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

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 26, 2025

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Trump’s ceasefire claim to Modi’s G-7 optics, media didn’t ask the right questions

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 19, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/06/19/from-trumps-ceasefire-claim-to-modis-g-7-optics-media-didnt-ask-the-right-questions

Did he, or didn’t he? That is a question that remains unanswered. US President Donald Trump continues to claim that he stopped the clash between India and Pakistan after India launched Operation Sindoor in May. At the same time, we are told officially that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a telephone conversation with Trump, told him in no uncertain terms that India will never accept mediation and that the “pause” between the two countries was agreed upon bilaterally.  

The Indian media’s reporting of this purported telephone conversation between Modi and Trump, soon after the latter left the G 7 summit in Canada, consisted of an almost verbatim reproduction of the external affairs ministry’s report on it. Furthermore, the claim that Trump had “stepped back” from his repeated claims that he was responsible for the end of hostilities between India and Pakistan was based on a statement Trump made after he met Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir. In it he didn’t emphasise his own role. But could this be credited to his conversation with Modi? Or was he merely being diplomatic?  

Meanwhile, reports continue to appear quoting Trump saying much the same as he had stated earlier, claiming he was responsible for the “ceasefire” between India and Pakistan. 

Another example of questions left unanswered in the coverage of foreign affairs is the recently concluded G-7 summit. It was routinely reported until Modi, who was invited rather late in the day, made it to Canada. By then, Trump had already left.  There were no official photo-op as in previous summits. So why did the Indian PM, the leader of the world’s most populous nation, feel he had to accept being a sideshow in this summit? How did India benefit? Such questions, even if they were asked, were not part of the reportage.

The Hindu was an exception as it raised some questions in its editorial. Calling it a “Failed summit”, it concluded that “To have the Prime Minister travel more that 11,000 kilometres to address one outreach session of a fractious summit may not be the most optimal use of India’s resources.” 

This is only one of the many examples of how even the print media, which still occasionally shows some spunk by asking questions, today looks and reads almost the same across publications when it comes to any foreign policy issue.

In any case, in the larger scheme of things, especially at a time when we are teetering on the verge of a major conflagration in West Asia if the US decides to enter the ongoing war between Israel and Iran, perhaps such minutiae about who said what to whom don’t really matter. Foreign affairs have rarely excited readers except when our immediate neighbours are involved. 

But because all this has been front page news, it is worth considering what the reporting tells us about the coverage of foreign affairs in the print media and the uniformity in the style and substance of it.

This virtual uniformity brings back memories of the Emergency, declared 50 years ago by Indira Gandhi, on June 25, 1975. Several newspapers are carrying articles about it, a useful education for an entire generation that knows practically nothing about it. And the BJP has decided to make political capital out of the occasion by announcing that it will hold marches and meetings on what will be called “Samvidhan Hatya Divas”. Ironical, given the many attacks on the Constitution we have witnessed in the last decade since this party came to power at the Centre and in several states.

The big difference in the last 50 years is the change in what constitutes the media.  In those days it was “press” or print media. Television and radio were government controlled.

Today, not only have print publications proliferated, but the media scene is crowded with hundreds of television channels, social media, digital news platforms and video streaming platforms. Although print has not lost its relevance as precipitously as it has in a country like the US, there is a noticeable decline as the younger generation rarely turn to a newspaper as the main source of news.

In many ways, this diversification is a good thing. It makes the job of an authoritarian regime even more difficult when it wants to control access to information. 

Indira Gandhi had a relatively easy time in 1975. Yet even then, there was an underground network through which news circulated. It was unorganised, risky and with a limited reach. Still, word did get around and once censorship was lifted in the run-up to the 1977 general elections, it was evident that people already knew about the arrests of opposition leaders, the forced sterilisation campaigns in north India, the ruthless slum demolitions in cities like Mumbai and Delhi and the “encounter” killings of people suspected of being Naxalites. None of these violations had been reported in the media.

