Why did India's media ignore Wired story on police planting evidence against Bhima Koregaon activists?

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 14, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/07/14/why-did-indias-media-ignore-wired-story-on-police-planting-evidence-against-bhima-koregaon-activists

News is always “breaking" and stories are sometimes “broken”. But then you also have important stories that are “broken” but are quickly forgotten. Not always deliberately, although sometimes that is the case. Quite often because there is just too much news breaking all around us, genuine and fake. As a result, many important stories that need to be followed up are relegated to the archives.

Meanwhile, those doing the essential task of sifting the fake from the real, like AltNews cofounder Mohammed Zubair, are arrested and treated like criminals. More on that later.

But first to an important investigative story that got barely reported in the Indian media.

I refer to the remarkable story broken by the Wired magazine on June 16. Headlined “Police linked to hacking campaign to frame Indian activists”, the story describes in some detail how the Indian police were able to plant evidence on the computers of some activists that ultimately led to their arrest. This is in reference to the 16 individuals – now 15 after the death of Father Stan Swamy last year – who have been in jail for over three years without trial in the Bhima Koregaon case.

A year ago, a story in the Washington Post had also revealed how evidence was planted on the computers of Rona Wilson and Surendra Gadling, both in jail in the Bhima Koregaon case.

Now, one of the companies investigating this, SentinelOne, has released the startling finding that the hackers who broke into the phones and laptops of the activists did so on the directions of none other than the Pune police, the very people who had announced the “conspiracy” for which the BK 16 were picked up and incarcerated.

Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, a security researcher at the company, is quoted in the Wired article as saying, “There’s a provable connection between individuals who arrested these folks and the individuals who planted the evidence.” Although the company has identified the Pune police official linked to the hacking, it hasn’t made their details public yet. It is expected to do so at the Black Hat security conference, slated to be held in Las Vegas, United States, in August.

Such a story ought to have triggered a major response from the Indian media. After all, it was reported not by an unknown media organisation, but by a well-respected tech magazine.

Surprisingly, barring a few newspapers like the Telegraph and the Hindustan Times that reported on the investigation, the news was largely ignored by the Indian media with the exception of independent digital news platforms. As a result, this explosive story, establishing a nexus between law enforcement agencies and their actions that result in sending people who have broken no law to jail, has virtually sunk without a trace.

Why is it important even now, in addition to its obvious relevance to the Bhima Koregaon case? Because if the representatives of the state, namely the police, can use such tactics with such ease in this case, how do we know the next time an activist or a journalist is arrested, and their phones and laptops are “seized”, that the same won’t happen?

Take the case of Zubair. He was arrested on June 27 for a tweet posted in 2018 that contained a picture from a 1983 film by the renowned director Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Not only was he detained on these flimsy grounds, but his electronic devices were picked up from his home in Bengaluru.

In the meantime, multiple FIRs were filed against him in different locations forcing him and his lawyers to rush from court to court fighting for his right to get bail. In the Supreme Court, even as his lawyer argued Zubair’s bail plea in another case filed in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who was representing the UP government opposing the bail plea, was reported as saying that Zubair was part of a “syndicate”. This remark is more than just a hint that before long there could be a “conspiracy" in which Zubair would be implicated.

Zubair’s "crime" was that he was doing journalism: sifting fact from fiction. But in this “new India”, journalists should not be doing this. Their job is not just to be loyal stenographers taking down the official narrative and repeating it, but enthusiastic promoters of it, irrespective of whether what they are reporting has any basis in fact.

Zubair’s case is further complicated because he happens to be a Muslim in a country where, increasingly, no Muslim, educated or unlettered, can feel safe anymore. Not even a person as highly respected as the former vice president Hamid Ansari.

At least AltNews and Zubair are well-known. They have a profile on social media. The work they are doing is talked about. And his case has garnered support in India and abroad.

There are, however, hundreds of journalists, many who are not even recognised as journalists by the very media organisations for whom they report, whose fate is even more fraught, and largely unknown.

