Washington Post’s Adani-LIC story fizzled out in India. That says a lot

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on October 30, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/10/30/washington-posts-adani-lic-story-fizzled-out-in-india-that-says-a-lot

Whether the story had substance or not, it is intriguing that there has been little to no follow up in mainstream print media to the Washington Post expose about the Life Insurance Corporation’s investments in Gautam Adani’s companies, allegedly at the behest of the Modi government.

Or perhaps, given the current state of much of our mainstream media, we should not be surprised that a story like this, in a major international outlet, landed in India and created only a small ripple before it disappeared. The ripple was the result of the Congress demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee to investigate the allegations.

The tepid response in the Indian media cannot be dismissed merely by observing that given the media’s fixation with elections, currently the forthcoming elections in Bihar, there is neither time nor space to follow-up on the story. There is clearly more to this.

The Washington Post has alleged in its exclusive published on October 25 that a plan to invest $3.9 billion by the Life Insurance Corporation in Gautam Adani’s companies was overseen by officials of the Department of Financial Services.

The story states: “The documents and interviews show it was just one piece of a larger plan by Indian authorities to direct taxpayer money to a conglomerate owned by one of the country’s most prominent and politically well-connected billionaires. It is a vivid illustration of Adani’s clout within the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his longtime ally, and of how officials in New Delhi have come to see his business empire as central to the country’s economic fortunes.”

Newspapers did respond to this story, but with headlines that mentioned the denial by the LIC and little about the substance of the revelations in the article.

Here are some of the headlines the day after the story broke:

“LIC refutes Washington Post report on $3.9 bn Adani investment” in the Economic Times.

“Made investments in Adani firms independently, after detailed due diligence: LIC” in The Hindu.

“‘No letter written to LIC,’ Govt official rejects Post report questioning $3.9 bn investment in Adani Group,” wrote Financial Express.

“‘False and baseless’: LIC denies Washington Post report, says investment decisions taken after due diligence,” stated Mint.

Most of the other headlines were similar. 

For readers, who would not have accessed the original article, all they read was that the LIC had called the allegations made by the paper “false, baseless, and far from the truth.” This rebuttal also appeared as an unsigned statement on the LIC letterhead on X.

The Indian Express carried a report with more details about the original story and quoted unnamed officials “familiar with the matter” dismissing the allegations. While the Washington Post had claimed that the investment plan had been “crafted by officials at DFS (Department of Financial Services) in coordination with LIC and India’s main government-funded think tank, Niti Aayog,” and “approved by the Finance Ministry”, the officials who spoke to The Indian Express said that their department does not write letters to the LIC like the one quoted in the Post article.

To quote from The Indian Express story: “A government official told The Indian Express that DFS has not written any letter to LIC asking it to invest in the Adani Group. ‘The documents being mentioned in the media are not from DFS. It’s not true that DFS wrote to LIC to invest in Adani companies… DFS doesn’t write such letters to LIC,’ the official said.”

In other words, readers are being told that what the Washington Post has reported is baseless but no one from the government will go on the record to say so, leaving it to newspapers to quote unnamed officials as The Indian Express has done. How then as a citizen, or a reader, do you decide that this is, or is not, a major transgression by the Modi government to boost one particular business house?

Sohit Misra, who used to work with NDTV before it was taken over by Gautam Adani, but now runs his own YouTube channel, raises important questions about the coverage, or rather non-coverage by India’s mainstream media of this expose in this report. 

Misra takes us back to the pre-Modi era, when the media relentlessly asked the government led by Manmohan Singh tough questions about several scams that were exposed, like the 2G scam for instance. Even though finally these cases were dismissed as there wasn’t enough evidence, at that time the media was out in full force questioning the government and alleging large-scale corruption. 

As Misra points out, the contrast today is striking. Even if the story in the Post is speculative or even wrong, given that it involves the government and India’s richest man, is it not an issue that ought to be followed up independently by our media? Is it enough just to run denials and quotes from anonymous officials? 

Of course, the journalists who have relentlessly followed the Adani story, how his wealth has grown dramatically in the last decade, have been subject to innumerable court cases and harassment. Journalists like Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who holds that the Washington Post report is factual and substantive. 

