Bihar’s silenced voters, India’s gagged press: The twin threats to Indian democracy

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 28, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/28/bihars-silenced-voters-indias-gagged-press-the-twin-threats-to-indian-democracy

The Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, probably expected that his August 18 press conference would settle the controversy surrounding the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar and Rahul Gandhi’s “vote chori” charge. He was wrong. This is a story that has refused to die, notwithstanding Trump’s tariffs, or even the tragic floods in parts of India.  

In fact, it should not die as it is, by a long measure, one of the most important stories that any self-respecting media organisation needs to investigate. For it is more than evident now that the state of our electoral rolls, as exposed by the SIR in Bihar and subsequent media exposes, raises many important questions about our electoral system and our democracy.  

So far, only one mainstream newspaper, The Indian Express, has put its heft behind investigating the many lacunae in the SIR process in Bihar. More granular details have emerged from the stories done by independent platforms and journalists. 

Here are links to several important investigations carried by independent platforms, with several of them collaborating and pooling their resources. 

Journalist Ajit Anjum has assiduously followed up on people declared as dead in the list of 65 lakh people who have been struck off the electoral rolls. So has Saurabh Shukla of The Red Mike. 

The women and men declared dead are very much alive, as you will see in these reports. The common thread that runs through them is that these are poor people who are not even aware that the one right they have, to vote, has been denied to them because some official has decided they are dead. 

Others who have pursued this story include independent news platforms like Reporters’ Collective.   

While Reporters’ Collective found that an incredible 80,000 voters had been clustered together at addresses where 20 or more of them were supposed to be living in just three constituencies that they investigated, the latest report in Newslaundry goes further to show that even in places where people live separately according to their caste or religion, over 100 voters belonging to different castes and religions are shown as living in the same house.

For readers who would have missed much of the action because of the neglect of this story by mainstream media, it is worth taking the time to read these detailed reports and watch the videos. They tell us not only about the way this particular exercise is being conducted in Bihar but the reality of India, where despite boasts of “digital India” and elimination of poverty, millions of poor people do not have the proof that is demanded of them to establish that they exist.  

Interestingly, the latest story in the series in The Indian Express on SIR in Bihar tells us that out of 36 assembly constituencies in three districts, in 25 of them, the number of voters whose names have been deleted exceeds the margin by which the candidate elected won. Of these 25 seats, the governing alliance of the BJP and JD(U) won 18 seats. The story also shows through its data that women have been particularly disadvantaged. 

These stories graphically illustrate a very real problem we are facing, one that cannot be obfuscated the way the CEC attempted to do in his press conference. And as I have argued earlier, it is a legitimate story that the media, in a democracy, must pursue. 

Another development that has drawn attention to the importance of independent media is the series of cases filed against three prominent independent journalists, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire, Karan Thapar, whose weekly interview programme is widely watched, and Abhisar Sarma, a former mainstream TV anchor who now runs his own YouTube news channel. 

All three have had cases filed against them in Assam, a state governed by the BJP. And at least two of the people filing these cases are affiliated to the BJP or ABVP (read here).

This development tells us two things. One, that even if the government might dismiss these independent news platforms as being limited in their reach, it apparently is concerned about their reporting. Otherwise why bother to charge them. 

The second point this development illustrates is the strategy this government is following with impunity: label journalists who question as “anti-national”, or “urban Naxals” or “terrorists sympathiser” and then file cases against them, or even jail them as in Kashmir. 

Incidentally, Israel follows a part of the same strategy. It also labels Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives. It’s another thing that it even proceeds to eliminate them in targeted attacks. Most recently, five Palestinian journalists were killed even as they were reporting. 

There will be long-term consequences for freedom of speech, and the media, in India if this strategy being used by the government is not challenged and checked. The most persuasive argument on this has been made by retired Supreme Court judge, Justice Madan Lokur in an op-ed in The Hindu.

Justice Lokur points out that this government has weaponised a provision in the law that was supposed to have replaced the previous colonial sedition law. He suggests that Section 152 in the BNS is nothing more than sedition in “sheep’s clothing”, and that while the earlier law had a chilling effect on freedom of speech, the new provision has a “freezing effect”. 

