent to cover. Nepal is an independent, sovereign state with its own language, culture, and history.

What we share with Nepal is geography: the Himalayas that stretch across the subcontinent. At this time of environmental challenges, including global warming, and the push for development that ignores past warnings about the Himalayas, a disaster hitting one part of this mountain chain offers lessons for all others who share its geography.

The August 26 torrent of what seemed like liquid cement that coursed down the mountains of a part of Nepal, destroying everything in its path, left all who watched it stunned. The footage was all over social media within hours, even before the media could respond and send their reporters to the spot.

We watched reels by ordinary Nepalis who managed to find a perch out of reach of that deadly wall of destruction. Yet, even as we struggled to understand what had happened, how and why, the Nepali media, often without sufficient resources, was at work. 

Today, when that story has predictably disappeared from our front pages – and in India the story was principally about Indian tourists and pilgrims who were affected – it is worth pausing to reflect on what the media needs when covering such disasters in other countries, especially our neighbouring countries.

Much of Indian mainstream TV stayed true to form, over-dramatising and emphasising their own presence there rather than the story.

Print did better, although some still could not resist boasting that the reports were by “such and such in Nepal”.  Surely that is the job of a media house, to have feet on the ground and report. 

An exception to the routine reporting we read is this long-form piece in The Indian Express by Tashi Tobgyal and Devansh Mittal, tracing people in a photograph they found while reporting on the Nepal disaster.

Even as Nepal picks up the pieces and continues to search for survivors, it is worth looking at the reporting in Nepali newspapers. I looked at Nepali Times, edited by veteran journalist Kunda Dixit and found articles that were informative and graphic in telling the story.

On August 27, a day after the flood, the headline of the editorial in Nepali Times read: “Not if, but when next?” That sums up the reality many parts of Nepal face, and it would also apply to the Himalayan region in India.

The editorial goes on to state: “This was not a ‘natural’ disaster. Nothing about it was natural – not the glacier melting due to greenhouse gas buildup due to fossil fuel burning, not the location of expensive hydropower plants on trans-Himalayan rivers, not designing highways to follow rivers, not the settlements that have grown around them, not the corruption and greed, not the poor governance.” A conclusion that could apply to similar events that have occurred in India’s Himalayan region.

An interview with Alton C. Byers, a Himalayan glacier expert, reiterates this comment in the editorial. Calling this “the most horrific flood I have ever seen”, Byers points out that “the critical point, and that I’m starting to hear more and more on this in the Nepal press, is that there are settlements along floodplains. A tremendous surge in unregulated, unplanned urbanisation, with much of the building along the rivers where it really shouldn’t be. If you look at aerial photos from 50 years ago, you’ll see that the villages in the area were up high. Only farms may have been down by the river because that’s where a lot of fertile soil is. So this is unfortunately a consequence of building in the wrong places.” 

Much has been reported about the settlement of Trisuli on the banks of the river that was crushed in the avalanche. This piece in Nepali Times gives a sense of what the place looked and felt like before it was wiped out. The writer quotes a survivor: “We couldn’t find my wife. She and the house are both gone. There’s nothing to say. We are without an address.”

Bringing home the ugly reality of how social media today has replaced reflective or careful reporting in times of tragedy, Milan Shreshtha writes a searing critique in the same paper that is worth reading for journalists and social media consumers. “The most disturbing feature of social media engagement”, he writes, “is the transformation of tragedy into entertainment even more than earlier legacy tabloid press.”

As a result, writes Shreshtha, “A catastrophe is turned into ‘content’. An ice-rock avalanche becomes content. Human suffering becomes content. Comment sections fill with mockery, outrage, conspiracy theories, and political point-scoring – all the while families mourn their losses…Videos of destruction are consumed with the same casual detachment as any other viral post. The algorithm favours emotional reaction, not ethical reflection. The result is a public sphere that is often disconnected from empathy.”

This last paragraph, I think, captures much of what has gone wrong with the way news, any news, is disseminated today. It is reduced to content. It must be eye-catching and entertaining rather than factual. And it is “disconnected from empathy”. In the process, we forget that whether it is a so-called “natural” disaster or man-made, like the five-storey Satya Niketan building that collapsed like a house of cards in India’s capital city last week, there are people at the heart of the story – grieving, searching, in pain.

