The bigger story in Kashmir is the media’s silence on action against its own

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on January 23, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/01/23/the-bigger-story-in-kashmir-is-the-medias-silence-on-action-against-its-own

The job of a journalist, in any part of India, is to observe, investigate, verify and report. But if you do precisely that in Kashmir, you are in big trouble. That is what journalists associated with major English language newspapers – Indian Express, Hindustan Times and The Hindu – found out recently.

They have now experienced what journalists not attached to such prominent media houses have been through since August 2019 when the Modi government abrogated Article 370 and converted the state of Jammu and Kashmir into a union territory. With that change came control and coercion of the local press that included arrests, closing offices of publications like Kashmir Times, shutting the Press Club in Srinagar, and daily harassment of journalists and photographers.

You would think that now that this routine has touched mainstream print media, it would make for front page news. It did not. 

 

Bashaarat Masood, Assistant Editor with Indian Express who has been reporting for the paper since 2006 was first summoned on January 14 for this report that appeared on January 13.  The story was billed as an exclusive.  

Masood reported that the J&K police were conducting a survey of all mosques in Kashmir collecting information about the personnel in these mosques like imams and muezzins, members of their managing committee and their charitable wings. He followed this up with another report that quoted people who were concerned about these actions of the police, which they said had never happened before. Both stories are straight-forward reportage.  Yet, for reasons not made clear to Masood when he was summoned, they caught the attention of the police.

The response from his newspaper should have been immediate, the very next day. However, it took Indian Express a week before it ran a front-page story about what their own correspondent had been subjected to by the police, including being asked to sign a bond under Section 126 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023, to prevent “breach of peace” or anything that could disturb “public tranquillity”. A day before the belated Indian Express story, the Wire had already filed a report. 

Also, although the correspondent of Hindustan Times, Ashiq Hussain had also been summoned, his paper buried the report on an inside page on January 21. As if to compensate for this lapse, the paper published an editorial the next day saying the police had crossed a “red line”.  The editors of the paper should be aware that this line had been crossed a long time back.

Altogether four journalists, including Peerzada Ashiq from The Hindu, have been summoned for reporting on what in all respects is a routine story. 

Why should we be shocked or concerned that finally the daily harassment faced by so many Kashmiri journalists has now reached these well-known bylines?

Because, as I have argued in previous columns, what happens in Kashmir is a litmus test for what could happen anywhere in India. If a government does not respect the right of journalists in one part of the country to report without constantly watching their backs, what is to stop it from doing the same elsewhere?  

Furthermore, asking journalists to sign a bond under a provision of the law that anticipates that what you write might disturb “public tranquillity” is particularly dangerous and runs counter to any concept of freedom of expression. If such a precedent is set in Kashmir, it will give police the right anywhere in India to use this provision to stop journalists from doing their work.  

The message from these recent developments in Kashmir is that even what we in the media consider routine reporting can be unacceptable to the current dispensation. As a Kashmiri journalist told Scroll, “If there is no tolerance for even this kind of journalism, then what is the future of journalism here?”

Indeed, that is a question that all journalists and media houses, not just those based in Kashmir, should be asking.

Also, after these developments in Kashmir, will media houses ask their correspondents there, and elsewhere, to tread carefully, or will they encourage them to continue to report as journalists are supposed to do? 

While content even vaguely critical of the government is becoming scarce in most mainstream print media, although occasionally an in-depth report on an issue will pop up, this virtual flattening of the media undermines its credibility. Why should readers/viewers believe anything that is reported when most people with access to the internet have their own channels of information? Some of these peddle fake news but there are an equal number that provide coverage of issues that the mainstream ignores. 

As an illustration, here’s a story that the media in Maharashtra should have covered and used it to question the government when it insists that India is forging ahead as a growing economy. Hidden from view, because the media does not pay attention to the dark invisible corners of perpetually deprived areas in India, are stories like this one about the Melghat region in Maharashtra.

While reports on the region’s abundant wildlife in sanctuaries like the one in Tadoba make it to the news pages, the people who have lived in its forests do not. The Adivasi communities living in Melghat have suffered decades of neglect with patchy roads, poor health care facilities and abject poverty. 