Going further, he spells out what the deliberate misuse of this provision means for the future of freedom of speech in India: 

“Try and imagine any journalist or anybody in a panel discussion on television or otherwise having the courage to be critical of anything to do with any policy of the Government of India. Somebody can misinterpret it and bring national security into play, and the police can take cognisance and summon the alleged offender. Freedom of speech can be bulldozed or demolished because one individual out of a billion anywhere in the country believes (without evidence) that national security is in danger or that the armed forces are demoralised or that dissent is ‘strategic subversion’ undermining the sovereignty and the integrity of India.” (Emphasis added)

This then is the future we are looking at in India as far as freedom of the press is concerned. 

In media reports on a wall collapse in Mumbai, evidence that the lives of the poor don’t matter

 

If a poor person dies during what is deemed a natural disaster, they become a statistic, nothing more.

Published in Scroll.in on August 22, 2025

Link: https://scroll.in/article/1085767/in-media-reports-on-a-wall-collapse-in-mumbai-evidence-that-the-lives-of-the-poor-dont-matter

Every monsoon, India’s richest city has its tales of horror: of submerged railway tracks, of flooded roads, of open manholes into which people fall, of trees that collapse, often on passersby, and of hillsides that give way.

This year has been no different. People living in Mumbai are more than familiar with the images we see in newspapers and on television.

But the story that mostly escapes attention is the impact this has on the poor, those who must work rain or shine, with no means to protect themselves or their temporary dwellings from being submerged or even washed away.

And when some of them die, when a wall collapses or they fall into an open drain, they appear the next day as a statistic in the media: 9 dead, two from tree fall; 6 dead including one in an open drain, etc.

Sometimes the dead have names. But just that. Names. We do not know anything more about them. Were they migrants? Did they have families in Mumbai? And who will be held responsible for what are routinely registered by the police as “accidental deaths”.

Worse still, even in death, there is no dignity of those mentioning their names bothering either to get the names right or their ages right.

A loud sound

Take for instance Satish Tirkey. This 35-year-old from Chhattisgarh worked as a watchman in Godrej Baug on Malabar Hill, one of Mumbai’s wealthiest localities. He lived with his wife in Simla Nagar, a large settlement next door that is home to drivers and domestic staff who work in the homes of the well-heeled residents of the locality.

Also living in Simla Nagar are taxi drivers, delivery workers, construction workers and others with jobs across Mumbai.

Tirkey’s job included stepping out of the complex to find taxis for its residents. On August 18, despite the heavy rain, he set out to do that. As he walked down the road, sheltering under a large umbrella, the wall on the side of that road collapsed right on top of him.

Residents of the building facing the wall heard the loud sound and rushed out to their balconies to see what had happened. But they did not realise at first that someone had been crushed by the debris. They watched in horror as stones, mud and water cascaded down as if a dam had broken, filled the road, and flooded their building.

Even before the fire brigade arrived, they saw a man dressed in a yellow raincoat being carried out by three young men. These were the first responders. They were residents of Simla Nagar who saw the wall crumbling, rushed to pull Tirkey out and take him to the nearest hospital. They said he was still breathing when they carried him out despite the barbed wire from the wall having penetrated his body. But by the time they got to the hospital, Tirkey had died.

A cascade of water

Meantime, the cascade of water that had shattered the wall continued unabated. It took the fire brigade and the municipality hours to clean up the road, remove the rocks, clear the stormwater drain and cut a tree that was precariously poised on the broken wall. All this in pouring rain.

The next day, some newspapers reported Tirkey’s death. In some, he was mentioned as a watchman. A few articles gave his name. In practically all his age was wrong – it ranged from 55 to 75.

Most reports repeated what the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation must have told the journalists, that the man died due to a tree fall. A couple mentioned that he was crushed by the wall. What no one wondered was who had built that wall and who was responsible for the flood of water that led to the wall collapsing.

If the person injured or dead in such circumstances had been one of the residents of the buildings of Malabar Hill, how would the media have reacted? Would they not have made sure to get at least the basic details such as name and age and cause of death accurately? Would they not have gone further to investigate why the wall collapsed? Was it just the rain or something more? Who built the wall?

