TV media sinks lower as independent media offers glimmer of hope in 2025

 Broken News

2025 in Review

Published in Newslaundry on December 22, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/12/22/tv-media-sinks-lower-as-independent-media-offers-glimmer-of-hope-in-2025

As we come to the end of 2025, how do we assess the state of our mainstream media? Can it sink lower than it already has, given that it stands at 151 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index? 

It can because in more than two instances this year, mainstream media, especially TV news, has demonstrated the depths to which it can fall.

Yet there is a glimmer of hope: despite the dismal performance of mainstream TV channels, independent journalists and digital platforms still survive and do the kind of journalism this country needs.

The two lowest points for our mainstream media this year, in my view, were the coverage of Operation Sindoor and the reporting and follow-up stories after the Delhi blast, when a car exploded at peak hour near the Red Fort, killing an estimated 15 people.

Indian TV channels love war and conflict. It allows them to dramatise, increase decibel levels, and stage the conflict in their studios by pitching individuals who can outshout their opponents. But the coverage of Operation Sindoor exceeded expectations. 

Indian channels, even so-called “respectable” news channels like India Today, fell for the fake news that India had captured Lahore and bombed Karachi. In the rush to be the first, these channels fell hook, line and sinker for the most obvious fake news. 

Even a slight pause, a pinch of scepticism, and taking time to implement a basic journalistic norm – verify and double check – would have saved them from this stupid and appalling faux pas. But no, who has the time these days to do this? Scepticism is reserved for statements made by those who oppose the government, while obedience to the narrative of those who support it is the norm.

Just watch this episode of TV Newsance by Manisha Pande to remind yourself of the disgraceful coverage by our leading TV news channels. It is cringeworthy.

In fact, Rajdeep Sardesai, one of the many anchors who allowed these fairy tales to be broadcast as if they were verified news, acknowledges that it was a mistake and says he apologised on air. A long profile piece on him in Caravan mentions that in a post-mortem bureau meeting, when asked why they didn’t verify the news, India Today staffers said that several reporters had been called by ministers and senior officials from various ministries telling them that this was precisely what was going to happen and that TV channels should “break” this news.

The media’s behaviour during Operation Sindoor reconfirms what’s now well known: that the government briefs journalists through messages and phone calls about what should be reported.

The other low point in my view is the way the media reported the Delhi blast and its aftermath. All kinds of unverified information were instantly broadcast and reported. Basically, anything the government or investigative agencies told the media was presented as the truth, with no effort at fact-checking (read here).

A consequence of such reporting was felt immediately by ordinary Kashmiris in other parts of the country and in Kashmir. The demolition of the house of the main suspect was reported but not questioned; the fact that all doctors from Kashmir were being viewed as potential suspects was also not questioned. 

And if this was not enough, the locked office of the Kashmir Times in Jammu was raided by the State Investigation Agency, which claimed it had found guns and ammunition in it. The editors and owners of the paper, which is now published remotely as a digital publication, have been charged under various sections, including for violating India’s “sovereignty”. Kashmir Times is practically the only independent voice coming out of Kashmir, as most others have either fallen in line or been banned. 

The state of the media in Kashmir, and the problems that journalists there face almost every day, continues to be the litmus test for the extent of freedom that the Indian media enjoys. Just this week, the police arrived at the home of Jehangir Ali, the reporter for The Wire, and without a warrant, seized his phone without providing him with the hash value to ensure that it would not be tampered with. He finally got the phone back after several hours.

A glimmer of hope

Despite the Modi government's proactive efforts to ensure that mainstream media sticks to the approved narrative, and the threats and intimidation, especially against journalists in Kashmir, aimed at sending a clear message to other journalists who choose to do their jobs, several remarkable investigative stories have appeared on independent platforms.

At a time when the word “environment” is clubbed with the killer air pollution levels in Delhi and in many other cities in India, it is important to remember that there are other pressing environmental challenges that get precious little coverage in the media, such as the handing over of forests to private interests. 

A story to note is independent journalist M. Rajshekhar's piece on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Writing in Time magazine, Rajshekhar reports on the disaster that the natural resources of the islands and the indigenous communities face due to the government’s policies.