I personally knew people who would painstakingly type out stories that had appeared in Western media on such human rights violations, make cyclostyled copies, and then post them in different parts of a city so that the source could not be traced. News also travelled through word of mouth at a time when there was nothing resembling social media. So even during such a time of oppression, when after an initial fight, the mainstream press fell in line, and most of the smaller, independent publications that tried to defy censorship were unable to survive, the government failed to clamp down completely on the circulation of news. 

Today, of course, we have a different media environment. Officially, there is no censorship. Yet, Big Media in India, including television and print, mostly toe the government line barring an occasional report or investigative story that suggests that the official narrative on any issue, foreign affairs or developmental programmes is not entirely true.

Also, despite its efforts, the Modi government has not succeeded in controlling the counter narrative on independent digital channels. Ask any ordinary person you meet – a taxi driver, a migrant worker, a domestic help. Ask them where they get their news from. Rarely will you find someone who says they read newspapers. The majority of those even interested in news, and this interest is not universal, say they access it through channels on YouTube. And some of the most popular are those that are openly critical of this government such as Ravish Kumar, Abhisar Sharma, Punya Prasun Bajpai and Deepak Sharma. 

If there is any lesson to be learned on this 50th anniversary of the Emergency, it is this. 

While controlling a diverse media is more difficult, every government with an authoritarian streak will work out ways to control it. And perhaps the sameness of coverage that we already witness on some issues in mainstream media suggests that aspects of that control are already working. 

There is no guarantee that more avenues for control of media will not be devised.  So, diversity of media cannot permanently stall a determined government’s efforts to stifle the free flow of information. In fact, the experience of the Emergency has taught us that there is no room for complacency if you believe that a free media is essential for the survival of a democracy. 

From Kunal Kamra to Mohanlal to a long-dead emperor, India is the Republic of Intolerance

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 31, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/03/31/from-kunal-kamra-to-mohanlal-to-a-long-dead-emperor-india-is-the-republic-of-intolerance

Mohanlal and Kunal Kamra, with Aurangzeb in the background.|Shambhavi Thakur

Between Aurangzeb and Kunal Kamra, we are now fully qualified to call ourselves “The Republic of Intolerance”.  

The month of March in Maharashtra has seen agitations and riots around a Mughal emperor who died 300 years ago. And a stand-up comic, who performed in Mumbai in January but released a video of his act in March, receiving threats to his life, several cases being filed against him, and a privilege motion against him in the state assembly. 

Meanwhile, it was almost comical to learn that the wrecking brigade of Eknath Shinde’s offended loyalists, who trashed the venue where Kamra had performed, expressed disbelief that he was not present when all of them had just seen his video! 

But jokes apart, the current generation must wonder whether there was ever a time when humourists and cartoonists could poke fun at politicians and not be slapped with cases, or be lynched, or sent to jail.

In fact, such a time did exist. As recently as 1975, just 50 years ago, the late Abu Abraham could draw and publish a cartoon in which he depicted the person holding the highest office in India, none other than the President, as someone sitting in a bathtub signing the declaration of the Emergency that Indira Gandhi had sent to the Rashtrapati Bhawan late on the night of June 25, 1975. Abraham did not have cases filed against him, nor was he sent to jail and the newspaper that published his cartoon, Indian Express, was not banned. And this even as Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency and placed curbs on the press.

The cartoon by Aby Abraham published in 1975.

In 1987, in the same newspaper, the cartoonist Ravi Shankar drew the image of a worried Rajiv Gandhi, by then the prime minister, sitting in a big chair, shouting “Mummy”! Shankar too did not face any adverse reactions from the Rajiv Gandhi government. 

Today, we truly live in the “Naya Bharat”, the title of Kamra’s controversial show. Not only are politicians in the list of unmentionables, but even events from the recent past cannot be referenced. 