Recently the Bombay High Court came down hard on the Maharashtra government in response to several writ petitions about the conditions in Melghat. It chastised the government for doing “too little” and said there should be “zero tolerance” of such neglect.

Those journalists who have covered Maharashtra since the 1980s are familiar with the Melghat story.  This has been a region of chronic developmental neglect that successive governments have addressed only when pushed.  The fact that in 2026 we are reading stories about Melghat that echo those reported four decades back is an indictment of India’s development story, as well as the indifference of its media.

According to this story in The Hindu, between April and October 2025, that is in six months, 97 children below six years died in the Melghat region either due to stillbirths or because the infants were low birth weight, born to severely malnourished women. In the same period, of the 4,437 pregnant women, 4,170 were anaemic. Let these facts sink in.  This is Maharashtra, one of the better off states in India.

Malnutrition and maternal deaths, in any part of India, rarely qualify as “breaking news”. But surely the detection of  “infiltrators” that the prime minister continues to mention at every opportunity, ought to find space in the news? It does not. 

By way of contrast, in the US, the actions of masked and fully armed ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents are top of the news. They are filmed pushing, shoving, chasing and even shooting down people presumed “illegal aliens” even before they have a chance to present their credentials. But in India, our equivalent of ICE, the police in a state like Assam have been literally pushing so-called “foreign nationals” into neighbouring Bangladesh and yet we read little about this in our newspapers.

Thanks to the consistent work of some independent journalists and platforms we get to read some stories about this. Stories like this worrying report by Rokibuz Zaman in Scroll about two men from Nagaon in Assam who were pushed into the no man’s land between India and Bangladesh not once but three times.

Hasan Ali, whose father was a “declared foreigner” and pushed out, told Scroll: “My country has declared my father a foreigner from Bangladesh. But Bangladesh has returned him twice. Taile amader desh kunda? Amader desh ase ki?” (Then, which is our country? Do we have any country at all?)

Who will answer Hasan Ali’s question? 

 

When media ‘solves’ terror cases, Kashmiris are collateral damage

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 27, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/11/27/when-media-solves-terror-cases-kashmiris-are-collateral-damage

The story about the Delhi blast on November 10, where a car exploded at peak hour in the Red Fort area, killing 15 people and injuring many more, continues to unravel as we read every day about the police and investigating agencies uncovering so-called “terror modules” and arresting more people. 

The headlines paint an intricate web of how it happened. They suggest an amazing certainty, as if the puzzle has already been solved. But read the story beneath those headlines, and you find that the information printed is based on what the investigating agencies are choosing to tell the media. It is their version.  

The people arrested so far are “suspects”. It has still to be established in a court of law that they were behind what happened. But readers, and especially viewers of our mainstream television channels, would not know that. Because the reporting has this quality of certainty, rather than being qualified by attribution to any source or agency. 

The cost of this kind of irresponsible reporting, something that runs contrary to the basic tenets of journalism that all of us have been taught, is being borne primarily by ordinary Kashmiris, who are living their lives, trying to study and qualify for jobs, selling their wares in Kashmir and outside, and basically surviving like so many in the rest of this country.

Let me quote here from an article which appeared as an op-ed in The Hindu on November 27 by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Chairman of the Hurriyat Conference. It is based on a sermon he gave at the Jama Masjid in Srinagar. Here is what he wrote, referring to the media and the November 10 incident: 

“Yet, while we mourn, it is troubling to see how quickly such tragedies are converted into sensational narratives. Even before investigations establish facts, sections of the media are quoting ‘inside sources’ and are ready with headlines that cast suspicion on a particular community and religion. This rush to judge not only misleads the public but also places an entire population under scrutiny – especially Kashmiri students and professionals living across India, who suddenly find themselves being treated as suspects. Fear replaces safety, and anxiety grips families back home.”

His observations come as no surprise. They should make us in the media pause. But that is unlikely to happen because Mirwaiz is anyway condemned to be part of “them”, the so-called anti-nationals.  

Barring a few honourable exceptions, mostly in mainstream print media, qualifiers like “alleged” or “suspect” or “according to” have virtually disappeared. Even if they appear in the main story, they are certainly not reflected in the headlines, which is what most people read and remember.  