This, in fact, is a story worth recounting because it illustrates how the job of investigating anything sensitive, that could land a media house in trouble, is now left entirely to under-resourced independent media platforms. 

Even as I write this column, another investigative platform, Cobra Post has come out with a story on the other big business house in India that is often in the news, the Ambanis. Given the response to the Adani story, if at all mainstream media takes note of this expose, the headlines in major newspapers will not surprise anyone. 

 

Jimmy Kimmel to Kunal Kamra: Trump’s US follows a familiar playbook from Modi’s India

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 25, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/09/25/jimmy-kimmel-to-kunal-kamra-trumps-us-follows-a-familiar-playbook-from-modis-india

What do the current government of the United States, headed by Donald Trump, and the government in India, led by Narendra Modi, have in common?

I would suggest at least three aspects, although there are many more. One, an inability to tolerate criticism from the media, even as they declare that they head democracies, and second, a very thin skin that cannot tolerate humour.

The third, and in many ways far more insidious, is the attempt to control, regulate and even capture the media without making any changes in the Constitutional provisions that underwrite media freedom.

How do we define what has happened to India’s mainstream media, especially in the last decade? There have been various discussions whether we are living through an “undeclared emergency”, referring to the emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Such a comparison serves no purpose in trying to understand the process that has resulted in a flattened mediascape, where even the normal questioning that is integral to journalism in a democracy, is virtually absent in mainstream media. 

I think the term “media capture” explains best the situation of the media in India. This is a term that is being used by media scholars to explain recent events in the US under the Trump regime where we have witnessed a combination of defamation suits and pressure on media owners to fall in line.  

The most recent incident was the decision of the ABC television channel to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show. Although within a week, Kimmel has been reinstated, the very fact that the channel felt compelled to take this step led to much discussion about what this represents in terms of the future of the freedom of the press in the US. 

In an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, under the headline “Is the US media captured?” Joel Simon quotes several media scholars who have used the term to explain the state of the media in authoritarian regimes such as in Hungary, Turkey, or Mexico. It entails “government strategies ranging from manipulation of advertising to economic and regulatory pressure to the exploitation of informal relationships with media owners”, he writes. 

The article discusses whether such an eventuality of “media capture” is a possibility under the Trump regime, if it hasn’t already happened to some extent. Simon paraphrases a media scholar thus: “What’s unprecedented in the US … is the willingness of media companies to so transparently put their business interests ahead of their public interest obligations. When one corporation does it, another might pull back on critical coverage to avoid regulatory pressure—a kind of anticipatory obedience or capture in advance.”

Senator Bernie Sanders provides us with a useful illustration of what is meant by the term “media capture” in the context of the US.

In a post on X, he writes: “This is what American media looks like today: The wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, owns X. The second-wealthiest person in the world, Larry Ellison, owns Paramount, including CBS, and will possibly now be taking over TikTok and CNN. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and Twitch. Mark Zuckerberg owns both Facebook and Instagram. In fact, the five richest men in the world are ALL media owners or executives. When we talk about oligarchy in America, it’s not only income and wealth inequality. It’s control over the media and what the American people are able to see, hear and read.”

In India, the richest man owns NDTV, the second richest owns Network 18 Group, and the dominant media houses are all owned by businesses that must remain on the right side of the government, a “kind of anticipatory obedience” as mentioned by Simon in the article quoted above. The dividing line between editorial and management was erased well before this last decade but the results of that erasure are more evident today in India’s mediascape than earlier.

Just look at the print media on September 17, when the prime minister turned 75. Newspapers were replete with page after page of advertisements and signed articles praising Modi. As if this was not enough, a few days later, the government’s decision to lower GST rates, after the country had lived through eight years of much higher rates brought in by the same government, was also greeted with page after page of ads by businesses and corporate houses thanking Modi for taking this step. Such a display of obsequiousness to “the leader” would be considered an embarrassment in any country that claims it is a democracy and has a free press.  

In India, we’ve also had our Jimmy Kimmel equivalents. They do not appear on mainstream television but have a notable following. For instance, the stand-up comic Kunal Kamra has had multiple cases filed against him because someone, somewhere, was offended by his jokes. Or Munawar Faruqui, who was hauled off to jail during a performance in Madhya Pradesh in 2021 and finally acquitted after spending 37 days in jail.