While Kamra refuses to apologise, the well-known actor Mohanlal from Kerala has done so with alacrity. He has agreed, after objections raised by members of the Sangh Parivar about scenes mentioning the Gujarat 2002 communal carnage in his new film Empuraan, to make “voluntary modifications”. 

It is not just actors and comedians who need to worry. Journalists, especially those who believe in doing the job for which they are trained, are in for tougher days given the rising temperature of intolerance in general, and specific statements and laws that several states are contemplating or have already enacted.

In Assam, Dilawar Hussain Mazumdar, who works for a digital platform CrossCurrents, was covering a demonstration outside the Assam Cooperative Apex Bank. He was detained, then arrested, then rearrested. Mazumdar and the platform for which he works have been critical of the ruling BJP in Assam. It is also not a coincidence that Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is a director of the bank before which the demonstration was being held. 

It is not just actors and comedians who need to worry. Journalists, especially those who believe in doing the job for which they are trained, are in for tougher days given the rising temperature of intolerance in general.

While Mazumdar has been granted bail, his detention is worrying not just for its arbitrariness but also because of Sarma’s remark that Mazumdar is not a “legitimate” journalist. In other words, if journalists who work for web portals do not get accreditation, they cannot be regarded as journalists. 

Then take Maharashtra, the scene of both the Aurangzeb controversy that led to a communal riot in Nagpur, and the incident involving Kunal Kamra who faces several legal challenges if he steps into the state.

The state government is in the process of setting up a Media Monitoring Unit at the cost of Rs 10 crore, ostensibly to check whether government programmes and policies are being reported accurately. But we know that “monitoring” the media cannot be that innocent.

Why does the government need a special media monitoring unit when it already has the Directorate of Information and Public Relations that does precisely this: it monitors the media, sends out press releases about government programmes, and informs those who run the government about the media’s response.  

Incidentally, it was the same Kunal Kamra, who challenged a similar attempt by the central government to set up a Fact Checking Unit. This was also supposed to monitor the media and deal with “fake” or “false” news relating to government programmes. Kamra’s challenge before the Bombay High Court resulted in a ruling that has stopped the central government from proceeding with this for now.

When governments decide to monitor the media, categorise journalists as “legitimate” or not, and introduce laws that increase their powers of arbitrary arrest, there is a reason to be worried. 

The Maharashtra government has reintroduced a law that lapsed last year before the state elections. In July last year, the government then led by Eknath Shinde, had introduced the Maharashtra Special Public Security Bill 2024. In December, the new government led by Devendra Fadnavis reintroduced the same bill. It is likely to come up in the monsoon session.

The ostensible reason stated for bringing in such a law is apparently to curb “urban Naxals”, a vague term that covers anyone or any organisation that is critical of the government. Additionally, it duplicates laws that already exist such as the UAPA and provisions in the criminal law that give governments the power to detain and imprison individuals on a whole range of grounds. Such laws have already been widely used in the last decade, including in Maharashtra. 

Therefore, we must ask why such a law, and why now? Editorials in several newspapers including The Hindu, Indian Express, Deccan Herald and Times of India have asked the same question. The Hindu writes:

“When existing laws seem adequate to tackle extremism, and the area affected by left-wing extremism is limited in the State, the only reason such a proposal has been made could be an oblique intent to crack down on lawyers, dissenters and human rights activists involved in taking up the cause of the marginalised.”

Needless to say, journalists and news portals that speak up on human rights issues would also come under the radar of such a law.

So, is this just a coincidence that several states are bringing in similar laws, and closely monitoring the media, either through new structures as in Maharashtra, or through their existing bodies? Or does it suggest that the Modi government has decided to let the states do what it hasn’t managed to do yet, especially in controlling the media that is still independent and continues to be critical?

I would suggest it is the latter. To the world the Modi government can claim India is a democracy, that freedom of expression is guaranteed. In fact, through existing laws and new ones being introduced at the state level, every attempt is being made not just to curb civil society groups and dissenters, which would include writers and journalists, but also to keep a closer eye on media and journalists. 