The stories the media sees only in a crisis are now being told by schoolchildren

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 28, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/08/28/the-stories-the-media-sees-only-in-a-crisis-are-now-being-told-by-schoolchildren

The fallout of the student protests at Jantar Mantar last month, culminating in the police crackdown on July 20, and the ripples created throughout the country have yet to settle.

One of the significant outcomes has been the way people across the country have understood the power of telling their own stories through reels uploaded on various social media platforms. In fact, July 20 illustrated how the absence of established media now makes no difference as participants themselves record and tell their own story.

The camera has now moved from the hands of the students in Jantar Mantar and other cities, to students in rural schools across the country. They are the ones now recording and complaining about pot-holed roads making the journey to school difficult, the virtual absence of toilets, or showing how those that exist are stinking unfinished structures, and that many schools have one teacher, who is also designated the principal, taking multiple classes.

These are stories that mainstream media ought to have been recording. It did so in the past. There was a time when television channels did longform stories on such issues. The visual format is always more powerful than the written word, and even more so now. But in those days, even newspapers had designated “development” and “education” correspondents who were assigned to investigate the reality behind government statistics. 

 

The gaze of mainstream media has now moved elsewhere. And as a result, the entrenched neglect of government schools, and health facilities is reported only sporadically, when there is a disaster. The event is covered; the process that led to the disaster is ignored.

Although the response of some state governments to these self-generated stories by rural children is a promising start, it addresses only a small part of a much larger problem of developmental neglect.

Take Maharashtra, one of the better-off states in India. There are tribal-dominated areas within driving distance of its capital, Mumbai, and some further afield that have remained virtual islands of neglect. For decades, journalists have reported on the Melghat area, for instance, where many tribal villages are virtually inaccessible.  They are in the news when one hears of a pregnant woman, carried in a hammock, who could not be taken to a hospital in time to survive. Pregnancy is not an incurable disease; and women in India of 2026 should not die in the process of giving birth.  Yet they do, and we know only when a media house bothers to invest in reporting on such regions.

In recent weeks, the pressure on the state government has built up as tribal students from these areas have spoken on camera about their schools, about the roads, about the state of their hostels (in one hostel three girls died of snake bite), and of the humiliation older girls go through when they are asked to do pregnancy tests if they are away from the hostel for some months.

The Maharashtra government has finally moved and set up a committee to investigate the entrenched problems of developmental neglect in these areas (there are 10.5 million tribal people in Maharashtra), particularly of health care. It has also decided to conduct an audit of ashram schools established for tribal children. It would be a shame if the media now steps back because this is precisely the time that the focus must remain on these islands of neglect to ensure that the promises made today are being implemented. That is our job as media in a democracy.

Then take Rajasthan, where the team from the Cockroach Janta Party, as part of its “School Theek Karo” campaign, was beaten up when it went to check on government schools. But the attention this has brought to the school system in the state has resulted in the state government allocating Rs 12,500 crore to set things right. Clearly, unless governments are pushed, they do not act. That is the lesson that the protests of these last months have reiterated once again. 

The process set in motion by the protests in Delhi will continue to unravel. But so will another story that has yet to be concluded.

On August 6, the Bombay High Court overturned the ruling of a trial court in Goa acquitting the well-known journalist and founder-editor of Tehelka magazine, Tarun Tejpal, of sexually assaulting his colleague. Tejpal has now appealed to the Supreme Court. Here are links to three articles out of several published after the judgement (here, here, here).

The ruling set off once again the debate on the incident that occurred in November 2013 in Goa, where Tejpal was accused by a young reporter working for the magazine, of sexual assault. The Goa police registered a case against him. But typical of the glacial pace of the Indian judicial system, the trial began in 2017 and the judgement exonerating him was delivered in 2021. 

But even before the judicial process had been set in motion, the media trial had begun. The accused was a well-known personality; the survivor was a young journalist at the start of her career. Even though she was entitled to her privacy and her name was not used publicly, in fact people knew. This is because her emails, phone chats, and videos were liberally shared with select members of the media and others who believed that Tejpal was being falsely accused because his journal had exposed many powerful people in the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Based on this material that was circulated, opinion pieces appeared in newspapers and on digital platforms that seemed to have already concluded that the survivor was guilty. One such piece appeared on this platform in 2014 (since taken down).  