In addition to all this, in my view, the central government’s September 16 order asking 12 independent journalists and news platforms to take down allegedly defamatory content, which included 138 YouTube links and 83 Instagram posts, on Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL) removes even the chimera of pretence that it has any respect for the concept of freedom of the press. This order followed the September 6 ruling by a Delhi court, in response to a defamation suit by AEL against several journalists, asking them to take down content on AEL. The line between the government, and India’s richest man and a close ally of the prime minister, was erased by that one action.  

Although the matter continues to be heard in another court, the very fact that the government intervened on behalf of a private business, without allowing the matter to be assessed by a court of law, illustrates vividly the extent to which even the pretence of media freedom has been abandoned by this government. 

This has happened gradually over the last decade in a way that people have become used to a media that generally echoes the government’s line, questions only mildly, and stays away from any issue that could result in censure or loss of revenue.

The trajectory is now familiar. Get friendly industrial houses to buy media conglomerates. Then apply formal and informal pressure on those media houses that are still being critical. In time, mainstream media will be tamed.  

As for the pinpricks that constitute independent media, those not dependent on government advertising, or big business, you first ignore them because you think they don’t matter. Then you wake up to the fact that they do. You realise that technology has enhanced their reach. And the dwindling credibility of mainstream has further given the combined strength of many small platforms a reach that should not be ignored.

That is when you move against them. First, by protecting your main supporters, big business openly aligned with you. Then, by encouraging your loyal supporters spread across India to file cases against individual journalists or independent platforms under existing laws. These cases are filed in states where the party in power is the BJP. Hence, the police do not wait to even consider whether the complaint has any validity before they move. 

And all the while you keep assuring the rest of the world, and your followers in India, that this country is indeed the “mother of democracy” and that you are deeply committed to the Constitution and all the freedoms guaranteed in it.

The Modi government has provided a blueprint to other countries claiming to be democracies on how they can manage and capture the media.

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

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on December 11, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Hindenburg fallout, serious questions cordoned off by the media’s noise

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 14, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/08/14/in-hindenburg-fallout-serious-questions-cordoned-off-by-the-medias-noise

The Modi government is lucky. The latest bombshell from Hindenburg Research landed in India a day after the budget session of parliament had concluded. Had it come a couple of days earlier, one can just imagine the scenes in both houses of parliament, given that the name “Adani”, mentioned by anyone in the opposition, is like a red rag for this government. 

It will be recalled that we first heard about US-based Hindenburg Research when it broke a major story in January 2023 about the Adani group of companies. It claimed that after two years of research it had evidence to show that “Indian conglomerate Adani Group has engaged in a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades”. The expose shook up the financial markets in India and it is estimated that the Adani Group lost $150 billion. 

In the weeks that followed these sensational revelations, in response to a petition, the Supreme Court asked the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to investigate the veracity of the accusations made in the Hindenburg report. More than a year later, the investigation has still not been completed despite the court setting a deadline for March 2024. 

It is against this background that the latest report by Hindenburg, made public on August 10 must be viewed. The group has raised serious questions about the current chairperson of SEBI, Madhabi Puri Buch, and suggested the possibility of a conflict of interest in relation to the ongoing investigation into the Adani affair. 

How has the Indian media covered this latest development?

The story is not straightforward. To independently verify the Hindenburg revelations would require media houses to invest time and money to investigate each accusation and ascertain whether there was any truth in them.

It is still early days and perhaps some media house will walk that distance.

However, so far, the English print media, including the business papers, have stuck to reporting the gist of the Hindenburg revelations. Some gave it prominence on the first day, that is August 11. Others buried the story on the inside pages. For instance, while Indian Express and Times of India, as well as Telegraph, ran the story prominently on their front pages, The Hindu and Hindustan Times buried it on an inside page.  

In subsequent days, Indian Express has been the most active in following the story, continuing to give it a prominent position on its front pages, and doing a detailed explainer.  Some of the business papers have also done explainers. These are essential for lay readers who would not understand the intricacies of the financial world. 