The Blank Editorials Of Emergency: When Silence Speaks

Published in Outlook magazine on September 19, 2024

Link: https://www.outlookindia.com/national/the-blank-editorials-of-emergency-when-silence-speaks

Ironic is it not, that a film on the Emergency was held up by what we call the Censor Board (officially the Central Board of Film Certification)? For it was during this infamous Emergency from 1975-77 that the Indian media, at that time essentially the print media, faced direct censorship for the first, and only time, since Independence.

On June 26, 1975, when the Indira Gandhi-led government declared a state of Emergency and announced that there would be press censorship, none of us knew what this meant. Censorship? How? Who would execute the policy? What were we as journalists supposed to do?

At the time, I was working with a small independent news magazine called Himmat Weekly, founded by Rajmohan Gandhi who was also the editor-in-chief. I had joined as an assistant editor, and as the name suggests, our remit was to have the courage to call out the powerful and write about the powerless. Within six months of the declaration of the Emergency, I became the magazine’s editor as R M Lala, one of the founding editors, stepped down.

On that first day, our small team of mostly young journalists had to decide what to do. Should we submit to censorship? Or shut shop? Or should we find a way around it, even if it meant taking considerable risks given that practically all the Opposition leaders had been swept up and thrown in jail and even journalists and other critics were not spared. Perhaps it was our youth, our ignorance or sheer bravado that made most of us feel we should fight censorship and continue to publish as long as we could.

Much like the other, and better-known instances of defiance, such as the The Indian Express printing a blank front page to inform its readers about censorship, Himmat Weekly too ran blank editorials in its first two issues. Only to be told that even leaving a blank space violated the censorship guidelines.

These “guidelines” trickled down to the press during the days we were not informed that we had to clear all our copy with an official. As a result, in those initial weeks, publications took chances to see how far they could stretch the meaning of these guidelines.

The guidelines were vague. The first one, for instance, stated: “Where news is plainly dangerous, newspapers will assist the Chief Press Adviser by suppressing it themselves. Where doubts exist, reference may and should be made to the nearest Press Adviser.” In other words, we were left to decide what was “dangerous”.

But that window closed quite rapidly. The bigger newspapers were sent a representative from the censor’s office who sat in the newsroom in the evening and checked copy. We, who were small, and one had hoped so insignificant, that we could escape the eye of the censor, had to physically go each day with our typed copy to the censor’s office, wait till he decided what could and could not be printed, and scramble back to find enough copy to fill the magazine.

The guidelines were not set in stone. They morphed and changed as new advisories were sent from the centre through the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, then headed by V C Shukla. The nature and volume of these guidelines came to be known only after the Emergency when a commission of inquiry under Justice J C Shah was established. The Shah Commission report revealed that new guidelines were sometimes issued verbally and a phone call from the ministry in Delhi to the censor could lead to action against a publication deemed to be defiant or running material that was “prejudicial”.

For instance, Himmat Weekly was hauled over the coals for printing this quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “The restoration of free speech, free association and free press is almost the whole of Swaraj.” We were informed that this was “prejudicial” and asked to pay a fine of Rs 20,000—a huge amount in those days for a small magazine that could barely break even. Instead of paying it, we went to court. Another story that got us into trouble was for reporting that on October 2, 1976, Acharya Kripalani and others, including Rajmohan Gandhi, had been detained for going to Raj Ghat on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.

On that first day, our small team of mostly young journalists had to decide what to do. Should we submit to censorship? Or shut shop? Or should we find a way around it, even if it meant taking considerable risks.

I give these examples to explain the arbitrary nature of censorship and how power is wielded during times when no one can ask questions. The person in-charge of censoring the press in Maharashtra was a senior journalist, a former editor of The Indian Express. Many of us had known him in his earlier avatar. Yet, as fellow journalists, we could not argue with him or demand an explanation for why he decided what was “prejudicial” or violated the ever-expanding list of censorship guidelines. He knew he had the power, and we knew the price of defiance.