As a media commentator, I have been asked what I thought about the opinion piece that appeared in Newslaundry. In my view, on any objective journalistic criteria, it should not have been accepted. It was the kind of writing that appears on personal blogs, or on social media platforms like Facebook. But any digital platform, attempting to be credible and independent, ought not to have used it.

That article, and many others that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the case against Tejpal need to be seen in the context of how the media conducts its own trials even before the justice system gets going and the bias that is often evident in the coverage of rape cases when the individual accused is a prominent man, and in this case one of their own, a journalist.

There are many instances from the past where the media has covered in detail high profile rape cases while those cases involving poor women get barely any coverage.  There is a considerable body of work documenting this inbuilt bias in the media on its coverage of crime in general, and sexual assault in particular, when the extent of coverage is determined by proximity and “the market” which is interested in news about “people like us”.  

The insensitivity towards the survivor begins with her identity. According to the law, we are not permitted to name her. In 2012, in the coverage of the gang rape in Delhi that led to protests, and important changes in the rape law, media houses decided to make up names for the survivor. The one that stuck was Nirbhaya. 

In less high-profile cases, such as the rape of a woman journalist in Mumbai just six months after the Delhi gang rape case, where a group of men accosted her and the photographer accompanying her in an abandoned textile mill estate and gang raped her, everything short of actually using her name was fair game for some newspapers. One sent a reporter to the building where she lived and asked the watchman whether the woman who had been raped lived there.

In another case, documented in the book “Missing half the story, Journalism as if gender matters” (Zubaan books), Sameera Khan – in the chapter “When survivors become victims” – writes about the 2009 case of an international student at the Tata Institute of Social Studies who was gang-raped by six men. The headline of the news item the day after the case was filed was: “Why was she with six men that night?” Typically, the story quoted parents saying how the men charged were “good” boys. Worse still, one newspaper ran sections of the FIR filed by the student giving intimate details of how the assault took place. All this before the charge sheet had been filed by the police. 

In an age where information gets out before it is vetted and verified, the plight of women who pick up the courage to go to the police and report sexual assault is now even more fraught. 

Let me end with this quote from Sameera Khan’s chapter by feminist Bishakha Datta, words that are worth heeding today:

“Rape is coerced sex; a crime. Only perpetrators can be held responsible for the crimes they commit – not victims. How is it that victims of any other crime are never blamed, but rape victims are always suspected of triggering rape? People who are robbed, murdered or otherwise assaulted are never held responsible…One can debate opinion; one cannot debate fact. Rape is, in fact a crime. Period. There are no two opinions around this.” 

As CJP protest wrapped up, media found its ‘villains’ and buried all victims

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 6, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/08/06/as-cjp-protest-wrapped-up-media-found-its-villains-and-buried-all-victims

July 20, 2026, is a day that will be remembered for a long time. Not just because of the massive response to the call given by the Cockroach Janta Party to march to Parliament. Not just because of the recorded evidence of police brutality on young, mostly peaceful protestors. But because it has shifted the conversation in India from the one-way communication of the people in power to one where a generation has announced that it will be heard and is demanding a dialogue between equals. 

The demands made by students at Jantar Mantar and elsewhere have not disappeared despite the Modi government acceding to their principal demand for the resignation of the Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. On the contrary, young people continue to articulate their views on social media platforms as they assert that their struggle is far from over. 

For a time after the CJP called off the protests on August 1, it appeared as if the issue was settled. This is because the Modi government tried to do what it is known to do anytime it faces uncomfortable questions: change the narrative.

So instead of addressing the other important demands made by youth, the new narrative became the allegedly foul language used by some of the young people, specifically young women, that targeted the prime minister.

And those attempting to create this diversion almost succeeded. The unfortunate victim of this strategy was a 15-year-old girl, who had FIRs filed against her, and was eventually forced to apologise on video. That did not end her problems. Her mother told the press that they were compelled to relocate because of the continuous harassment, both by police and others visiting their home and through social media.  Her face and name are now known because even media houses, that ought to have known that a minor must be protected, had no compunction in broadcasting her name and photograph.

Read this piece in Newslaundry to get a sense of the extent of such abuse and trolling of the young women who had the courage to speak up during the protests.  One of them, who teaches yoga, told the Newslaundry reporter: “People are constantly targeting me. I have confined myself to my home and have practically stopped stepping out. My life has changed completely. I am a yoga instructor, and I lost many clients after this controversy. It feels as though my career is over.”