Mainstream media probably needs to be educated about the fundamental right of every citizen to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Even the spate of judgments in terror-related cases, where people have spent years in jail on charges that were finally dismissed by courts, does not seem to have informed reporting of such incidents in this country. The latest is the Allahabad High Court judgement on November 10, absolving Mohammad Ilyas, who spent 28 years in jail after being convicted for being the brain behind the 1996 blast in a UP Roadways bus. In my last column in Newslaundry, I had mentioned the men acquitted by the Bombay High Court for their alleged role in the 2006 serial train blasts in Mumbai.

Apart from the permanent harm such media coverage is doing to scores of families of these alleged culprits and co-conspirators, the more troubling aspect is the impact on the lives of people who have had nothing to do with that incident, namely all Kashmiris. Several reports in newspapers tell us that Kashmiri students are being targeted, that they are being asked to leave from rented accommodation in cities outside Kashmir, that itinerant dry-fruit and shawl sellers who can be seen on the streets in many cities once the weather becomes cooler are being harassed.  

This can only happen because the media is complicit in creating a narrative that places all Kashmiris in the same basket as a few who might be responsible for what happened in Delhi.

Equally concerning is the virtual absence of solidarity from India’s mainstream media with the Kashmir Times, one of the oldest English-language newspapers in Kashmir, founded by the respected journalist Ved Bhasin in 1954 and now published as a digital edition by his daughter, Anuradha Bhasin.

On November 20, the Kashmir Times office in Jammu was raided by the State Investigation Agency (SIA). The office had been locked for four years as the print version of the newspaper had been suspended. According to Anuradha, no one worked in the office. Yet the SIA chose not just to raid it but claimed that arms and ammunition had been found in the premises. All this was dutifully reported by newspapers. 

Furthermore, according to this report in Indian Express, the SIA has charged the owners and the editor of the paper with “disseminating terrorist and secessionist ideology”; “spreading inflammatory, fabricated and false narratives”; “attempting to radicalise the youth” of J&K; “inciting disaffection and separatist sentiments”; “disturbing peace and public order”; and, “challenging the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India through print and digital content”.

The raid on Kashmir Times should jolt us into remembering the challenges that journalists living in Kashmir face every day, particularly since August 2019, when Article 370 was abrogated, and Jammu and Kashmir became a union territory governed directly from New Delhi.

This comprehensive article by Irfan Amin Malik in Frontline magazine spells this out. It covers the reality of print publications, like Kashmir Times, that have withered and died because of the absence of any financial support. Most of this came in the form of government advertising. But since a “media policy” was introduced specifically for Jammu and Kashmir in 2020, things have become worse.  

One of the provisions in the policy states: “There shall be no release of advertisements to any media which incite or intend to incite violence, question sovereignty and integrity of India or violate the accepted norms of public decency and behaviour.” In other words, if you don’t toe the line, you will not get advertisements from the government.

Kashmir Times has been raided before, on October 19, 2020, when according to an op-ed in 2023 in New York Times by Anuradha Bhasin, “government officials and the police swept into the newspaper’s offices in the city of Srinagar, chased out the staff and put a lock on the door that remains to this day.”

Have a look at the charges against Kashmir Times and then read some of the articles it has carried, such as this one on autism and the absence of care or this one on saffron, one of the staple exports from Kashmir. You will not find such stories in newspapers published outside Kashmir, or for that matter, even in those that have survived in Kashmir. How is this kind of reporting “challenging the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India”?

The raid on Kashmir Times, the impact of media reporting of the November 10 Delhi blast on the lives of ordinary Kashmiris, and the routine surveillance and harassment that Kashmiri journalists go through call for some introspection by India’s mainstream media, which emphasises that Kashmir is an integral part of this country. If our colleagues in the media in one part of this country are facing such problems, surely it is a concern for all of us who support a free press in a democracy.

In this strong editorial following the raid on their office, Anuradha Bhasin and Prabodh Jamwal have said something that should be heeded by the media in India, before even the pretence of a free press is permanently erased.

“Journalism is not a crime. Accountability is not treason. And we will continue to inform, investigate, and advocate for those who depend on us. The state may have the power to raid our offices. But it cannot raid our commitment to the truth.”