The SEBI chairperson, and her husband Dhaval Buch, who has also been named by Hindenburg, issued a detailed statement that was carried by all media. SEBIissued a statement clearing the chairperson. And the press also reported the government’s response which was that it had nothing more to add to SEBI’s statement. 

However, even as all these statements were reported without any questions being asked, a couple of newspapers did raise some tentative doubts. 

For instance, both Hindustan Times and Mint, which belong to the same group, suggested in their editorials that in the “public interest” perhaps the Adani matter should be “taken over by sleuths other than Sebi’s”. They did not, however, suggest that the chairperson should step down.

The Financial Express did just that. In its editorial on August 12, it wrote: “Given the latest round of serious allegations before, it will be in the interest of India’s financial markets, the regulator, and Buch herself that the Supreme Court sets up a separate panel to take over the investigations into the Adani fiasco. Till the panel report is out, the Sebi chairman should recuse herself from this case. Such an action will only enhance the reputation and integrity of the country’s capital markets.”

On August 14, The Hindu also called for the SEBI chairperson to step down in its editorial.

Much of the rest of the coverage consisted of what the media like to call the “slugfest” between the opposition, which is demanding a JPC inquiry and the resignation of the SEBI chairperson, and the BJP which suspects that the controversy has been deliberately created to undermine India’s image. The loquacious Ravi Shankar Prasad led the way by typically bringing in the BJP’s favourite whipping horse, American philanthropist George Soros.

The serious questions being asked, and the first tentative investigations, have appeared in independent media platforms. Sucheta Dalal, whose expose of the stock market scam in 1992 still stands out as one of the best investigative stories done by a business journalist, asks tough questions in this piece in Moneylife 

She asks, for instance: “SEBI’s response, issued late on a Sunday night, is particularly disappointing. It claims to address issues that ‘warrant an appropriate response.’ However, when serious allegations are made against the chairperson and the regulator itself, an ‘appropriate response’ cannot be anonymous. It should come from those in a position to speak for the regulator – which is either the board of directors or the finance ministry. Was there a board meeting? Who has assumed responsibility for statements made in the press release?”

These are questions that other media organisations should also have asked but did not. 

Both Scroll and Wire have done reports checking the veracity of some of the statements made by the SEBI chairperson in response to the Hindenburg report. So even if parliament is not in session, and the opposition is unable to maintain a head of steam on this controversy, questions about conflict of interest in SEBI, the veracity of the Hindenburg revelations last year and now, and the health of our regulatory agencies will continue to be asked. 

Moving away from financial markets that interest a small percentage of Indian citizens, there is other dirt that is waiting for the media to dig up, literally. And that is on the state of India’s major cities. 

In this rainy season, almost every major city is drowning, their drains or what passes off for a drainage system, unable to cope with excess rains. Our cities are neither “smart”, as the Modi government promised, nor anywhere near a “global” standard despite the fancy airports, that also leak, and so-called “world class” highways that become moonscapes of potholes after a heavy downpour. 

While we write about urban infrastructure above the ground, stories that are often just refurbished press releases, the media needs to take a closer look at what lies beneath the city. 

On July 27, after three young people drowned in a basement in Delhi, the question of drainage systems appeared on the horizon momentarily. These three were not doing anything risky. They were sitting in a studying room, in one of the many centres that prepare those trying for competitive exams to enter the civil service, or to get into engineering or medical colleges. When the skies opened, and the drains overflowed, the basement flooded and these three drowned. It was a tragedy that ought to be a wakeup call not just for city planners and administrators, but for the media. 

Unfortunately, civic reporting has been downgraded to stories on such disasters. What we need are “drain inspectors”, journalists who understand the crucial infrastructure needed to make cities liveable for all and to persist in asking questions and reporting before disaster strikes.  

There was a time in Mumbai, where the acronym BRIMSTOWAD, which stood for Brihanmumbai Storm Water Disposal System, appeared regularly in the city papers. We read stories about the city’s 100-year-old drainage system and the urgent need for investment to repair and add to it so that the perennial monsoon flooding was avoided. Such reporting has virtually vanished. 

In the meantime, most of our cities continue to depend on ancient drainage systems and see little to no investment in making this “world class” even as densities increase, open areas are paved to prevent the natural absorption of excess rain, and the roads are in permanent gridlock. 

