Smriti Irani’s outburst, Modi’s lack of press conferences: Unpacking Indian govt’s hostility to the press

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 15, 2023

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/06/15/smriti-iranis-outburst-modis-lack-of-press-conferences-unpacking-indias-hostility-to-the-press

On June 9, on a visit to her parliamentary constituency of Amethi, BJP MP and Union Minister for Women and Child Welfare, Smriti Irani got really annoyed with a journalist. He never got around to asking a question. He merely requested her to say something. 

And she did. She charged him with insulting the people of her constituency and went further, saying, “I will call the owner of your paper and tell them no journalist has the right to insult the people.”

The journalist was a stringer for Dainik Bhaskar, although the paper later denied that he worked for them. But Irani did speak to the owners of Dainik Bhaskar. And they sacked the other stringer present, who was on their rolls.

Why should this incident be a reason for the media, and those concerned about press freedom, to worry? 

We need to be concerned because this is not just a passing incident.  It exemplifies the contempt with which the current government treats the media.  

If it had the slightest respect for what a free media is supposed to do in a democracy, would not the prime minister make himself available to answer questions directly to the media in these nine years that he has held office?

If ministers in the Modi government had even a modicum of understanding of what the media is supposed to do, would they heckle and harass reporters asking legitimate questions and threaten to speak to the owners of their media outlets?

Several media organisations, like the Editors Guild of India, Digipub and some press clubs have issued strong statements. The Editors Guild states: “This trigger-happy approach to browbeat and harass reporters and news camera persons undermines the freedom of the press.” The Digipub statement brings out an important aspect of journalism today in India – the role of stringers. They are sometimes not paid at all, or paid a pittance, and yet they serve an important role in news gathering in the face of the cutbacks on hiring full time reporters by much of mainstream media.

This attitude of the current government – where any kind of questioning is viewed as hostile, where journalists are singled out and threatened either directly or through social media platforms, and where journalists have been arrested while on assignment, as was Siddique Kappan – is a direct threat to freedom of the press. It is not possible for a vibrant, questioning, and free press to survive in such a hostile atmosphere.

This government knows that the media with the largest reach, namely television, has already prostrated itself at its feet. Until last year, just one channel had survived with a modicum of independence. Now that too is part of the laudatory lot, singing hosannas to the government and saving its criticism for the opposition. 

This government also understands the power of other forms of media, especially social media, to spread its narrative. And how to use this effectively. 

And it could have sensed that increasingly people are not interested in “news” the way we have come to understand it in the past. Cross-check, verify, report. That used to be the norm.

These restrictions don’t apply to some of the “news” circulating on social media platforms. And unfortunately, this is what an increasing number of people are consuming in India, and in many other parts of the world.

According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023, there has been a noticeable decline in news consumption and trust in news worldwide. In India, the social media platform most preferred by those surveyed for news was YouTube (56 percent). WhatsApp and Facebook came next with 47 percent and 39 percent respectively. Some of this “news” could be from established media houses, but much of it would also be from unverified sources. 

Additionally, the survey recorded a decline in trust in what we call “news” although in India, the difference between last year and this year is marginal. 

We now have a situation where the government of the day does not care about the media, or media persons, and makes that more than apparent in its behaviour. And the consumers of news do not trust what is presented to them. Together, they represent a danger to press freedom, and to the very existence of established media. 

This is not the space to look at the economics of the media, but that too must be factored in. It is evident today that more of the larger media houses are dependent on government advertising than they were at any point in the recent past. This gives the government a handle to ensure that they fall in line when asked. They are asked, and they do fall in line.

Those that take no advertising at all, such as Newslaundry, or refuse government advertising, as some independent digital news platforms do, lead a precarious existence. In a country, where even support for voices of dissent is frowned upon, how long will these spaces of independent thought and expression survive? That too without adequate financial backing.

The state of the media in the United States holds out some lessons and a warning. Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times correspondent in India, has written an important piece in the paper about the American media and the dilemma it faces as fewer people want to pay for news. Without a constituency that appreciates the costs involved in disseminating credible news, a free media cannot survive even if there are laws protecting its freedom, as in the US. In India, with the whitling down of laws relating to press freedom, the very survival of a free media comes into question. 

So indeed, Smriti Irani’s outburst should worry us, not just those of us in the news business, but ordinary Indians who look to the media for verified, credible, information and news. 

Why Disha Ravi’s arrest should worry independent media platforms

 Broken News     

Published in Newslaundry on Feb 18, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/02/18/why-disha-ravis-arrest-should-worry-independent-media-platforms

We should not have been surprised that the Delhi police arrested a young environmental activist, Disha Ravi, on February 13 for helping put together a “toolkit” in support of the farmers protesting against the Narendra Modi government’s new agriculture laws. An early warning that something like this might happen had been given by no less an authority than the prime minister himself.

Speaking in the parliament, Modi denounced “andolanjeevi” who spent their time protesting and agitating. The country needed to be protected from such “parjeevi”, or parasites, he declared. Narrowing the definition further he said it was the Foreign Destructive Ideology – FDI – to which such people adhered that posed a danger to the country.

