The stories the media sees only in a crisis are now being told by schoolchildren

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 28, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/08/28/the-stories-the-media-sees-only-in-a-crisis-are-now-being-told-by-schoolchildren

The fallout of the student protests at Jantar Mantar last month, culminating in the police crackdown on July 20, and the ripples created throughout the country have yet to settle.

One of the significant outcomes has been the way people across the country have understood the power of telling their own stories through reels uploaded on various social media platforms. In fact, July 20 illustrated how the absence of established media now makes no difference as participants themselves record and tell their own story.

The camera has now moved from the hands of the students in Jantar Mantar and other cities, to students in rural schools across the country. They are the ones now recording and complaining about pot-holed roads making the journey to school difficult, the virtual absence of toilets, or showing how those that exist are stinking unfinished structures, and that many schools have one teacher, who is also designated the principal, taking multiple classes.

These are stories that mainstream media ought to have been recording. It did so in the past. There was a time when television channels did longform stories on such issues. The visual format is always more powerful than the written word, and even more so now. But in those days, even newspapers had designated “development” and “education” correspondents who were assigned to investigate the reality behind government statistics. 

 

The gaze of mainstream media has now moved elsewhere. And as a result, the entrenched neglect of government schools, and health facilities is reported only sporadically, when there is a disaster. The event is covered; the process that led to the disaster is ignored.

Although the response of some state governments to these self-generated stories by rural children is a promising start, it addresses only a small part of a much larger problem of developmental neglect.

Take Maharashtra, one of the better-off states in India. There are tribal-dominated areas within driving distance of its capital, Mumbai, and some further afield that have remained virtual islands of neglect. For decades, journalists have reported on the Melghat area, for instance, where many tribal villages are virtually inaccessible.  They are in the news when one hears of a pregnant woman, carried in a hammock, who could not be taken to a hospital in time to survive. Pregnancy is not an incurable disease; and women in India of 2026 should not die in the process of giving birth.  Yet they do, and we know only when a media house bothers to invest in reporting on such regions.

In recent weeks, the pressure on the state government has built up as tribal students from these areas have spoken on camera about their schools, about the roads, about the state of their hostels (in one hostel three girls died of snake bite), and of the humiliation older girls go through when they are asked to do pregnancy tests if they are away from the hostel for some months.

The Maharashtra government has finally moved and set up a committee to investigate the entrenched problems of developmental neglect in these areas (there are 10.5 million tribal people in Maharashtra), particularly of health care. It has also decided to conduct an audit of ashram schools established for tribal children. It would be a shame if the media now steps back because this is precisely the time that the focus must remain on these islands of neglect to ensure that the promises made today are being implemented. That is our job as media in a democracy.

Then take Rajasthan, where the team from the Cockroach Janta Party, as part of its “School Theek Karo” campaign, was beaten up when it went to check on government schools. But the attention this has brought to the school system in the state has resulted in the state government allocating Rs 12,500 crore to set things right. Clearly, unless governments are pushed, they do not act. That is the lesson that the protests of these last months have reiterated once again. 

The process set in motion by the protests in Delhi will continue to unravel. But so will another story that has yet to be concluded.

On August 6, the Bombay High Court overturned the ruling of a trial court in Goa acquitting the well-known journalist and founder-editor of Tehelka magazine, Tarun Tejpal, of sexually assaulting his colleague. Tejpal has now appealed to the Supreme Court. Here are links to three articles out of several published after the judgement (here, here, here).

The ruling set off once again the debate on the incident that occurred in November 2013 in Goa, where Tejpal was accused by a young reporter working for the magazine, of sexual assault. The Goa police registered a case against him. But typical of the glacial pace of the Indian judicial system, the trial began in 2017 and the judgement exonerating him was delivered in 2021. 

But even before the judicial process had been set in motion, the media trial had begun. The accused was a well-known personality; the survivor was a young journalist at the start of her career. Even though she was entitled to her privacy and her name was not used publicly, in fact people knew. This is because her emails, phone chats, and videos were liberally shared with select members of the media and others who believed that Tejpal was being falsely accused because his journal had exposed many powerful people in the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Based on this material that was circulated, opinion pieces appeared in newspapers and on digital platforms that seemed to have already concluded that the survivor was guilty. One such piece appeared on this platform in 2014 (since taken down).  