What is worse, despite all the talk about becoming a developed country, almost every day there are sickening stories of men who are lowered to clean these drains manually and die as they inhale the noxious fumes trapped inside – stories like this one in Scroll. India must be one of the few countries in the world that aspires to conquer space but cannot invent machines to replace people for such hazardous but essential work. 

As media fanned Maldives flames, silence on Lakshadweep’s ecology, Chhattisgarh forests

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on January 11, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/01/11/as-media-fanned-maldives-flames-silence-on-lakshadweeps-ecology-chhattisgarh-forests

Predictable, is it not, that the new year should get off to a flying start with a non-issue becoming a raging controversy, thanks to social and mainstream media. It is a precursor to what we can expect in the rest of this year. 

On January 4, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Lakshadweep, a group of 36 islands in the Arabian Sea which is a Union territory. It is not clear what was the provocation for this visit.  There are no elections on the immediate horizon. Then why? 

In a carefully curated video and photographs that were released to the media and circulated through social media, Modi is seen, alone, on a sparkling white beach. He walks, sits, gazes out at the sea, all this with several changes of clothes. And then, wearing a bodysuit used for deep sea diving, he is seen snorkelling, accompanied by two divers. This is the only image where we see someone else. 

The message in this promo, by none other than the prime minister, is that Indians should choose the beautiful beaches of the island territory for holidays and tourism.

What followed, of course, was more than just a rush of Indians to the Lakshadweep. The resultant ultra-nationalism, with celebrities and influencers making vapid statements about how Lakshadweep was better than the Maldives, another group of islands in the Arabian Sea with beautiful beaches and coral reefs, exposed the real intent behind the promotion.

India has been uneasy ever since Mohammed Muizzu was elected president of the island state in November last year. He has openly reached out to China and already signed 20 agreements as part of a bilateral Comprehensive Strategic Cooperative Partnership.  

The economy of the Maldives is heavily dependent on tourism and Indian tourists constitute a substantial percentage. It appears that the “boycott Maldives” trend triggered by the Modi visit was not spontaneous. It has resulted in hyper-nationalism in India and sharp critical statements by ministers in Muizzu’s cabinet in response.

Apart from the strategic dimensions of this silly spat, the incident has underlined a couple of factors that are perhaps an indication of the way all media will be used in the future. One, that those with the skill to use social media can push agendas if mainstream media picks up the cue and follows the lead. The BJP has already shown its mastery in this regard. And second, that leading up to 2024, this is the kind of strategy that will be used increasingly to build up the image of Narendra Modi.

In the social media melee that followed the tourism promo, no one mentioned the environmental challenges that the Maldives already faces because of tourism. Troubled as it is with the prospect of sea level rise due to global warming, the island state has seen beaches disappear and its precious coral reefs being bleached due to the pollution caused by human intervention.

The Lakshadweep is safe for the moment because the tourist trade has not expanded. But after this little exercise, if it does – and there are already indications that the trend has begun – we will see an end to those pristine beaches and the coral reefs that have survived.  

While these environmental aspects of opening Lakshadweep to tourism were barely discussed in the media, another major story that concerns the destruction of pristine natural forests has also got hardly any traction in mainstream media.

The Hasdeo Arand Forest in Chhattisgarh, described as “one of the last unfragmented forest landscapes in Central India”, will be decimated if expansion of the existing coal mines is permitted. Despite reports by two credible organisations, the Wildlife Institute of India and the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education advising against expansion, the union government gave its clearance in 2022. 

The decision has been met with vociferous opposition by the local Adivasi population. They have taken out massive rallies in the state capital Raipur. Yet, barring a passing news item or a small single column photograph, these protests have barely been covered. The mines, incidentally, are owned by Adani group.

According to an investigative story in Scroll.in a year ago, the second phase of the mining project, which envisages an expansion of the existing two mines in the Hasdeo Arand Forest, would result in 2.5 lakh trees being cut in an area of 1,137 hectares. The forest, spread over 1,500 sq km, is one of the few remaining untouched forests in central India. It hosts rare plants and several species of endangered animals. 

But, as I have argued in earlier columns, saving the environment has become a passing concern in mainstream media. And governments, both state and central, are champions at churning out politically correct rhetoric even as their actions are leading to environmental devastation.