That is the other story that ought to have drawn more attention but did not in these times of shrinking attention spans. It is a long and detailed story, one that most readers usually do not make the time to read. But it ought to be read if we really want to understand what is happening to the press, and to journalists, in this country.

I recommend this detailed and excellent report by Arunabh Saikia in Scrollabout a bunch of journalists in Uttar Pradesh and what they went through after they broke an important story.

The region where these journalists work is known for many different things, including widespread and open cheating during examinations. Three of them exposed this by getting hold of the papers that had been leaked. For this, instead of being applauded, they were arrested and sent to jail for several weeks. What is worse, the media organisations for which they reported, widely circulated Hindi papers Amar Ujala and Rashtriya Sahara, did not acknowledge their work, nor did they initially stand by them when they were arrested.

Furthermore, many of these journalists are not formally on the payroll of the newspapers using their stories. They are hived off into separate organisations so that the newspaper does not have to pay them the salary they are required to do on the scale set by pay commissions. In this case, one of them was paid Rs 450 per month and another Rs 500, less than the minimum wage paid to a labourer.

Clearly, what this story exposes about the conditions under which these journalists work in UP is not an exception. A little bit of digging would reveal that this is virtually the norm in smaller towns, places where journalists supply the gritty details so essential for well-reported stories. In 2007, Sevanti Ninan wrote a book recording the experiences of such journalists in Headlines from the Heartland. I suspect not much has changed since.

So freedom of the press involves not just freedom for journalists to do their work, and not be locked up like Zubair and earlier Siddique Kappan, Fahad Shah, Aasif Sultan, Sajad Gul and others. It also consists of journalists being recognised as professionals, paid a decent wage, and supported when they end up being jailed for no other crime than doing journalism.

 

Will mainstream media show the same attention to the Bhima Koregaon case as it did to Stan Swamy’s death?

 Broken News

Published on July 8, 2021 in Newslaundry

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/07/08/will-mainstream-media-show-the-same-attention-to-the-bhima-koregaon-case-as-it-did-to-stan-swamys-death

In a time of constantly breaking news, when events such as the recent dramatic cabinet overhaul in the Modi government tends to sweep all other news off the front pages, it is imperative that the implications of Father Stan Swamy’s death in judicial custody are not forgotten.

On the afternoon of July 5, Father Stan, 84, died at the Holy Family Hospital in Mumbai. He was still in judicial custody in the Bhima Koregaon case, one of 16 who have been incarcerated without trial, charged under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

Father Stan's death represents more than the passing of a fine human being who gave his life for the welfare of Adivasis in Jharkhand, which he considered home. It forces us to think about the callous and cruel nature of the criminal justice system in this country as illustrated in this piece in the Wire by Susan Abraham, one of the lawyers fighting for the Bhima Koregaon accused and the wife of accused Vernon Gonsalves. It also ought to make us question the manner in which laws like the UAPA are increasingly being used to suppress all forms of dissent and interventions for the rights of the most marginalised.

While the Bhima Koregaon case itself has drawn sporadic interest in the media since 2018, when the first arrests were made, Father Stan's death has provoked an unexpected and strong response from national English language papers.

Not only were reports of his death on the front page of practically every leading national daily newspaper, but there were also strong editorial comments. While the Telegraph held that "the State is responsible for Stan Swamy’s death. But the shame of it and the loss it signifies are the Indian people’s", Times of India held the criminal justice system responsible and argued for revisiting provisions of the UAPA. The Hindu saw in the treatment meted out to Father Stan in prison "institutional oppression" and wrote that his death "will weigh on the country’s collective conscience for long". And Indian Express called the attitude of the courts in delaying and denying his legitimate plea for bail on medical grounds a "dark blot"; it concluded that his death "has left the highest institutions of India’s justice system diminished".

At the same time, it must be noted that on the whole, barring routine reports about the cases for bail filed by the 16 (now 15) men and women in the Bhima Koregaon case, the mainstream media did little to highlight the injustice meted out to them or investigate whether the case had any basis.