The fact they did not is because Tirkey was a poor man, a migrant worker, one of the millions of such workers who literally hold up a city like Mumbai. These are the men and women who cook, clean, deliver, build and repair. They are mostly invisible. Even when they die, they are noticed in passing, but just as a statistic – a victim who succumbed in an “accidental death”.

In this case, I know that this was an accident waiting to happen because I live in the building that was flooded after the wall collapsed.

Raised wall

The wall in question skirts a garden meant exclusively for senior government officers who live in Hyderabad Estate, which once belonged to the Nizam of Hyderabad. The gates to this large park are kept locked in a city that is starved of open space.

At some point, the height of the wall was increased. The residents of the area and those who regularly use the road would probably not have noticed this.

The original wall was thick, low and made of stone. The extension made it several feet higher, not as thick but with a heavy iron frame and barbed wire on top. Why this was needed to protect the garden is unknown.

What was also not noticed by residents of this neighbourhood is that alongside the wall, a water body with concrete sides had been built. What purpose it served is also not known.

What residents discovered, through their own effort to trace the source of the unending flow of water from the broken wall, was that this pool was overflowing and did not appear to have a drainage system to deal with excess water.

Furthermore, the builders of the wall had left holes in it from where the excess water could drain –onto a road used by thousands of people every day. An old cobbler who conducted his business next to the wall had complained about the outflow of water from these holes. But who listens to what old cobblers say?

A routine event

Two days before the disaster, residents of my building noticed that water was gushing out of several holes in the wall, flooding the road and subsequently our compound. This ought to have been a warning signal. But as this happened on the first day of the deluge that drowned the city, it passed as something that happens when it rains.

Except that this time, after the collapse and the subsequent flood, the water did not stop flowing, even when rain stopped. The municipal corporation would not answer the queries of residents. No one representing Hyderabad Estate was visible during or after the catastrophe.

I narrate all this to emphasise several points.

One, as I mentioned earlier, if a poor person dies during what is deemed a natural disaster, they become a statistic, nothing more.

Second, because it is a poor person who has been killed, there is practically nothing by way of follow-up to fix culpability. The authorities – in this case the municipal corporation and the Central Public Works Department, which is responsible for the garden and the wall – simply throw up their hands or pass the buck. When the rain stops, everything is back to normal.

Independence Day is a reminder to ask the questions EC isn’t answering

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 13, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/13/independence-day-a-reminder-to-ask-the-questions-ec-isnt-answering

As the week leading up to India’s 79th Independence Day dawned, the condition of stray dogs in the country’s national capital made the top headlines following a ruling by the Supreme Court. While the fact of the highest court in the land addressing this issue is certainly unusual, one can question whether the story merited the page one lead in some English language newspapers.

Also, was it more important than the growing clamour by Opposition parties about discrepancies in voters’ lists? All Opposition members in Parliament staged a protest on August 11 as they marched to the office of the Election Commission but were stopped from proceeding by the Delhi police. Surely, in the context of India’s democracy and on the eve of its Independence Day, this merited more attention.

In many ways, this juxtaposition of two stories, one relating to the future of stray dogs in New Delhi, and the other relating to the future of electoral democracy in India, reflects media priorities in India of 2025.  The former will appeal to the “market” to which the media caters. The latter, if pursued and highlighted by mainstream media is likely to draw the ire of the party in power and be viewed as being pro-Opposition. 

 The issue of discrepancies in voters’ list became a topic for discussion after the Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, held a press conference on August 7 presenting a detailed survey of one parliamentary constituency, Mahadevapura in Bengaluru. 

Since Rahul Gandhi’s press conference, several independent platforms and a couple of mainstream channels have followed up. But overall, national newspapers have stuck to reporting the “claims” made by Rahul Gandhi and the various protests but not done their own follow-up investigations.

The investigation by a team in the Congress suggested, based on the official data of the Election Commission, that in that one constituency questions could be raised about over 1 lakh registered voters. The voters list of Mahadevapura included duplicate votes, that is one person with more than one voter ID, unverifiable addresses, many voters registered at a single address (such as a brewery), voter IDs without photos, and voters registered as new voters who were older than the norm for such registrations.