Go to Kashmir to understand what life is like under an Emergency

 On the eve of the 48th anniversary of the Emergency, here's something I wrote for the Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) website.

Link: https://nwmindia.org/features/nwmi-writes/the-emergency-writing-back-to-the-future/

Forty-eight years after Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency on the night of June 25, 1975, people still ask: What was it like?

If today, in the year 2023, you want to get a sense of what life was like under the Emergency, go and spend some time in what was once the state of Jammu and Kashmir.  Not as a tourist, or a pilgrim, but as a citizen who wants to understand what life is like for people in that region.

Since August 5, 2019, when the rights provided to the people of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 were taken away overnight, and a full-fledged state was reduced to a union territory, there is a virtual state of emergency in the region, especially in Kashmir.

Think about it.  Even as the central government led by Narendra Modi took this step, all political leaders who opposed the move were arrested.

The media, that has never had an easy run because of the presence of security forces, virtually fell silent. Internet was suspended making it impossible for journalists to file stories. They were questioned, intimidated, and detained.

Over time, what little remained of an independent media was snuffed out, while journalists who dared to question were charged under public safety and terror laws.

Four Kashmiri journalists are still in jail, and dozens more have had to either leave Kashmir or tread carefully as the sword of arrest or interrogation hangs over them all the time. Even leaving the country is not an option as several have found themselves on a no-fly list without prior intimation.

Many prominent Kashmiri journalists now write for international publications as their stories are rarely picked up by mainstream Indian media barring some independent digital news platforms.

Newspapers in Kashmir survive only if they toe the line as they are now entirely dependent on government advertising. Kashmir Times, the oldest English language paper founded by the veteran journalist Ved Bhasin and now run by his daughter Anuradha Bhasin, was forced to shut its Srinagar office when the lease was cancelled without explanation.

The Kashmir Press Club in Srinagar, an important meeting place for journalists, was also arbitrarily closed.

 

Kashmir Press Club. Photo by Quratulain Rehbar

A media policy was put in place in 2020 that would penalise any publication or journalist who reported what the government considered “misleading” or “false”. In other words, nothing critical of government policies or programmes could be reported.

How is any of this different from what happened in the days following the declaration of emergency in June 1975?

Then too, opposition leaders were rounded up and put in jail. Most of them remained in jail for the entire period of the emergency.

The press soon fell silent as press censorship was imposed. Any publication violating censorship “guidelines”, which were frequently revised and updated, faced closure. No one could question the logic of these guidelines. You just had to follow them.

Even if journalists working for prominent newspapers wanted to report what they saw on the ground, they could not as their stories would not have been carried by their own publications. Their only option was to somehow sneak out the information they had collected so that it could be published in the international media.

A pall of fear that fell on the country after the first weeks of the declaration of emergency ensured that no dissent or political activity could take place. Such activity was compelled to go underground. Opponents of the Emergency, who had managed to evade arrest, had to devise ways to communicate without being detected.

For the 20 months that the Emergency lasted, people in one part of the country were unaware of what was happening in other parts. We only knew the full extent of the atrocities that were committed during the period when censorship was lifted, elections were held, and the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government was thrown out.

It will soon be four years since the abrogation of article 370. Have things changed in Kashmir?

Although some political leaders have been released, they have no role in the running of their former state because there is no legislative assembly. Normal political activity, such as public meetings and rallies are impossible to hold.  Political parties are compelled to reach out to their constituents in ways that will not attract the attention of the authorities, people who take direct orders from New Delhi.

And what about the media? Before August 5, 2019, many highly regarded Kashmiri journalists reported for mainstream media houses. Their stories included reports on human rights violations and the views of ordinary people about the situation.  They featured opposition politicians even if their views were unpalatable to those in power in New Delhi.

Today, there is a trickle of news from the region. What we read or watch are stories based on handouts by the security forces, and upbeat write-ups about tourism. It’s as if all the human rights abuses we read about in the past have disappeared.

So, even if a formal state of emergency has not been declared in Jammu and Kashmir, what people in the region have lived through in the last four years is not that different from the Emergency period of 1975-77.