To end on a more positive note, the only bit of good news as we enter the new year has been the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Bilkis Bano case. It has ordered that the 11 men sentenced for life for murder and rape during the Gujarat violence of 2002, who were granted remission of their jail term by the Gujarat government, be sent back to prison. It has concluded that the remission order by the Gujarat government was fraudulent. This ruling has generated some optimism that perhaps justice is still possible.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has also taken note of a petition filed by a journalist about the way caste operates inside prisons and the casteist nature of prison manuals that are still being used in Indian jails in 2024.

This shocking revelation was made in 2020 by an excellent series of five articles in the Wire by Sukanya Shantha and Jahnavi Sen titled “Barred: the prison project”. They studied prison manuals in different states and spoke to prisoners belonging to the marginalised castes, especially Dalits.  

What they found was perhaps not unusual given that caste continues to determine how Indian society is run. But the series revealed that official prison manuals laid down tasks that prisoners are expected to do while serving their sentences on caste lines. Thus, only upper castes are assigned cooking duties while Dalits have no choice but to clean. These manuals from colonial times have never been revised. 

This quote sums it up:

“Caste-based labour, in fact, is sanctioned in the prison manuals of many states. The colonial texts of the late 19th century have barely seen any amendments, and caste-based labour remains an untouched part of these manuals. While every state has its own unique prison manual, they are mostly based on The Prisons Act, 1894. These jail manuals mention every activity in detail – from the measurement of food and space per prisoner to punishments for the ‘disorderly ones’.”

The expose was noted and appreciated when it appeared, and the journalists won awards. But the issue would have remained unaddressed had it not been for the decision of one of them, Sukanya Shantha, to follow up by going to court. 

The hearings in the case have just begun in the Supreme Court. As prisons are under state governments, it has asked 11 states to look at their prison manuals. This could lead to important and long-term change.

The lesson to draw from this is that sometimes journalists cannot rest after they have done a path-breaking investigative story. In a society, and particularly today when both politics and mainstream media seem determined to distract rather than inform, there is little choice before journalists but to follow up on the information unearthed and find ways to make the change happen. This is what Sukanya Shantha from the Wire has done by filing her case.

Amid G20 hype, exposé on Adani, Vedanta and Manipur crisis relegated to shadows

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 7, 2023

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/09/07/amid-g20-hype-expos-on-adani-vedanta-and-manipur-crisis-relegated-to-shadows

The G20 Summit has taken over the headlines and the news cycle. By the end of the week, the recent exposes on Adani, the opposition alliance’s Mumbai meet, or even the Manipur crisis would have faded from people’s memories.  

In the meantime, we also had the surprise announcement of a special session of Parliament from September 18-22 with no indication of the agenda, some kite-flying about whether the name of our country will be 'Bharat' instead of 'India, although it is both in the Constitution, and the proposal of One Nation, One Election.  Enough masala to cover up the real and more substantive issues on which the media should continue to keep its focus.

The expose by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project or OCCRP on the financial dealings of the Adani group, carried in detail in the leading daily Financial Times, and The Guardian, has provoked no more than a murmur in India’s mainstream media. Although, the day after the story broke, newspapers did report it on their front pages, there has been little to nothing by way of a follow up apart from a few editorial comments, such as in Hindustan Times and Indian Express.  

Admittedly, the Adani story is complex. It is not easy to understand for readers who are not informed about the way financial markets work. Yet, it is possible for the media to explain it,  like this report in Newslaundry.  

At times, the silence of the media tells a bigger story than its word. 

Sometimes, the silence of the media speaks louder than words about its status. And the ongoing Adani story, exposing cronyism and institutional failures under the current government, must surely qualify as one such instance of silence. 

Given its open and blatant biases, the Indian TV news media is not expected to touch the Adani story. Nor are we surprised that the only way it can deal with it is to spin out its usual conspiracy theory, about George Soros being behind the exposes. But mainstream Indian print media’s silence cannot be ignored, especially when independent media, such as the Reporters’ Collective and the stories by M Rajshekhar in Wire have reported on the expose.  