Some newspapers took the investigation seriously enough to make an editorial comment.  The most nuanced of these was in The Hindu. Even as it acknowledged the importance of Rahul Gandhi’s presentation, it cautioned against drawing conclusions about electoral outcomes from these revelations without sufficient proof. At the same time, it emphasised that the Election Commission needed to respond to the revelations rather than casting aspersions on the motives of the person, or the party, that had done this. The editorial concluded:

“The ECI must embrace the principle that democratic institutions grow stronger through scrutiny. The alternative — continued erosion of confidence in electoral processes — poses far greater risks to democratic governance than any specific allegation of malpractice.”

The Indian Express, on the other hand, a newspaper that had done an excellent investigation into the way the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was being conducted in Bihar, chose to focus on Rahul Gandhi, calling the campaign of “Vote Chori” (vote theft) “self-serving and fraught”. Only in the last paragraph did it mildly criticise the EC for its “peeved responses”. 

Since Rahul Gandhi’s press conference, several independent platforms and a couple of mainstream channels have followed up. But overall, national newspapers have stuck to reporting the “claims” made by Rahul Gandhi and the various protests but not done their own follow-up investigations.

Meanwhile, even without the resources available to the big media houses, independent media journalists have been working and digging out information that suggests that the problem exposed in Mahadevapura is far more widespread. It calls for serious questioning of how an independent, constitutional body like the Election Commission updates voters’ lists.

On this issue, one of the first to raise the alarm was The News Minute which reported as far back as November 2022 how a non-governmental organisation called Chilume Educational Cultural and Rural Development Institute claimed it had authorisation to collect information from voters to update voters’ lists in Bengaluru.

The story is worth revisiting now in the light of the discussion on voters’ lists as it suggests that there could have been other such interventions that were not detected or challenged and therefore not reported.

Also, in this last week, while little appeared in national newspapers, AltNews was already putting out information that mirrored some of what the Congress’s investigation revealed. For instance, it found from the official EC data that six duplicate voter ID cards were issued to the same person, Sushama Gupta from the same constituency, Palghar in Maharashtra.

A Newslaundry investigation of three Lok Sabha seats earlier this year had pointed to gaps in the way revisions were made and verified. In Bihar, a report on Kaupa village in Bihar’s Rohtas constituency revealed that several voters, listed as living in the same house, aged between 26 and 28 years, had either their own name, or the name of their father or husband as just a full stop. How has this happened when the state is going through an intensive revision of electoral rolls, and this information was gathered from the draft revised list published by the EC?

Also read this detailed investigation by the Reporters’ Collective. It found that more than 1,000 new voters registered in Valmikinagar in Bihar following the revision of electoral votes were also registered as voters in Uttar Pradesh. According to the report: “For more than 1,000 cases, we found perfect matches: Names of the voter, their ages and their listed relatives (a mandatory field in the ECI database) were exactly the same across the databases of the two states. Only, their addresses were different.”

Apart from the discrepancies in voters’ lists, in the last few years, attention has been drawn to a mismatch between votes polled and votes counted after an election. One of the first to expose this was independent journalist Poonam Agarwal, who noticed this in a constituency in Madhya Pradesh in 2018. Since then, she has persisted with the story, right up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. 

In an interview to Article-14, she describes the hurdles she has faced to expose the discrepancies between the votes polled and the votes counted after an election. She says:

“When I first started working on stories about a mismatch between votes polled and votes counted, I asked the EC questions about this mismatch. Rather than answering my questions, they removed the data from their website. I found the EC’s response very odd—not normal at all. Earlier, politicians across party lines had a sense of trust in the Election Commission and believed that whatever it did, it did with full transparency. But since 2019, and especially after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, there has been growing distrust of the EC among both politicians and the public.”

It is evident from the reports that have already appeared, that the expose by the Congress, irrespective of its claims that this represents stolen votes, is a big story, one that is worth pursuing by the media.

If the EC had addressed these queries and discrepancies, it is possible that the story would have died down. But when an independent body like the Election Commission stonewalls, or prevents data from being accessed, or refuses to publish data (such as the list of the 65 lakh voters who have been held ineligible in Bihar following the SIR), we must ask why? Did it not know that there were such discrepancies? If not, why not? Did it know but chose to ignore them? If so, why? Or is there another reason?