Despite this, small journals like Himmat Weekly, Freedom First edited by Minoo Masani, Janata Weekly, whose publisher Dr G G Parikh is now 99 years old and still as feisty as ever, and others found ways to get around censorship by taking calculated risks.

In spite of our limited reach, these journals remained under scrutiny during the entire period. Himmat Weekly was forced to find another printer as the place where we had printed the magazine from its inception was told that it risked being shut down if it continued to print magazines like ours. We survived, just about, by raising money from our readers to buy a small printing press. By shouldering the legal risk of any fallout from the content we carried, we were somehow able to persuade another printer to print the bulk of the magazine.

Censorship worked in other ways too. The government had divided publications into the following categories: positively friendly, hostile, and continuously hostile. This determined who would receive government or public sector advertising. For journals like Himmat Weekly, obviously in the third category, this meant that the few advertisements we did get from some public sector companies and banks stopped. Given our precarious financial situation, which fluctuated each week depending on the advertisements we received, this was a virtual death blow. Yet, the magazine managed to survive for the entire period.

This form of indirect control on the media did not disappear once the Emergency ended in 1977. Even today, governments, at the Centre and particularly in the states, leverage advertising to exert editorial control. The only difference now, as compared to the 1970s, is that the private sector has grown and is a substantial source of revenue for the media. But then that leads to another kind of editorial control evident in the virtual absence of rigorous investigative reporting in Indian media on the many transgressions of big business.

Furthermore, efforts to exert direct control on the media have accelerated in the last decade under the Modi government. The pressure on independent digital news platforms is especially apparent. Even if their reach is much smaller than the bigger media houses, they are under scrutiny, much as small magazines like Himmat Weekly were during the Emergency. Although the current government has backtracked on some of the regulations it had planned to introduce to control independent media, such as provisions in the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill 2023, the desire to control is evident.

Censorship during the Emergency blocked out the voices of dissidents. But it also silenced the voices of the poor and the powerless. Today, almost five decades later, we must ask ourselves: is the Indian media, bigger and more diverse than during the Emergency, really all that different?

 

From health emergency to parliament, little changes for the media under new govt

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 27, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/06/27/from-health-emergency-to-parliament-little-changes-for-the-media-under-new-govt

The death of a poor person is rarely front-page news, especially in this post-election season when the daily drama of the 18th Lok Sabha is understandably drawing attention. But even as we watch this session of the Lok Sabha and note the changes and the repetitions from the past, it is important to remember that in the last month, hundreds of Indians have been killed, not due to the spread of a disease but because of extreme heat.

But first, coverage of the Lok Sabha session. Thanks to Sansad TV, the live telecast is available for anyone interested in knowing who says what on the floor of the House. This also facilitates the sharing of video clips on social media. So, even if television channels and newspapers pick and choose what they report, much more is circulating by way of social media. 

Take, for instance, the statement by first-time MP Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi from Kashmir.  When he got up to speak, he reminded the newly elected Speaker, Om Birla, of what had occurred when he occupied the same chair in the previous Lok Sabha. He mentioned how a Muslim MP had been called a terrorist, and also spoke about how little time had been allotted to debate the reading down of Article 370. 

Reminiscent of his actions in the previous Lok Sabha, Birla interrupted the MP and asked him to stop and sit down. The next day, this exchange did not make it to any of the prominent English language national newspapers. It had, however, already been circulated on social media platforms.

Then take the invocation of the Emergency by both the Speaker and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Solemn sentiments were expressed about democracy and the dangers of dictatorship. The reason for this, one assumes, was that the session was held on the anniversary of the declaration of Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975. However, the motive behind bringing this up was obvious. The government, and the Speaker, who is supposed to be non-partisan, used the occasion to hit at the largest party in the opposition, the Congress.