The other narrative that dominated was the Modi government’s demand that the head of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg apologise to the prime minister for having taken down his video from Instagram. The explanation that it was a technical glitch did not suffice, nor an apology by a senior executive of the company.

But as Apar Gupta of the Internet Freedom Foundation, wrote on X, “More than an apology, we need a law for social media regulation that is centred in human rights and guards against political control of platforms… The Standing Committee on IT wants Mark Zuckerberg to apologize, but the real apology is owed to the users themselves, not just the government. A 5-hour takedown of one video made headlines, but doxing of protesters, unchecked hate speech, and automated over-censorship of ordinary citizens’ content go unanswered. An apology to power means little without accountability to the people actually affected.”

So, the 15-year-old who is likely to be marked for life, or the young woman who said her career is over, are not considered worthy of an apology from the government that knows well who is behind the harassment, but the dominant narrative is how these young women, and the company that runs the social media platforms, must apologise.

We must also note that although most of the protestors were men, it is the women who have been targeted. The misogyny so deeply ingrained in our political culture, especially over the last decade when powerful politicians, including Modi, have not hesitated to hurl sexist abuses at their opponents, has been on full display since July 20.

Despite the concentrated effort to move the focus away from the demands of the students, the story refuses to die down. Now it is young people in Jharkhand who are being seen and heard as they occupy the streets of the state capital, Ranchi and its biggest stadium, where some of them are on hunger strike as were their counterparts in Delhi, and where similar demands about leaked exam papers and the desperate hunt for jobs can be heard on the ground.

This video of a young woman on the YouTube channel Lallantop is particularly disturbing. She speaks of the many ways in which she has tried to deal with competitive exams, the desperation of trying to succeed, yet despite being encouraged by parents, she concludes, “We don’t have any value, even as much as insects”. Holding a copy of the Constitution in her hand, she says, “Our Constitution says there should be equality. But where is equality?” And then goes on to say, “I don’t want to cry in front of the camera but sometimes I feel I am nothing, I am nothing.” 

Those words should haunt those who make policies that affect people like this young woman, and the dominant media that perpetuates the false narratives of the powerful.

I must point out though, that there is one big difference in the coverage of the protests in Ranchi and those held in the week starting July 20.

Jharkhand is ruled by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), an ally of the Congress Party and a member of the opposition India Alliance. Significantly, this time, major television channels, that had virtually ignored the previous protests, flew reporters, and even prominent anchors to Ranchi to cover these protests. Apparently, when the target is a non-BJP government, it is worth their time and resources to provide coverage.  

Let me leave you with two stories that illustrate that journalism, as it ought to be practised, still exists.

Just before the July 20 march to parliament, there were videos and images of a truck laden with stones and bricks parked close to the site of the protests.  Questions were raised on social media about how the truck appeared at that location shortly before July 20.

A reporter at Newslaundry did what any media organisation could have done.  He traced the registration plate of the truck, clearly visible in the images, and filed this report. It tells us that the truck was involved in an accident on July 16 but that the police could not give a convincing explanation about why it was parked outside the office of the Indian Youth Congress and so close to the site of the protests on July 19, a day before the march to parliament. The story illustrates what journalists are supposed to do: not speculate but investigate.

AltNews is a platform that does precisely that. And in this instance, it has investigated the use of AK-47 guns by the Bihar police against protesters in Siwan.  Questions were raised about this once a photograph showing a policeman with such a gun went viral. There were also reports of people injured by bullets.  But it is this report that establishes that it was not just a couple of bullets fired at people but at least nine that AltNews has managed to verify.

Newspapers like The Hindu and independent digital news platforms have also followed up on the pellet injuries on protestors that the police refused to acknowledge. The case is now being heard in the Supreme Court.

The events since July 20 ought to make those in power, including the powerful in the media, acknowledge the passion, clarity and courage of these young protestors. Instead, what we have seen is either a patronising attitude, talking down to them as if they are children to be scolded, or demonising them by attacking the most vulnerable amongst them, the young women.

This is a formula that will rebound because if you took the time to listen and watch the reels and reports since July 20, you would have understood that this cacophony of dissenting voices will not quieten down easily.