These are perfectly legitimate questions that voters, and the media, should ask of the EC and what better time than when we are celebrating and talking about freedom and independence. 

 

2006 Mumbai blasts are a stark reminder of glaring gaps in terror reportage

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 22, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/07/22/2006-mumbai-blasts-are-a-stark-reminder-of-glaring-gaps-in-terror-reportage

 

The acquittal by the Bombay High Court of 12 men accused of being responsible for the 2006 serial bomb blasts on Mumbai’s suburban trains has triggered a much-needed discussion on our criminal justice system, on the police and the investigative agencies, and the absence of closure in so many such cases.

On the evening of July 11, on a typically rainy monsoon day, millions of Mumbaikars made their way to take a train back to their homes. The suburban train system in Mumbai has often been referred to as a “lifeline”. However, on this particular evening, it turned out to be a “death line”. The seven blasts that occurred as the trains pulled into different stations along the route, all in the First-Class compartments, killed 189 people and injured 827.

Even as reporters scrambled to reach the stations, speculation about this being a “terror attack” had started. The front pages of newspapers a couple of days after the blasts carried stories of not just of how Mumbai, a city that apparently never sleeps, leapt back to normal the day after, but reports about how Pakistan was the main suspect behind the blasts. Within a day, a special anti-terror squad, led by senior police officer K P Raghuvanshi, was handed the responsibility to investigate the case. 

Within three months, this anti-terror squad claimed that the case had been solved. It picked up suspects not just in Mumbai but from other cities including Secunderabad. All the suspects were Muslim men. Thirteen of them were charged. 

The case was heard in a trial court which finally gave its ruling in 2015, nine years after the arrests. One man was acquitted, five were awarded death sentences and seven life sentences. Of these, one died in jail before the recent ruling acquitting all.  

Apart from what this case tells us about the criminal justice system and the glacial pace at which it works, there is another question: are there lessons that the media can draw from the coverage of such cases? 

While this case is high-profile and is based in a metropolitan centre like Mumbai, every now and then there are reports about cases of people who have spent long years in jail only to be acquitted of all charges. There are few if any follow-up stories on their families, how they survived, and how the released adjusted back to their lives after release. It’s almost as if such acquittals are so routine that they don’t merit any media attention. 

After the recent Bombay High Court ruling, the founding editor of Maktoob Media, Aslah Kayyalakkath posted this on X which ought to give us in the media a reason to pause and think:

“Since 2020, I have been collecting screenshots of news stories about Muslim men jailed in terror cases. Almost every single one-barring one or two-described these men as ‘terrorists,’ ‘bombmakers,’ ‘fugitives,’ or ‘commanders.’ There were so-called ‘explainers,’ ‘long forms,’ and ‘investigations’ about the ‘crime they committed.’ But remember, these were not stories about convicted men. These were about Muslim men who were accused or suspects. Legally, they were not proven guilty, but not a single media house chose to call them that. Some of them were acquitted because not a single piece of evidence stood against them. These news websites, without any shame or accountability, will publish a small story about the acquittal. They won’t feel regret for being complicit in the vendetta, just like the State doesn’t.”

You can agree or disagree with his point that some news websites are “complicit” but even a cursory glance at news coverage suggests that there is an absence of scepticism and a willing acceptance of the official version of such incidents. 

Going by the reporting in the newspapers on the morning after the Bombay High Court judgment, the coverage has followed a predictable pattern. There are detailed stories on the judgment and explanations about it, there are stories on the anguish felt by survivors of the blast who feel there is no closure, there are detailed sketches of the men released with their photographs (almost identical in each paper as the matter has obviously been supplied by the police), and an occasional piece on how the lawyers of the accused fought the case (including this interesting piece in Indian Express on how RTI was used to access information that blew apart the prosecution’s case). 

Yet, so far, there is little about the families of the accused and what they feel except this article by Tabassum Barnagarwala in Scroll. It is possible that in the days to come, some mainstream newspapers will make the effort to reach out to these families to give their side of the story too. 