As a media commentator, I have been asked what I thought about the opinion piece that appeared in Newslaundry. In my view, on any objective journalistic criteria, it should not have been accepted. It was the kind of writing that appears on personal blogs, or on social media platforms like Facebook. But any digital platform, attempting to be credible and independent, ought not to have used it.

That article, and many others that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the case against Tejpal need to be seen in the context of how the media conducts its own trials even before the justice system gets going and the bias that is often evident in the coverage of rape cases when the individual accused is a prominent man, and in this case one of their own, a journalist.

There are many instances from the past where the media has covered in detail high profile rape cases while those cases involving poor women get barely any coverage.  There is a considerable body of work documenting this inbuilt bias in the media on its coverage of crime in general, and sexual assault in particular, when the extent of coverage is determined by proximity and “the market” which is interested in news about “people like us”.  

The insensitivity towards the survivor begins with her identity. According to the law, we are not permitted to name her. In 2012, in the coverage of the gang rape in Delhi that led to protests, and important changes in the rape law, media houses decided to make up names for the survivor. The one that stuck was Nirbhaya. 

In less high-profile cases, such as the rape of a woman journalist in Mumbai just six months after the Delhi gang rape case, where a group of men accosted her and the photographer accompanying her in an abandoned textile mill estate and gang raped her, everything short of actually using her name was fair game for some newspapers. One sent a reporter to the building where she lived and asked the watchman whether the woman who had been raped lived there.

In another case, documented in the book “Missing half the story, Journalism as if gender matters” (Zubaan books), Sameera Khan – in the chapter “When survivors become victims” – writes about the 2009 case of an international student at the Tata Institute of Social Studies who was gang-raped by six men. The headline of the news item the day after the case was filed was: “Why was she with six men that night?” Typically, the story quoted parents saying how the men charged were “good” boys. Worse still, one newspaper ran sections of the FIR filed by the student giving intimate details of how the assault took place. All this before the charge sheet had been filed by the police. 

In an age where information gets out before it is vetted and verified, the plight of women who pick up the courage to go to the police and report sexual assault is now even more fraught. 

Let me end with this quote from Sameera Khan’s chapter by feminist Bishakha Datta, words that are worth heeding today:

“Rape is coerced sex; a crime. Only perpetrators can be held responsible for the crimes they commit – not victims. How is it that victims of any other crime are never blamed, but rape victims are always suspected of triggering rape? People who are robbed, murdered or otherwise assaulted are never held responsible…One can debate opinion; one cannot debate fact. Rape is, in fact a crime. Period. There are no two opinions around this.” 

As CJP protest wrapped up, media found its ‘villains’ and buried all victims

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 6, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/08/06/as-cjp-protest-wrapped-up-media-found-its-villains-and-buried-all-victims

July 20, 2026, is a day that will be remembered for a long time. Not just because of the massive response to the call given by the Cockroach Janta Party to march to Parliament. Not just because of the recorded evidence of police brutality on young, mostly peaceful protestors. But because it has shifted the conversation in India from the one-way communication of the people in power to one where a generation has announced that it will be heard and is demanding a dialogue between equals. 

The demands made by students at Jantar Mantar and elsewhere have not disappeared despite the Modi government acceding to their principal demand for the resignation of the Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. On the contrary, young people continue to articulate their views on social media platforms as they assert that their struggle is far from over. 

For a time after the CJP called off the protests on August 1, it appeared as if the issue was settled. This is because the Modi government tried to do what it is known to do anytime it faces uncomfortable questions: change the narrative.

So instead of addressing the other important demands made by youth, the new narrative became the allegedly foul language used by some of the young people, specifically young women, that targeted the prime minister.

And those attempting to create this diversion almost succeeded. The unfortunate victim of this strategy was a 15-year-old girl, who had FIRs filed against her, and was eventually forced to apologise on video. That did not end her problems. Her mother told the press that they were compelled to relocate because of the continuous harassment, both by police and others visiting their home and through social media.  Her face and name are now known because even media houses, that ought to have known that a minor must be protected, had no compunction in broadcasting her name and photograph.

Read this piece in Newslaundry to get a sense of the extent of such abuse and trolling of the young women who had the courage to speak up during the protests.  One of them, who teaches yoga, told the Newslaundry reporter: “People are constantly targeting me. I have confined myself to my home and have practically stopped stepping out. My life has changed completely. I am a yoga instructor, and I lost many clients after this controversy. It feels as though my career is over.”