Be it NEET or Ayodhya, BJP’s accountability problem is getting harder to hide. Media must keep asking

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 9, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/07/09/be-it-neet-or-ayodhya-bjps-accountability-problem-is-getting-harder-to-hide-media-must-keep-asking

Accountability and corruption. These two words are now haunting the Modi government. Not just because of the ongoing protests by the Cockroach Janta Party and its followers in New Delhi demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the leak of the NEET examination papers. The bigger story that speaks of corruption and demands accountability is the expose about the theft of donations at the much vaunted Ram Temple in Ayodhya.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with the backing of its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) rode to power on the back of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement that promised a Ram Temple in Ayodhya. The movement kicked off with the Rath Yatra led by the L K Advani during which an inestimable amount was collected by way of donations by ordinary people who gave jewellery, bought and paid for silver and gold bricks and donated cash.

The culmination of this campaign, marked by communal riots in many parts of the country and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, was the inauguration of the Ram Temple in January 2024 by the prime minister of an ostensibly secular country. Narendra Modi remarked that the building of the temple was an act of “civilisational justice”. 

A decade before this, when the BJP won the 2014 elections and Modi became the prime minister, he had promised: “Na khaoonga, na khane doonga” (Neither will I eat, nor will I let others eat). He was elected on the back of the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare from 2012 onwards.

That promise has come to bite the Modi government now as the story of the extent to which donations given for the Ram Temple were stolen has emerged. What we know so far is perhaps no more than the trailer. But it is striking that on this story, some mainstream newspapers like The Indian Express have led the way.

The report about the theft from the coffers of the Ram Temple is not unusual. In the past, there have been cases of similar thefts from temples across India. But this one at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya is significant because it is so central to the route that the BJP and the RSS have taken to come into power. 

The reports in mainstream print media tell us how the men designated to receive donations helped themselves to it and were caught only because there is some CCTV footage available. But this covers only 45 days, according to the BBC. It quotes a police officer saying: “The total amount that was allegedly stolen is yet to be established, but the accused appear to have taken money whenever they found an opportunity. There was no fixed amount stolen on a given day.” 

Clearly, the stealing did not begin when the surveillance system was installed. In fact, what we know as of today is literally the “tip of the iceberg” as veteran police officer Vibhuti Narain Rai told The Hindu.  

Also, although the UP government has formed an SIT to investigate the theft, and there have been arrests and demands for the resignation of those serving on the Ram Temple trust, the issue of accountability remains. Can the Modi government and the RSS shrug off this story, and claim that the matter has been handled if a few people lower down in the pecking order are arrested and charged?

Clearly not, as Indian Express columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out in his edit page article. He writes: “The strongest government in decades appears strangely powerless before the one problem it once claimed it was uniquely capable of addressing: Corruption. When the extraordinary power that the Prime Minister has encounters extraordinary silence and inaction on the issue of corruption, it tells a story. A very damning story.”

Rajdeep Sardesai, writing in India Today, makes a similar point when he writes: “The RSS cannot simultaneously claim moral ownership of the Ram Mandir movement during its hour of triumph and distance itself from institutional failures during its hour of crisis.”

He reminds us that the Ram Janmabhoomi project “became the defining ideological project of the Sangh Parivar”. And that “the BJP transformed it into unprecedented electoral success. The RSS provided the ideological framework.” Therefore today, in the face of the theft from the Ram Temple, “leadership cannot claim ownership of a historic success while disclaiming responsibility for an embarrassing failure.”

The real test for the media now is to pursue this story, regardless of the discomfort it causes those who lead this country. If there is one story that has blown the cover of the so-called “party with a difference”, it is this.  

To quote Mehta’s prescient observation: “The RSS is discovering that corruption is not just a matter of homilies about character; people with a background in the RSS can succumb to the temptations of unchecked power like anyone else. The allegations of temple theft in Ayodhya, an organisational structure architected entirely by the BJP-RSS, takes the fig leaf off Ram Rajya, literally. The BJP is now the ancien régime with all the signs of rot too overwhelming to hide.”

The Modi government has perfected the art of distraction, and simultaneously putting pressure on the media, so that stories like this die down. There are many examples of a glimmer of an investigation that begins into such cases of corruption, or favours granted to powerful business houses, that then fade away. 

 

Stories like this one, also broken by The Indian Express, about the family of the current Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Mohan Yadav, who is a member of the BJP. According to land records accessed by the reporter, his family acquired 168 acres of land in Ujjain, a city that is undergoing urban renewal. They profited from changes in land-use that were announced by his government. The conflict of interest is too obvious to be underlined. Yet, despite this expose, so far there is no pressure by the BJP’s leadership on Yadav to step down.