Where mainstream media does need to introspect, perhaps an unrealistic expectation, is to look at how such cases are routinely reported from the time the incidents, like these serial train blasts, occur, to when the investigative agencies announce a breakthrough, to the case as it makes its slow way through courts.  

The norm has been to give the official version and leave it at that. The names and faces of the suspects are reported without clarifying that these people are “accused” and not convicted as pointed out by Aslah. That under the justice system, they deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt.  

The men acquitted by the Bombay High Court were not given the benefit of doubt. They were convicted by a court and that was that. Yet this ruling tells us that the story never ends with the first conviction. More so, the judgment itself should instruct us in the media why we need to be sceptical when confessions are readily provided by investigative agencies.

The judgment addresses the use of torture to extract confessions in this case and has termed it “barbaric and inhuman”. It has also questioned the confessions because it found them to be “incomplete and not truthful as some parts are a copy-paste of each other”.

For more details on the kind of torture used on the accused to extract confessions, this is a good time to read Josy Joseph’s book “The Silent Coup: A short history of India’s deep state”.  Published in 2021, Joseph looks at several such “terror” attacks in different parts of the country and raises legitimate questions.

He has a chapter on the 2006 Mumbai blasts in which he interviews the one man who was acquitted in 2015, Wahid Sheikh. In graphic detail, Sheikh describes the torture he went through and how he was framed. Incidentally, since his release in 2015, Sheikh has been part of the team that assembled invaluable evidence that contributed to the ultimate discharge of the accused in this case.

Mainstream media remains in thrall of official versions when it comes to a suspected terror attack. It is as if raising questions on these versions or even trying to unearth some other aspect of the story is “anti-national”.  

From my own experience, I can recall being told by one of my editors that we cannot question an official version as the media does not have the ability to independently verify what happened. This was after I raised questions, as did some others in the media about the daylight encounter killing of three men and one woman by the Gujarat police on June 15, 2004. The media was told that this was a terrorist module on its way to assassinate the then Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. The woman shot dead was 19-year-old  Ishrat Jahan, from Mumbra just outside Mumbai. Till today, we do not know the truth as the suspects are dead.  We are left only with what the police want to tell us.

What Bihar voter roll row reveals about journalism and India

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 11, 2025

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The editorial we didn’t see on Emergency@50: Authoritarianism with anaesthesia in 2025

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 26, 2025

 

Anniversaries are a ritual in India. This week, it has been interesting to watch how the 50th anniversary of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi at midnight on June 25, 1975, is being observed. 

 

There are several people in the governing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party who opposed the emergency. And in the opposition is the Congress Party, held responsible for the Emergency. As a result, the occasion has been reduced to one of the BJP finding more ways to slam the Congress by pitching the ‘Samvidhan Hatya Diwas’ to counter the opposition’s campaign to uphold the Constitution. This is politics as usual. 

 

But how does all this rhetoric help us to understand what the Emergency was all about, what we should learn from it, and whether what’s happening in India today reflects a difference or a similarity to the events that unfolded 50 years ago? 

I ask this as someone who was a journalist at that time, working with Himmat Weekly, a news magazine founded by Rajmohan Gandhi. Hence, I found this statement of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, while speaking about that period in our history, particularly ironic: “Just imagine the moment you became subjects of a tyrant within a day. You were a journalist or a student but suddenly became a danger to the country.”

Perhaps the selective amnesia that afflicts most politicians made him forget people like Umar Khalid, a student leader who questioned the Modi government’s intent in bringing in the Citizenship Amendment Act. Khalid was arrested in 2020 and continues to languish in jail without trial, without bail, for more than six years. He must have wondered how he suddenly became a danger to the country. A country where the government had not declared an internal Emergency.

Or Siddique Kappan, the Delhi correspondent of a Malayalam news portal who was arrested while on his way to report the rape of a Dalit woman in Hathras in October 2020. He was incarcerated for over two years, is out of bail, but still has the cases hanging over his head.

Or the Kashmiri journalists who have been in and out of jail. Why does this government consider them a danger to the country? Read this report in Kashmir Times on these journalists, their battle for bail and the multiple cases they have had to fight. How can this happen if the people who fought the emergency opposed precisely this kind of arbitrary action at that time?