What is more worrying is the absence of outrage in the rest of India about citizens in one part of this country being deprived of their basic democratic rights.

Authoritarianism finds fertile ground when the citizenry is immunised against violations of democratic rights, when people are willing to delude themselves that what happens in one region really cannot happen elsewhere, and when they swallow the propaganda that India remains the “mother of democracy”.

We need to recognise that what has happened in Kashmir is an experiment by this government to see how far they can go to deny citizens their basic rights. Why declare a formal emergency when you can manage without it?

---

Why do we keep ignoring violations of journalists’ rights in Kashmir?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry.com on September 16, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/09/16/why-do-we-keep-ignoring-violations-of-journalists-rights-in-kashmir

When the news broke about two Afghan journalists being detained and subsequently brutally beaten up by the Taliban for covering a women's demonstration in Kabul recently, there was international outrage. And rightly so. After all, the two men – photographer Nematullah Naqdi and reporter Taqi Daryabi from Etilaat Roz – had not committed a crime; they were simply doing their jobs.

In Indian mainstream media too there was outrage, and the photographs of the two men with their injuries were reproduced. Yet, as several senior Kashmiri journalists like Gowhar Geelani asked on social media, why was there no such outrage in mainstream Indian media when similar violations of the rights of journalists take place in Kashmir all too frequently? Such as the beating up of journalists and photographers covering a Muharram procession in Srinagar on August 17.

This is as good a time as any to focus on the state of the media, journalists and press freedom in Kashmir. There is no better illustration of how impossible it is for journalists to do even their routine jobs when you see the response of the administration following the death of the chairman of the Hurriyat, Syed Ali Shah Geelani on September 1. Not only were journalists prevented from going anywhere near his home after news of his death spread, as this report by Shahid Tantray in the Caravan describes, but they were even stopped from filming the huge presence of security forces outside his home. Additionally, internet services were suspended yet again, crippling the media even if it wanted to report on developments.

The absence of any independent source of information, which would have been facilitated had the media had access, has left the public with two conflicting narratives about Geelani’s funeral: one of the family alleging that the police forcibly took the body and buried it without the immediate family present, and the other of the police which claims that the last rites of the Kashmiri leader were performed properly.

If you look back over the last two years since August 5, 2019, when Jammu and Kashmir's special status ended and it was split into two union territories, there are innumerable and frequent incidents illustrating the continuing pressure under which journalists and the media have to function there.

Priya Ramani, in this detailed piece in Article14 titled “The dangerous profession of journalism in Kashmir”, has recorded many of these incidents. She outlines not just the impact of the media policy for Kashmir of last June that essentially allows the administration of the union territory to control the media in multiple ways, but also reports the string of instances of journalists apprehended, jailed, charged, interrogated, detained and threatened if they deviated from the script the government now expects from them. That, according to the media policy, is to create “a sustained narrative on the functioning of the government in media”.

Ramani begins her report with the experience of a young photographer, Kamran Yousef, who was jailed for six months because, according to the National Investigation Agency, he had "never covered any developmental activity of any Government Department/Agency, any inauguration of Hospital, School Building, Road, Bridge, statement of political party in power or any other social/developmental activity by state government or Govt of India."

In other words, for not doing what the government expects, a journalist can be charged under the UAPA and jailed. Yousef got bail in 2018 but the following year, he was beaten up by the police while taking photographs in Pulwama in southern Kashmir.

Since then, there has been no change in the attitude of the government towards journalists. The latest incident took place on September 8, when the police raided and searched the homes of four Kashmiri journalists – Hilal Mir, Shah Abbas, Showkat Motta and Azhar Qadri – and confiscated digital devices and travel documents.

In an atmosphere where you can be apprehended, and even jailed, for any number of reasons, how can journalists function? How different is this from the challenges that journalists in other countries, such as Afghanistan, face today? The difference, of course, is that we insist we are a democracy where the freedom of the press exists, even though India's ranking in indices measuring this freedom is steadily plummeting.