As the columnist Sugata Srinivasaraju rightly observed, young Disha fits the definition perfectly. She is an “andolanjeevi”, in that she is known to participate in protests, particularly those connected to the environment and animal rights. As part of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for the Future movement in India, Disha has been active in campaigns around climate change. And her link to an international movement sets her up to be part of Modi’s version of FDI.

Given this statement by the prime minister, it is not surprising that the Delhi police went ahead with their far-fetched conspiracy theory. They were following the playbook, or should we say “toolkit”, that has now been publicly endorsed by Modi. Whenever there is dissent, agitation, protests against the government, seek out “andolanjeevi” and spin a conspiracy theory about what they had planned. It doesn’t matter if they were even present when the supposed crime took place. Moreover, in this era of “atmanirbharta”, or self-reliance, any association with a “foreign” organisation automatically makes you a suspect.

The international conspiracy theory, or the omnipresent “foreign hand” from Indira Gandhi’s days, is nothing new in India’s political discourse. What is new, and ominous, is the determination with which it is being pursued by the government. Even young environmentalists, expressing their concern for what ought to be non-controversial, that is the advent of climate change, have now come on the radar.

While the media has still to fully unravel how the Delhi police zeroed in on this “toolkit” to fashion its case over the January 26 violence at the Red Fort, the most remarkable story of the last fortnight has to be the investigation by Meghnad S and Shambavi Thakur of Newslaundry into the Hindutva toolkit. This is not a figment of the imagination. The two journalists successfully infiltrated chat groups set up by the BJP’s Kapil Mishra and exposed how that toolkit works. It comes as no surprise, but is worrying because it functions with impunity, confident that there will be no case against the perpetrators of this hate machine.

The media will also have to think about the real import of the 113-hour raid by the Enforcement Directorate against the digital news platform NewsClick. Was this a one-off action? Or is it a precursor to more such moves against the dozen or so other independent digital platforms?

In a media landscape where much of the mainstream media is either choosing to remain uncritical or believes wholeheartedly in this government, the few spaces left for dissenting voices, for reports that seek to present what ordinary people feel, and to raise critical questions are on a handful of digital news platforms.

Over the last decade, digital news organisations such as NewsClick, Newslaundry, Wire, Scroll, News Minute and others have carved out a space that’s different, and far more independent, than the mainstream media. Even with their relatively meagre resources, they are often ahead of their larger, older counterparts in print.

In some ways, these platforms have become the equivalent of the smaller newspapers and magazines that were able to question the Indira Gandhi government during the Emergency of 1975-77 despite censorship. They could do so because of their ownerships. They were either run by small trusts or by individuals who were prepared to take risks. In some senses, they were islands of independence in an authoritarian sea. Today, that is what some of these digital platforms represent.

Their existence is always precarious because of their financial structures. Yet, so far, they have survived and even grown, suggesting that there is a demand for an independent and courageous media.

Although there have been hints that the government plans to bring in regulation that will restrict and control these outlets, so far this has not happened. In fact, it was this possibility that led some of them to come together to form the DIGIPUB News India Foundation last year with the aim to “help ensure the creation of a healthy and robust news ecosystem for the digital age”.

The challenge posed by these organisations is neither their size nor their reach. It is the fact that they can choose not to toe the government line, as much of the mainstream media is doing. And they can also report on matters that are ignored or overlooked by the legacy media.

As a result, these portals have created an invaluable digital record of recent people’s struggles such as the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act through late 2019 and early 2020, and the ongoing protests by farmers.

Furthermore, these reports and records are available to anyone outside the country looking for an independent account of such movements. Researchers as well as mainline media platforms abroad regularly cite work done by these digital platforms. That is something this government does not appreciate as currently anything critical written anywhere in the world about it is considered an international conspiracy to tarnish India’s image.

You would think that a party with such a comfortable majority in the parliament and with a leader who apparently remains popular despite disastrous policies – demonetisation, the new citizenship law, the manner in which the lockdown to check the spread of Covid was implemented – wouldn’t worry about these news outlets.

Yet, as the events since January 26 have shown, the government is rattled. Its totally illogical actions, culminating in the arrest of a 21-year-old climate activist for an imaginary “international conspiracy”, suggest precisely that.

This is why the few remaining independent spaces as well as independent journalists have something to worry about. For there is no doubt that this government has a clear strategy to silence or subvert independent and critical voices, as outlined by Kavitha Iyer in Article 14.

One way to rein them in would be by mounting the kind of attack that was used against NewsClick where, as the editor Prabir Purkayastha pointed out in an interview with Caravan, the very process is the punishment. Organisations with little to fall back on in terms of finances can be finished by protracted court cases. It’s the simplest way of dealing with them.

The last two weeks have made it clear that it is not just “andolanjeevi” that need to be worried. Any media platform that dares to interrogate, expose, or simply do the job of honest newsgathering is being closely watched. What NewsClick went through could be the precursor for more such actions given the heightened and visible paranoia of this powerful government.