These are the questions we should be asking on the anniversary of the Emergency. Though there is little evidence of them being asked except editorially in Indian Express which has run an extensive series on the Emergency.

Even there, it is political scientist Suhas Palshikar who raises several pertinent questions in his edit page article on June 25. He emphasises that the anniversary should be a time of introspection and asks whether the “Emergency template” has really been discarded. For instance, like the “foreign hand” that Indira Gandhi saw lurking everywhere, today there is the American billionaire George Soros, and if you protest you are labelled anti-national or an urban Naxal. Palshikar concludes: “The essence of the Emergency is being normalised in India’s current moment.”

To understand this better, just look at the state of the Indian media. During the Emergency, censorship was imposed. Everyone was required to check if what was published adhered to “guidelines” issued by the government that kept changing as the Emergency progressed. If the authorities thought you had violated them, your publisher could be fined or jailed, your printing press could be sealed, and you would find it difficult to continue.

As has been recorded in several books and articles over the years, mainstream print media, and there was only print in those days, conformed and fell in line. Indian Express did resist, as recounted in this piece by Coomi Kapoor who was working with it as a reporter at that time. In her first-person account, Kapoor writes about the way the government used all avenues of pressure, including the income tax department, trying to seize the printing press, and denying advertisements from the government and public sector companies to bring the paper in line.

If all this sounds familiar, it is the template this government has followed in the last decade to get the media to conform and relay the official narrative without asking too many questions.

During the Emergency, the Indian Express could withstand such pressure for some time because of its feisty owner Ramnath Goenka and because it had the financial ability to withstand it. 

What is not acknowledged adequately is the role played by many smaller publications, in English and in the regional languages, that also tried to resist censorship. They did not have the deep pockets of mainstream media houses like the Express group. And as a result, many of them had to fold up. 

 

Himmat Weekly, for instance, where I worked, also ran blank editorials after the Emergency was declared. It also tried to bypass censorship by deciding that we did not have to submit a copy to the censor as the government had declared “guidelines”. We thought we were too small and inconsequential to attract the wrath of the government. But in doing so, we were clearly delusional as in an authoritarian regime, even small pinpricks of opposition or questioning will not be tolerated.

Himmat survived the Emergency, just about. It was deprived of advertising; it had fines and notices slapped on it for “violations” of censorship guidelines that seem ridiculous today (such as using a quotation from Mahatma Gandhi about freedom), and had to hunt for a printer who would risk printing the magazine.

I have recounted the Himmat story over the years several times as illustrative of what happened to many other small publications (read here, here and here). And to point out that the story of resistance to authoritarianism is not just about prominent politicians and big media, but also of small independent publications and ordinary people. This is a history that sometimes goes unrecorded and unacknowledged.

For instance, few know about A D Gorwala, a retired civil servant who brought out a small journal named Opinion. When Emergency was declared, he refused to submit to censorship and continued till he was ordered to shut down. In his last issue, he wrote:

“The current Indira regime, founded on June 26, 1975, was born through lies, nurtured through lies, and flourished by lies. The essential ingredient of its being is the lie. Consequently, to have a truth-loving, straight thinking journal to examine it week after week and point out its falsehoods becomes intolerable to it.” 

Others like Minoo Masani’s Freedom First, or Janata Weekly, whose editor G G Parikh is now 100 years old and still as feisty as ever, also resisted. And there were many others across India.

The reason we need to heed such struggles is to understand what we are witnessing today. 

Take the media. Mainstream media has mostly fallen in line. The resisters are the small independent YouTube channels run by journalists who once worked in mainstream, or digital news platforms that perform the kind of “journalism of courage” that we so sorely need today. 

As Palshikar points out, aspects of the Emergency have been normalised. It has happened gradually in a way that most Indians seem to have been anesthetised. We have accepted that governments have a right to suppress dissent, to jail opponents, to put pressure on the media to conform, and to use all the power it has in its hands to ensure that its actions are not challenged.  

And yet, 50 years after the Emergency, we are lamenting that Indira Gandhi did precisely this.