The intimidation of journalists is not the only way to control the media. Another well-known tactic is to squeeze finances by withdrawing government advertising. In many parts of India, newspapers and local TV channels are heavily dependent on advertisements from the government. Since the pandemic and the downturn in the economy, this dependence has grown. Indeed, it is striking to see how much government advertising appears today in major mainstream newspapers. In Jammu and Kashmir, this is a well-honed tactic, one that the government has used to good effect to silence any semblance of criticism from the media.

In its coverage of Ayodhya bhoomi pujan, the Indian media hit a new level of sycophancy

Broken News

 

https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/08/13/in-its-coverage-of-ayodhya-bhoomi-pujan-the-indian-media-hit-a-new-level-of-sycophancy

 

Has some of India's mainstream media, especially electronic media, sunk so deep into the swamp of sycophancy that it will never be able to pull itself out?

 

August 5, 2020 may well be remembered for many reasons not just for the bhoomi pujan for the Ram temple in Ayodhya by the elected head of a "secular" state, but also for the most vivid exhibition of hero worship with not even a hint of balance or independence by much of the country's mainstream media. As always, there were exceptions but their numbers diminish by the day.

 

Newslaundry has already commented on the breathless and over-the-top coverage given to the event in Ayodhya on August 5.

 

Print media, by virtue of its very format, tends to be a little more restrained, particularly the English language newspapers.  But read the newspapers in the Indian languages, especially in Hindi, and the story is very different. They are uniformly a sea of saffron on August 6, the day after the laying of the foundation stone by Modi. The favourite image is of the prime minister, dressed in a gold silk kurta and saffron lungi prostrating himself before the idol.

 

IJR (Indian Journalism Review), an often caustic and insightful blog by senior journalist Krishna Prasad, has compiled the front pages of several Indian language papers that illustrate this. The temple is not the story, it is the man dedicating the temple who is. And that is clearly how it was meant to be.

 

The question we have to ask is how, we in the Indian media, reached this point? How much does it have to do with the way politics has played out since 2014 and how much with our willing surrender to the agendas set by the ruling party at the Centre?

 

One could argue that the media has no option but to report on an event such as the foundation ceremony in Ayodhya because the prime minister was central to it. But it was not an official event. And it represented a troubled and violent history.  Should none of that have found a mention in the headline, something that most people read and remember?

 

For instance, The Telegraph, which often has arresting front-page headlines and graphics did not disappoint this time with this headline:

 

"The book that begins with We, the people, is

 

THE GOD THAT WE FAILED

 

Raja and rishi are no longer separate in the Republic."

 

Others ranged from "Modi lays first brick for Ram Rajya" in Deccan Chronicle to "PM fulfills national aspiration" in Hitvada. The Times of India mentioned Modi equating the mandir campaign with the freedom movement and the Indian Express simply stated, "Modi marks the mandir".

 

Compare this to "Modi initiates temple at mosque site" in Financial Times or "Modi sets Hindu temple in stone at razed mosque site" in The Times, London. Several other international publications included mention of the mosque, referring to the Babri Masjid that was demolished by Hindutva foot soldiers on December 6, 1992.  By doing so, these headlines place the context of the event right at the top, rather than as an afterthought.

 

And that context, as well as this headline in The Washington Post,"In Modi's quest to transform India, a Hindu temple rises" is the real story of August 5. To be fair, in the reporting in several newspapers the history relating to the demolition of the Babri Masjid was included. But in these days of shrinking attention spans, it is the headline and the photographs that make an impression and not necessarily the text beneath.

 

The editorials, which signify the stand taken by different periodicals on this kind of event, are read even less.  But they are important nonetheless as they reflect some of the thinking during these times.  Historians in the future would read them to grasp how far the Indian media supported uncritically not just the construction of the temple on the ruins of the mosque but the heightened importance given to the process with the prime minister who represents all the people of India, not just the Hindu majority, choosing to lay its foundation stone.

 

Modi compared the movement to build the temple with the freedom movement. He spoke about a "new India" and spoke of freedom from "1200 years of slavery". Some questions were asked about this, but precious few. The iconography of an incumbent prime minister comparing a divisive and violent movement that led to it culmination on August 5 with the freedom movement is what will be remembered.