The other narrative that dominated was the Modi government’s demand that the head of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg apologise to the prime minister for having taken down his video from Instagram. The explanation that it was a technical glitch did not suffice, nor an apology by a senior executive of the company.

But as Apar Gupta of the Internet Freedom Foundation, wrote on X, “More than an apology, we need a law for social media regulation that is centred in human rights and guards against political control of platforms… The Standing Committee on IT wants Mark Zuckerberg to apologize, but the real apology is owed to the users themselves, not just the government. A 5-hour takedown of one video made headlines, but doxing of protesters, unchecked hate speech, and automated over-censorship of ordinary citizens’ content go unanswered. An apology to power means little without accountability to the people actually affected.”

So, the 15-year-old who is likely to be marked for life, or the young woman who said her career is over, are not considered worthy of an apology from the government that knows well who is behind the harassment, but the dominant narrative is how these young women, and the company that runs the social media platforms, must apologise.

We must also note that although most of the protestors were men, it is the women who have been targeted. The misogyny so deeply ingrained in our political culture, especially over the last decade when powerful politicians, including Modi, have not hesitated to hurl sexist abuses at their opponents, has been on full display since July 20.

Despite the concentrated effort to move the focus away from the demands of the students, the story refuses to die down. Now it is young people in Jharkhand who are being seen and heard as they occupy the streets of the state capital, Ranchi and its biggest stadium, where some of them are on hunger strike as were their counterparts in Delhi, and where similar demands about leaked exam papers and the desperate hunt for jobs can be heard on the ground.

This video of a young woman on the YouTube channel Lallantop is particularly disturbing. She speaks of the many ways in which she has tried to deal with competitive exams, the desperation of trying to succeed, yet despite being encouraged by parents, she concludes, “We don’t have any value, even as much as insects”. Holding a copy of the Constitution in her hand, she says, “Our Constitution says there should be equality. But where is equality?” And then goes on to say, “I don’t want to cry in front of the camera but sometimes I feel I am nothing, I am nothing.” 

Those words should haunt those who make policies that affect people like this young woman, and the dominant media that perpetuates the false narratives of the powerful.

I must point out though, that there is one big difference in the coverage of the protests in Ranchi and those held in the week starting July 20.

Jharkhand is ruled by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), an ally of the Congress Party and a member of the opposition India Alliance. Significantly, this time, major television channels, that had virtually ignored the previous protests, flew reporters, and even prominent anchors to Ranchi to cover these protests. Apparently, when the target is a non-BJP government, it is worth their time and resources to provide coverage.  

Let me leave you with two stories that illustrate that journalism, as it ought to be practised, still exists.

Just before the July 20 march to parliament, there were videos and images of a truck laden with stones and bricks parked close to the site of the protests.  Questions were raised on social media about how the truck appeared at that location shortly before July 20.

A reporter at Newslaundry did what any media organisation could have done.  He traced the registration plate of the truck, clearly visible in the images, and filed this report. It tells us that the truck was involved in an accident on July 16 but that the police could not give a convincing explanation about why it was parked outside the office of the Indian Youth Congress and so close to the site of the protests on July 19, a day before the march to parliament. The story illustrates what journalists are supposed to do: not speculate but investigate.

AltNews is a platform that does precisely that. And in this instance, it has investigated the use of AK-47 guns by the Bihar police against protesters in Siwan.  Questions were raised about this once a photograph showing a policeman with such a gun went viral. There were also reports of people injured by bullets.  But it is this report that establishes that it was not just a couple of bullets fired at people but at least nine that AltNews has managed to verify.

Newspapers like The Hindu and independent digital news platforms have also followed up on the pellet injuries on protestors that the police refused to acknowledge. The case is now being heard in the Supreme Court.

The events since July 20 ought to make those in power, including the powerful in the media, acknowledge the passion, clarity and courage of these young protestors. Instead, what we have seen is either a patronising attitude, talking down to them as if they are children to be scolded, or demonising them by attacking the most vulnerable amongst them, the young women.

This is a formula that will rebound because if you took the time to listen and watch the reels and reports since July 20, you would have understood that this cacophony of dissenting voices will not quieten down easily.