The events in recent weeks, beginning with the NEET exam leak, and culminating in the expose about the theft of donations to the Ram Temple make it clear that corruption and demands for accountability from the Modi government will not fade away. 

Furthermore, if these media exposes, from Madhya Pradesh and Ayodhya are an indication, then perhaps there is reason to hope that at least some in mainstream print media have developed the spine to continue to dig out the dirt.

 

Documenting the Pandemic

Book review in The India Forum

Published on June 23, 2026 

Link: https://www.theindiaforum.in/book-reviews/documenting-pandemic

Documenting Lost Time: Reports from a Recent Pandemic
Edited by Nalini Rajan
Orient BlackSwan, 2026

The Covid-19 global pandemic, which stretched three years from 11 March 2020 to 5 May 2023, has left behind questions that still await answers, scars that have yet to heal, and fears that cannot be easily dispelled. The concoction of misinformation, inadequate and unreliable information, and medical interventions falling well short of needs left behind not just disease and death, but also trauma and fear that have not entirely disappeared.

Official claims were exposed as gross underestimations when images of half-submerged corpses on the banks of the Ganga appeared, along with stories by independent media.

Capturing all of this is not an easy task. The book under review attempts to document what it calls “lost time” through 17 essays that cover the journey of the pandemic through India.

Edited volumes are often uneven, as is this one. However, it contains individual essays that together provide useful information and perspectives as we look back on the Covid-19 pandemic.

The most comprehensive is “The Virus and the Viral: The Use and Abuse of Information During the Pandemic” by senior journalist Pamela Philipose. She divides the different kinds of fake news that circulated over that time into three categories: first, the narrative controlled and propagated by the government; second, the communal propaganda in the initial months; and third, the way such information was used for profit, both monetary and political.

The government’s control of information was an extension of what the Narendra Modi government has attempted to do on many issues. To achieve this, the government not only found ways to reach out and persuade mainstream media to accept the official narrative but also centralised the source of information for the media. 

The strategy worked. For instance, mainstream media did not question the official figures put out by the government on the extent of the spread of the infection or the death toll. Official claims were exposed as gross underestimations when images of half-submerged corpses on the banks of the Ganga appeared, along with stories by independent media. Despite this, the government continues to claim that the death toll was lower than estimated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other international bodies.

Similarly, in the initial days after the sudden lockdown declared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 23 March, the government was in denial about the impact on ordinary people. This was exemplified by the mass exodus of migrant workers from the cities. Those images of workers walking, crammed into trains and buses, and finding any means of transportation remain seared in our memories, thanks to photographs, real-life accounts, and films.

Despite this, as Philipose reports, the government remained in denial. Even when the photograph of an infant trying to wake up his dead mother went viral, the Press Information Bureau did a “fact check” claiming that the woman had died due to pre-existing health issues.

The lowest point in media coverage must surely be the way it reported on the meeting of the Tablighi Jamaat in New Delhi.

Meanwhile, the Solicitor General of India told the Supreme Court that on 30 March—a day when roads, trains, buses, and all forms of transport were bursting with people rushing back to their villages—not a single migrant worker was on the road. He also claimed the government was providing food and shelter to “about 23 lakh people”. Incidentally, the same Solicitor General referred to journalists as “prophets of doom” and “vultures” when the government approached the Supreme Court to pass an order preventing media from publishing any news about the pandemic without first clearing it with the government.

The lowest point in media coverage must surely be the way it reported on the meeting of the Tablighi Jamaat in New Delhi. Philipose, as well as Vikas Pathak in a separate essay, document how the false narrative that the virus was spread by followers of the Jamaat was amplified by mainstream media. As Philipose rightly points out, people fell for this misinformation partly because they did not understand the way the virus spread, but also because “communal forces were able to exploit fear, ignorance, and pre-existing prejudices to scapegoat an entire community”.

Another important essay is by retired Madras High Court judge, Justice K. Chandru. He lays out the ways in which the government used laws such as the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897, passed in colonial times to deal with the bubonic plague in Bombay.

Writing specifically about Tamil Nadu, Justice Chandru notes how the state government added Covid-19 to the list of notified diseases recognised by the Public Health Act. Under this law, public health officers could act to control the disease and set up a system whereby public hospitals and local authorities would come under a single authority. Private hospitals and medical practitioners could also be brought in by the state government.