The next day, only one paper, The Hindu, called out the blatant hypocrisy. The Congress Party was in power when Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency. And it was a dark period, as anyone – including this writer – who lived through it will confirm. For journalists, it was particularly dire, with direct censorship and the threat of imprisonment hanging over your head if you dared to publish the truth.

Yet today, 49 years later (not 50 as Modi and others insist it is), where do we stand regarding freedom and fundamental rights? Has there been any indication so far that the coalition government headed by Narendra Modi will backtrack on some of the laws and regulations that are on the anvil to curb freedom of expression and restrict the media? That it will reverse its actions that are reminiscent of the Emergency? 

As The Hindu points out in its editorial:

“If the government of the day is truly committed to undo the damages of the Emergency and not repeat its grave errors, it would have not taken recourse to the same measures in the recent past, seen in the attack on the free press, the use of enforcement and investigative agencies to selectively target Opposition representatives, and draconian preventive detention laws to keep political prisoners, activists and journalists in jail without trial, including by the foisting of charges against them.” 

By attacking the Congress on its record on fundamental rights, the government is clearly trying to deflect any attempt by the united opposition to raise questions around fundamental rights and freedom.  We will have to wait to see if any of the parties in the opposition decide to call out the government on this issue. 

Even as we wait for that, we will probably have to wait even longer for our elected representatives on either side of the political divide to wake up to the ugly reality of climate change and its devastating impact on the poorest and the most vulnerable in this country.

The whole of northern India, and in fact the subcontinent, has been reeling under high temperatures accompanied by high humidity. The combination is a killer. And those dying, literally collapsing on the streets, are poor people who have no choice but to continue doing back-breaking manual labour in this heat.  An estimated 300 million of India’s adult workforce is engaged in this kind of manual labour.

Yet, it is difficult to come across any reporting on this health emergency in our major newspapers. Fortunately, independent news platforms are reporting on this unfolding tragedy that has been invisibilised by an indifferent media.

Take this excellent story by Anumeha Yadav in the Migration Story. She visited one hospital in Delhi to track the impact of the heat wave. In Delhi in May, temperatures exceeded 45 degrees Celsius for 16 days. She describes the condition of a migrant worker, identified simply as Rohit, who lay unconscious with a body temperature of 40.5 degrees Celsius.

Rohit is typical of the men who work as manual labourers, pushing handcarts, working as construction workers, or as cooks in hot kitchens with little ventilation, or as delivery workers. They get no respite even when they return to their rooms in poor settlements where there is practically no ventilation, and the tin roofs make them like ovens. No human, even a perfectly healthy person, can survive in these conditions.

The heat crisis might not be like a pandemic, but it is a silent killer of the poorest and the most vulnerable. The minority, people who earn enough to afford coolers and air-conditioners and who need not step out in the heat, are also affected but have ways to survive. Not the poor. And it is their story that we in the media must tell because ultimately the crisis the world faces with a rapidly warming planet will affect everyone. 

Will mainstream media, obsessed as it is with the rich and the powerful, turn its gaze towards such a story? Again, like this government’s past record on human rights, it is unlikely that the media will suddenly change. 

In the meantime, we must appreciate that some determined journalists are stepping out and reporting. This video by the team at Newslaundry is another example of such reporting as is this article in Migration Story on the specific impact of the excessive heat on women workers.

An added complication is the fact that medically, it is challenging to certify a death as that caused by heat, as this story in Scroll explains. Furthermore, we do not get accurate mortality figures because there is no clear system of certification. The only way, as several experts have emphasised is to look at normal mortality figures and check if these are noticeably higher. Such an exercise was done during the Covid pandemic to give us a more accurate count of deaths due to the virus at a time when the government was attempting to downplay the real mortality numbers.

Dealing with the impact of climate change in a poor country like India calls for policy interventions by the government. The people most affected, the poor, cannot push for this. The responsibility lies with the media to put pressure on policy makers by reporting on the current heat crisis that is daily killing hundreds of Indians.