 

What is the shape of this new India that the prime minister promised? One of the most prescient articles on this appeared in Indian Express a day before the bhoomi pujan. Suhas Palshikar, the well-known political scientist analysed what he saw as the beginning of a new republic with the laying of the foundation stone in Ayodhya. 

 

He outlined the five pillars that will hold up this new republic. These are,

 according to Palshikar, transforming India into "a repository of repression"; the deligitimisation of "ideas of dissent and critique"; the "willingness of the judiciary to look the other way"; "the politics of avoidance displayed by most political parties"; and the foundation of this new republic "on a militant culture of majoritarianism".

 

How does all this apply to the media? What role has it played, and continues to play to build this "new India" of Modi's dreams or the new republic that Palshikar predicts?

 

A decade back, or even six years ago before 2014 and the ascendance of Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party, would the media have been so pliant and unquestioning? Wouldn't more people have voiced their concern about this event being elevated to one of "national" significance despite its obvious sectarian nature? Would we not have reminded readers about the events of 1992 even as they observed the celebrations around this temple? Instead, as Mihir Sharma points out in this article in Bloomberg, "Now, Hindu nationalism’s capture of the soul of India is so complete that television anchors broke into devotional song and newspaper front pages looked more like religious calendars than broadsheets."

 

Does this mean that August 5 marks game, set and match to the victory of Hindu nationalism in all spheres, including the media?

 

It need not and it should not. The cornerstone of not falling into the trap of reinforcing this majoritarian narrative that assaults us each day, especially by way of the electronic media, is for the sections of the media that still hold that an independent media is essential to a democracy to inject the necessary context and scepticism into the manner in which events like the Ayodhya spectacle are reported. The editorial decision is reflected in the headline, the choice of photographs and the amount of space given to the event as well as the tone of the reporting and not just the editorial comment.

 

In conclusion, I should also point out that August 5 was also one year since the clampdown in Jammu and Kashmir with the reading down of Article 370.  People there, including the media, have struggled to keep their heads above water, cut-off as they are without internet and with so many in jail. A year later, it is shameful that the court and the government are still debating whether 4G internet connectivity should be restored. This deserved more than just a mention on August 5. Yet once again, barring the usual exceptions, mainstream media did what was expected of it by erasing from our consciousness the continuing sorrow and suffering of the people in that region.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What the decline of opinion pages tells us about the media's role in India

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/06/18/what-the-decline-of-opinion-pages-tells-us-about-the-medias-role-in-india

If you put four Indian television news anchors in one jar and shake it vigorously, you will probably get at least 10 opinions. Maybe more. Television news in India today is dominated by opinion, of anchors and the talking heads invited on primetime shows. For the ordinary viewer, it’s virtually impossible to separate fact from opinion, even fiction.

Yet, journalism schools in this country continue to churn out women and men who enter the profession with the belief that the two should be separate.

It is this change brought about by TV news that makes the ongoing debate within the American media about the role of opinion pages seem a little distant from our reality.

There, a controversy erupted on June 3 when the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton headlined “Send in the Troops”.  A virtual brawl broke out, including in the newspaper's newsroom, where African American reporters saw this as an assault on their personhood at a time when the country watched police brutally suppress peaceful protesters calling out entrenched racism. It also triggered a debate on whether the opinion pages of an important newspaper should be open to such extreme views. The debate has been covered in some detail in this piece in Newslaundry.

In India, is this debate relevant given the nature of opinion pages in our newspapers and the fact that the debate about separating opinion from straight news reporting has already been settled by dominant Indian TV news channels? The print media still largely sticks to this concept of separation but with TV being the major source of news, do readers of print really appreciate the difference?

In the days when print was king, the opinion pages of leading newspapers were considered important. Editors of major newspapers in the 1970s and 80s, all men, were names to be reckoned with and their regular columns were widely read. Names like Sham Lal, NJ Nanporia, Frank Moraes, Girilal Jain, G Kasturi, and many others were high-profile because they articulated opinions that people in power took seriously.

With the opening up of the economy in the 1990s and the profit element coming to dominate the content of newspapers, the opinion pages inevitably took a hit. In one newspaper where I worked during this transition period, not only was the position of editor-in-chief abolished, we were informed that as only three percent of our readers looked at the edit page, so its contents would have to be rethought. That change took a while to come about but today the edit page of this newspaper is unrecognisable from what it was in the 1980s.