Implementation of this system was affected by the suddenness of the lockdown. It gave the police powers to stop movement of vehicles and people. In just four months after the lockdown, he notes, the police had booked 5.6 lakh traffic violations.

Such powers with the police also resulted in violence against the poor, especially migrant workers fleeing cities, or daily wage earners who had no option but to venture out.

Justice Chandru also notes the impact of the lockdown on the functioning of the courts. He writes, “The courts became virtual arbitrators of disputes between the beneficiaries and the government. Judges started advising the government on how to better manage the unfolding situation.”

An important reminder in Justice Chandru’s essay is on how state governments used the pandemic to tighten labour laws when “hundreds of thousands of people were losing jobs owing to the closure of commercial enterprises”. When 10 central labour unions drew the attention of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to this, the government backtracked. He also draws our attention to the inadequacies in the Inter-State Migrant Workers Act of 1979 in the face of the pandemic’s impact on migrant workers.

One wishes that there had been a chapter looking at India’s public healthcare system and how and why it virtually fell apart during the pandemic.

While there has been a good deal written on the scientific and medical aspects of the pandemic, it is still something that needs constant reminders and reiterations. The misinformation spread during those years has not vanished and is bound to resurface if another global health crisis appears.

In this collection, T.V. Venkateswaran, a science writer and founder editor of India Science Wire, does a competent compilation of the journey of Covid-19 from China’s Wuhan district to the rest of the world. His essay was written in 2020, when the pandemic had just begun. As we know, the spread of the virus continued unabated and turned more virulent. Although he touches on the vaccines, the writer does not elaborate on the controversy surrounding them. Still, in a short chapter, he has assembled the credible information that emerged about the virus—a handy reference for anyone wanting to pursue this further.

One wishes that there had been a chapter looking at India’s public healthcare system and how and why it virtually fell apart during the pandemic. This meant that the majority, who cannot afford private health care, had to scramble for help, or just quietly give in to the disease, unattended and uncounted. The increasing privatisation of health care is a concern when a country where many people are poor must grapple with a health emergency like the Covid-19 pandemic.

The three long years when the pandemic tore through India ought to have prompted a closer look at the inadequacies of our health care system, an acknowledgement of the extensive costs of unthinking and unplanned responses of the government—such as the sudden and arbitrary lockdown—and the dangers of official and unofficial policies that target one community at times of such distress.

None of this has happened. Instead, “lockdown” has now been incorporated into all our languages. This became evident when the US and Israel-led war on Iran began on 28 February 2026. Within days, rumours of a “lockdown” led to an exodus—albeit smaller—of migrant workers from our cities.

Mainstream media is losing a generation. Cockroach Janta Party is merely a symptom

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 11, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/06/11/mainstream-media-is-losing-a-generation-cockroach-janta-party-is-merely-a-symptom

A pest entered the news cycle recently. One that most people would like to either squash or obliterate with a deadly spray. So far, it has not been either squashed or obliterated. Only time will tell whether it can really weather all the storms that will come its way.

The online phenomenon, the Cockroach Janta Party, that began as a joke on social media has now manifested itself with feet on the ground. And it intends to continue to rally its online supporters and get them out and away from their computers, tablets and phones.

We can only speculate whether the CJP will transform itself into a political party. Or whether it will remain a group with a one-point agenda – demanding accountability from the Modi government about the recent leak of the NEET examination papers that has affected lakhs of young people across the country.

However, the very fact of the emergence of something like the CJP holds out lessons for the media, especially mainstream media. While newspapers have taken note of the CJP and most covered its rally in Jantar Mantar, New Delhi on June 6, mainstream TV channels have largely ignored it.

Social media has been rife with speculation about the government’s approach towards the CJP.  When demonstrations against the NEET leak by the Congress party’s student wing were put down with a heavy hand by the police in different parts of the country, how come the government allowed the CJP to hold its demonstration? And with that question comes speculation about the fledgeling group’s links with the BJP.

If you search print media, it is hard to find a plausible explanation about the Modi government’s soft response to the CJP. The Indian Express carried a front-page story quoting various leaders of the BJP. One of them is quoted as saying: “It’s part of democracy. Such things happen in democracies.” Ironic, given the same government has prevented peaceful demonstrations on a range of issues claiming they endangered “national security”.