The Adani story eclipsed what I believe is as important a story, if not more, by OCCRP on the way the Vedanta group, led by UK-based business tycoon Anil Agarwal, has been the beneficiary of changes made in environmental laws for mining and other related activities.   

The investigation has these five key findings:

• “Mining and oil giant Vedanta ran a covert lobbying campaign to weaken key environmental regulations during the pandemic.”

• “India’s government approved the changes without public consultation and implemented them by using what experts say are illegal methods.”

• “In one case, Vedanta led a push to ensure mining companies could produce up to 50 percent more without new environmental approvals.”

• “Vedanta’s oil business, Cairn India, also successfully lobbied to have public hearing scrapped for exploratory drilling in oil blocks it won in government auctions.”

• “Since then, six of Cairn’s controversial oil projects in Rajasthan have been approved despite local opposition.” 

We need to let this sink in. After years of campaigning by environmental groups, laws and regulations were set in place to protect the environment.  An important feature was public consultation before any changes were made. This is only one of the rules that has been bypassed. And all this has happened without us noticing because these issues do not find purchase in mainstream media anymore. 

Of the other issues subdued by the spate of “breaking news” is, of course, Manipur.  Thanks to the fact-finding report by the Editors’ Guild of India, titled 'Media's Reportage on Ethnic Violence in Manipur', and the disproportionate response of Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh to it, what’s happening in that beleaguered state has not been entirely forgotten. 

The Manipur state government has filed an FIR against the EGI team accusing them of “promoting enmity between different groups”.  Not just that, but Biren Singh has gone on record to call the team members “anti-state, anti-national and anti-establishment”. 

Although the Supreme Court has intervened and stayed the arrests of the journalists, the action of the Manipur government is another reminder of how the ruling party in that state, and at the centre, looks at freedom of expression. To them, this fundamental right is purely transactional. One is free to report only information approved by them. Anything contrary is ‘anti-national’.  

This is the second such reaction of the state government to fact-finding missions. In July, it had filed an FIR against a three-member group of the National Federation of Indian Women for concluding that the violence was “state-sponsored”. Since then, there have been several such telling reports including one by a group of doctors. In this report in The Hindu, the displaced populations, especially in the Kuki areas, are facing a dire crisis due to a lack of essential supplies even for infants and medications for the ailing. So far, there has been no denial or action against this group of doctors by the state government. 

Coming back to the EGI report, it specifically looked at the role of the local media in inflaming the situation in Manipur. It even quoted some instances of this.  But it also revealed the structural inequality that is built into the location of media houses. 

In most states, media houses concentrate on the capital and some major cities. Many parts of a state, often the most marginalised and deprived, are left uncovered, or barely reported. It’s only when something drastic happens like a natural disaster, or drought and starvation, that these places feature. 

Manipur is much the same. The media is located mostly in Imphal and run by the Meiteis. Although the Nagas have a newspaper, Ukhrul Times, and other forms of media, the Kukis have never had an adequate media presence. When a crisis like the present one hits, where two sides are literally at war with each other, even the semblance of a media that reports from all regions disappears. 

It is not just the absence of the internet that has affected coverage in the local media, although the unjustified internet shutdown over an extended period is an important factor. More significant has been the way even journalists, who are supposed to set aside their personal identities and biases when they go out to report, have been affected by the passions dividing the state.  

This partly explains why the means of communication that were not cut off, such as mobile phones or landlines, were not used to verify news and get reports from parts rendered unreachable by local media during this conflict. After all, many of us have reported in the times when there was no internet, when phoning in your story and sending updates from a landline, or even post office, to the desk wherever it was located, was routine.   

Sadly, some Imphal-based journalists continue to resent what they call “parachute journalists” from the “mainland”. Yet had it not been for these journalists, we would not have heard both sides of the story on the Manipur violence. Perhaps, the best of the recent reports on Manipur is this one by Arunabh Saikia for Scroll, that tells us that the problem in the northeastern state is not going to disappear in a hurry. In fact, it is likely to escalate given that now both sides have the support of militant groups who were quiescent for some years. 

Whether it is Adani, Vedanta, or Manipur, these are issues that will inform the path India takes in the future. The coverage, or erasure of such issues from the media also informs us about the direction that the Indian media has chosen to take.