Does any of this really matter? Indian edit pages vary greatly, from ones that carry a variety of views, including ghost-written pieces by leading members of the party in power, to those with strongly argued opinions on a range of subjects by academics and experts.

But would even those newspapers that permit such variety, even as their own unsigned editorials clearly indicate the views of the paper, permit a piece that wounds people already at the receiving end of state terror? It was argued that it was insensitive of the NYT to run Cotton's piece at a time when African Americans, including reporters, were at the receiving end of the police’s excesses.

In India, would any mainstream newspaper permit a blatantly Islamphobic comment or one that advocates for more force to suppress legitimate protests by people who are victimised? A broadsheet newspaper is still expected to convey a level of sobriety, unlike the nightly shouting matches on TV. Hence, giving space to views that hurt a segment of the population directly cannot be justified by arguing that opinion pages represent a range of views and do not reflect the editorial policy of a newspaper. Ultimately, the editor does make the choice.

While the US debated the role of opinion in the media, there was little to no debate in the Indian media on the new media policy introduced by the Jammu and Kashmir administration on June 2. It ought to have been debated, and opposed, because such a policy in one part of the country represents a danger to press freedom all over the country.

The policy is worrying for more than one reason. One, it has been imposed in a region where the absence of proper connectivity has restricted the ability of journalists to function for over 10 months now. Second, the continuing intimidation, arrests, and registration of cases against journalists, combined with the selective release of much-needed government ads to the newspapers that survive has already ensured that it’s risky and virtually impossible for journalists to report what is going on in their region.

On top of that you now have a policy where a bureaucrat, or a policeman, can decide what news is "fake" or "inaccurate", and take action against a journalist or a media house. The Indian Express was one of the few newspapers that came out with a strong comment against the move. In an editorial headlined "Ministry of Truth", the newspapers commented:

“The New Media Policy of the Jammu & Kashmir administration resembles 1984 in its 53 pages of rules and regulations on what is news, the setting up of a mechanism for ‘monitoring’ of fake news, conditions newspapers need to meet in order to be empanelled and under what circumstances they will be ‘de-empanelled’. The J&K Directorate of Information and Public Relations may not have George Orwell’s vocabulary but the framers of this policy have managed to provide a remarkably clear picture of the media they want – journalists and news organisations answerable not to their readers, nor even to their editors, but to government bureaucrats and security officials, who will have the powers to decide which news item is fake or ‘anti-national’; and with these determinations, to further decide the economic viability of a newspaper through the carrots and sticks of government advertisements. Officials will sit in judgement on journalistic ethics and issues of plagiarism. All this for building ‘a genuinely positive image of the government based on performance’, and to ‘build public trust’ and ‘increase public understanding about the Government’s roles and responsibilities’.”

How can the rest of the Indian media sit back and accept this policy? If it is applied in J&K today, what stops the people in power trying to extend some parts of it to the rest of the country?  Already we have seen how the central government has pushed a narrative that it wants the media to echo during the current pandemic. This is not the role of the media in a democracy.

The Indian media has already moved away from many fundamental tenets of the mission that the media ought to undertake in a democracy, even a troubled one like ours. And this has happened without direct censorship, or even a media policy like the one imposed in Jammu and Kashmir.

David Greenberg, writing in Politico, describes what he considers is the role of the press in America:

The reality is that advocacy and objectivity, which have both animated American journalism for ages, will always be in some tension. Men and women in every era have gone into journalism to make a difference in the world – to expose corruption, hold power to account, tell stories of the ignored or oppressed, shock the public into reforming business or government, or use the power of the press to right wrongs. But American newspapers and news networks have also since the early 20th century consistently prided themselves on truth and accuracy – striving as much as possible to prevent individual biases and prejudices from slanting the news coverage. Like poets who fashion beauty and meaning within the confines of a strict meter and rhyme scheme, the best journalists find a way to call attention to urgent social or political causes even as they preserve a reputation for fairness and open-mindedness.

"Fairness and open-mindedness". Under a regime that considers such values "anti-national", is that even possible in India?