But apart from what these BJP leaders said, what is significant is that none of them came on record with their views, a reflection on how tightly controlled the governing party is in terms of a media narrative.

Also, irrespective of the politics, or the lack of it, around the CJP, the very fact of its existence holds out important lessons for mainstream media.

It illustrates how a country, where most of the population is under 35 years, now gets its news and information from platforms other than mainstream media. And that even frustration and anger are expressed on these platforms. The fact that so far this has not been converted into votes that can affect the outcome of elections is not as relevant as what this indicates about the focus, or the lack of focus, in mainstream media that is turning millions of people away from it.

I suggest that it is the absence of news and reports in mainstream media about what is happening in most parts of the country that is the trigger for the growing disillusionment. Speak to anyone from the working class – a taxi or autorickshaw driver, a construction worker, a domestic help – and ask them what they turn to for news. Nine times out of 10 they will mention a YouTube channel that brings them local news from the region where they have their homes. Mainstream channels are rarely accessed and print media even less frequently.

The very fact that the CJP was able to garner such a huge support in such a short time on Instagram indicates the popularity of this particular social media platform with young people.

This does not mean that the days of so-called “legacy” media are over. But it does call for introspection on the direction that mainstream media has taken, especially in the last decade, and raises questions about whether it can change and find ways to become more relevant.

There are always exceptions. It is encouraging to read reports in some of the established print media that draw attention to the situation away from the national capital and politics.

This report by Purnima Sah in Indian Express on a perennially neglected part of Maharashtra, part of its tribal belt, is particularly striking. Nandurbar district, from where she reports, has been covered in the past. I can personally recollect from the 1980s that there were stories of the lack of water, and health care in the region, of children dying of malnutrition, of women bearing the burden of collecting water and firewood.

In India of 2026, little has changed. Women still do the back-breaking work of collecting water. There is poor connectivity in terms of roads. Basic health care remains inaccessible. And the women pay a terrible price with “chronic pelvic pain, uterine prolapse, recurrent vaginal infections, miscarriages, kidney stones and debilitating back pain conditions they believe are linked to years of carrying heavy loads of water from childhood.”

Such stories are few. Instead, what we read, or hear, are reports about how brilliantly the Indian economy is doing, how India is respected the world over, and how the government is reaching out to the poorest. Reading this, you could not imagine that areas of neglect like Maharashtra’s tribal belt remain where they were almost four decades back.

Or take another story that was on the front page in many newspapers because it was so shocking. Eight workers were killed and at least six injured when molten steel spilled on them at a public sector steel plant in Vishakhapatnam. Accidents do happen even in the best run factories.  But the horror of this one reminds us that these days there is little writing or investigation into workers’ safety and their rights. If you read carefully, almost every day there are small reports about accidents in factories, on construction sites, or manual scavenging despite a law that has banned it. But they are so easy to miss. And no one joins the dots to give us the bigger picture.

There are dozens more examples of these absences. To cover what is “real” India requires commitment and investment. It cannot be done sitting in an office, on the phone. These stories can only be told when there are feet on the ground. 

 

The absence of stories like the ones mentioned above inadvertently, or deliberately, furthers the government’s narrative that all is well. Repeating what is fed to the media has become such a norm now that one fails to be surprised.

The latest is the build-up to what we were told was Prime Minister Narendra Modi exceeding Jawaharlal Nehru’s record of being in office. No one questioned how these numbers were calculated. We were told that on completing 4,399 days in office “uninterruptedly”, Modi would surpass Nehru’s 4,398 days in office. 

 

This was repeated in every newspaper. World leaders sent in their congratulations. Ministers in the Modi government, including the education minister whose resignation is being demanded by the CJP, did pujas to mark the occasion. And we are told that at the cabinet meeting on that day, ministers resorted to synchronised clapping to felicitate the prime minister.

What practically no one, barring Aakar Patel in his column in Deccan Chronicle and this article in The Wire, pointed out that the calculation conveniently left out the years when Nehru was Prime Minister after Independence, that is 1947 to 1952 when the first general elections were held. And that in reality his total days in office “uninterruptedly” were over 6,000.  

This might sound like nit-picking. But it is an example of the ease with which these narratives are repeated now. Over time they become “fact” because we as journalists fail to do basic due diligence of questioning and checking.