Inside the ECI’s ‘black box’: IE investigation proves print journalism still has bite

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 25, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/09/25/inside-the-ecis-black-box-ie-investigation-proves-print-journalism-still-has-bite

Mainstream print media “abhi jinda hai” (still alive). That’s the conclusion we can draw from the September 23 investigative report helmed by Ritika Chopra of The Indian Express on dissent within the Election Commission of India (ECI) over how the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was being conducted. Also, those who thought the days of print media are over should pause and think again.

One of the biggest journalistic scoops has emerged towards the end of a year when we had every reason to ask whether mainstream media in India will ever find its spine. This is not just because of the paucity of serious reporting that “holds power to account” but also the nauseating obsequiousness evident on days like September 17, the prime minister’s birthday.

In this dismal scenario comes the investigative report in The Indian Express. The story is so solid that so far, the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, who is in the eye of the storm, has not faced the media directly. Instead, the ECI has issued a press release that side-steps the serious concerns raised in the story.

In summary, for those who have not read it, the Express story reveals that two of the three election commissioners raised 14 objections in writing over a 10-month period about various actions taken by the commission on the SIR. The three commissioners have equal status, and decisions must be taken by consensus or majority. Yet, some decisions were taken without the knowledge of these two commissioners. 

The most serious question raised by the dissenting commissioners concerns a change to Form 6 that new voters are expected to fill out. In that form, a question was added requiring new voters to provide details if their parents or grandparents had been voters. Despite the two commissioners quoted in the story pointing out that such a change could not be done without amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, the change was made. 

In sum, the story has given a twist to the SIR controversy that raises several crucial questions. Opposition parties and the newly formed pressure group, the Cockroach Janta Party, have now taken up many of these. 

The story has also shifted focus away from the growing number of incidents in which well-known personalities are left out of the electoral rolls, or asked to prove they should be considered voters. Such reporting obscures the real crisis: millions of ordinary people, many of them poor, who have no voice and simply cannot meet the demands of an exercise that verges on irrationality.  

For every ‘Very Important Person’ given space in the media to air their grievances about being left out, there are millions of women like Laxmi who lived on central Mumbai’s pavements. Her “house” was a tarpaulin attached to the wall of a building abutting the pavement. Before elections, in my reporting days, I sought out people like her to get their views. Once, when I asked her why she wanted to vote when the government did practically nothing for her, she replied, “Didi, if I don’t vote, how will anyone know I exist?”  

But back to the Express story, it is interesting that despite the intense competition in mainstream print media (for TV coverage, read this article in Newslaundry), national newspapers have acknowledged the story.

This is noteworthy because often, when one newspaper breaks a story, others might report the substance on their news pages, but rarely mention the source. For instance, you will see a headline quoting an opposition leader saying something about the ECI, but the story that follows will just say that “reports” about its functioning have prompted such comments. The reader would not know where these “reports” were published.

This time, The Hindu, Hindustan Times and even Times of India wrote strong editorials based on the Express story and acknowledged it. For non-journalists, this might mean nothing. And in any case, not many people read editorials in newspapers, even if they read newspapers. But the very fact that the day after the Express story, the lead editorial in all three papers was based on this story illustrates its importance. It is clearly not going to disappear for a while.

In fact, a day after the Express story, the Economic Times reported that “the annual Summary Revision of electoral rolls for 2026-27, potentially affecting the timely inclusion of new 18-year-old voters” had been put on hold. This means Indians eligible to vote in forthcoming elections might have to wait until they can be registered. Given our large youth population, this could mean millions of potential voters being disenfranchised. According to this story, this is another fallout of the lack of consensus between the three election commissioners.

The many problems raised by the SIR exercise have been reported by newspapers and more diligently by several independent digital platforms since it began. The Reporters’ Collective, for instance, has put together this important archive of its stories. If you go through them, you get a sense of the crisis that India faces as an electoral democracy.

And the Express story illustrates why people have reason to lose faith in the very institutions like the ECI that are supposed to function in the best interests of citizens. As the newspaper has stated in its editorial, its investigation into the ECI “points to a betrayal of trust — of the people, by one of the country’s most storied institutions. It shines a light into an institution’s black box and reveals a disturbing story.” 

What has emerged so far is only the trailer. Let us see whether major media houses pick up the story and pursue it further, such as by revealing the person or people who ordered the changes to the SIR process without the consent of the two dissenting election commissioners.

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.”