It was the Washington Post that broke the story about the malware planted on the laptops of Rona Wilson, one of the accused, and subsequently another report about the malware on the laptop of Surendra Gadling. If this is true, then the very basis on which these arrests were made will be proven as baseless. Neither of these stories created more than a ripple in the national media, although Sreenivasan Jain of NDTV did report on it in his programme Reality Check.

The point I am making is that the coverage given to this tragic death of an 84-year-old priest, cannot end with some reports and a few editorials. There is clearly a larger story that needs to be pursued, not just about the Bhima Koregaon case but also about the rampant misuse of the UAPA. Only weeks before Father Stan's death, Akhil Gogoi, who was elected to the Assam assembly while still in jail under the UAPA, was exonerated of all charges. Bashir Ahmad Baba from Srinagar was released after 11 years in prison after being acquitted under all charges under the UAPA. We also have the Delhi High Court judgement granting bail to Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Asif Tanha that draws attention to the misuse of this law.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, only two percent of those arrested under the UAPA between 2015-19 have been convicted. The rest, one can assume, are still in jail. Each of them has a story that needs telling. Will at least those newspapers, which were moved to comment strongly after Father Stan’s death, take this on?

There is another death that took place a few weeks before Father Stan's that also calls for a pause and introspection about the kind of society we live in. That is the death of a 22-year-old woman in Kerala.

Vismaya from Kollam had been married for only a year to Kiran. Yet, despite complaining about the violence she experienced within the four walls of her home, she was persuaded to remain and give her marriage to an abusive man a chance. It ended with her death.

Within hours of the news about Vismaya, there were reports of a 24-year-old woman's death in Thiruvananthapuram. In both cases, there was a link to dowry.

The giving and taking of dowry was made illegal by the Dowry Prohibition Act in 1961. That made no difference. After campaigns by women's groups in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when newspapers particularly in Delhi carried routine reports about young brides dying in "accidental" kitchen fires, Section 498A was introduced in the Indian Penal Code making the unnatural death of a woman within seven years of marriage a cognizable offence.

Even this has made no difference. Despite the increasing levels of literacy amongst women, and their participation in the workforce, the scourge of dowry remains, and perhaps has become stronger if you go by this well-researched report by Haritha John in the News Minute. What then does this say about Indian society that in the 21st century, a woman's worth continues to be determined by the amount of gold and other "gifts" that her family sends with her to her marital home?

According to this article in Article 14, "Over 38% of murders of women are committed by current or former partners finds the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), and Indian women account for 36% of global female suicide deaths, finds the Harvard School of Public Health despite making up less than 18% of the world’s female population. Suicide is a leading cause of death among women aged 15-29 in India."

The article in the News Minute also raises several important points about the role of the media in perpetuating the prevalence of dowry. In the opinion of Burton Cleetus, an assistant professor of history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, "When we enforce conventional marriages, the fundamental factor in it is wealth transfer. Though we romanticize marriage, it is basically a market for this wealth transfer. It is the same people and media who speak against the dowry system, who run matrimonial sites. It is the same media that promotes a luxurious lifestyle which creates a desire in people, a desire that is above our income. So on one hand, they promote consumerism, and on the other, they criticise these systems. This is pointless. All these are causes of the problem in a larger perspective.”

Whether one agrees with this analysis or not, it is evident that Vismaya's death has reminded us again how a woman's worth is calculated in modern day India. Economic progress, education, pro-women laws have failed to dent the patriarchy that ensures that most marriages remain a transaction. And the price for an unsatisfactory deal, as viewed from the man's side, is always paid by the woman. For every one report that comes to light, there would be thousands that are never reported.

These are the truths about our society that the media needs to report. Of the thousands unjustly incarcerated under laws that have no place in a democracy. Of an unjust, cruel and callous criminal justice system that denies bail even to the old and ailing. And of the way regressive, patriarchal values continue to ensure that women are treated as little more than a commodity.