Another story that stands out for the challenge the reporter must have faced while investigating it is Nidhi Suresh's report in The News Minute. The journalist did a remarkable job by talking to the nun who alleged she was raped by Bishop Franco Mulakkal in 2018. Although the Bishop was acquitted, no one knows what happened to the nun. Nidhi Suresh traced her and persuaded her to speak. The result is a chilling narrative in 10 parts of the life of this woman.

Another recent investigative story is Sukanya Shantha's three-part series in The Wire.  Based on publicly available data, Shantha has followed up on the National Investigation Agency’s claims that it secured convictions in 100 percent of its cases in 2024. Her digging revealed that this was happening because the people accused, the majority of them Muslim men charged under laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), were persuaded to plead guilty when faced with the reality that they would spend much longer in jail as undertrials waiting for the trial to begin.  

While Alt News remains outstanding in its fact-checking work, as seen best during Operation Sindoor, Newslaundry has also done notable stories, like this one on the stampede during the Kumbh Mela this year. The government insisted that only 30 people had died. NL reporters, however, found that as many as 79 had died in the stampede. This was established by doing the kind of routine work that journalists are expected to do: first being sceptical of government data, then following up and checking for yourself. When that is done, as we saw during the Covid pandemic, there’s always a yawning gap between official figures and reality.

While “vote chori” and elections continue to be widely covered, the back story of how political parties like the BJP are funded, particularly before the Supreme Court scrapped the Electoral bonds scheme, did not get the same kind of attention. 

Although Indian Express has now done a detailed story on who funds political parties, earlier it was independent platforms that investigated the Electoral Bonds scheme. More recently, the Reporters’ Collective has investigated the BJP's funding in Assam. The results are revealing. Most of the funders are people who have won lucrative government contracts.

And finally, like Kashmir, some of the best reporting on Northeast India, which only comes into focus during conflict, is from reporters working for independent digital news platforms. Like this report by Rokibuz Zaman of Scroll of the people physically pushed out of Assam into Bangladesh because they were suspected to be “foreigners” even though they were Indian citizens.

In sum, at the end of 2025, we are where we were at the end of 2024. The mainstream media houses, and specifically their television channels, continue to compete to go lower with news that is sometimes untrue and almost always divisive in a country where the nature of our politics increasingly fractures the polity.

And for real journalism, for in-depth stories, practically the only source – although some print media like Indian Express, The Hindu and Times of India have done some excellent long-form stories – are the independent digital news platforms that continue to survive, even if precariously.

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.”

From one WhatsApp to every frontpage: How ‘sources’ dictated the Delhi blast coverage

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on November 13, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/11/13/from-one-whatsapp-to-every-frontpage-how-sources-dictated-the-delhi-blast-coverage

Every time a suspected terror attack takes place in India, you can be certain about how it will play out in the Indian media.  

Without waiting for verifiable information, there will be confident conspiracy scenarios spelt out, it will be pronounced as “terror” even before there is official confirmation, the neighbouring country will be blamed, and those whose names are put out as possible suspects will be broadcast as the perpetrators of the crime even before there is adequate and plausible evidence to charge them. With its desperate need to beat the competition over a 24-hour news cycle, the spin given based on few, or even no facts, by TV channels will send many heads spinning.

Additionally, in today’s divisive political atmosphere, if the suspects happen to be Muslim, then inevitably the hate and invective against an entire community will be aired without any compunction. 

That is precisely what we have witnessed, yet again, after the explosion that killed 13 people and injured many more on the evening of November 10 near the Red Fort metro station in Delhi.  

We know now that it was an explosion in a car. We are told there is certainty about the identity of the person driving the car. And after two days of speculation, hints by “sources” and conspiracy theories set out with great certainty by the usual suspects on mainstream television channels, the Modi government finally issued a statement saying that it was a “heinous terror incident” by “anti-national forces.” The anticipated accusation that Pakistan was behind it, something that has occurred so routinely as to be taken for granted, was not in the statement.

What one should note, however, is that in the preceding two days before this statement, neither the Union Home Ministry, nor the Delhi Police that was on the spot, has held an official briefing for the media.

The reason this stands out as unusual is because in the past, when such incidents took place, the media has been briefed officially, and not through unofficial sources.  

In Mumbai for instance, when serial blasts took place on Mumbai’s suburban trains on July 11, 2006, at peak rush hour, in which 209 people were killed and more than 700 injured, reporters were sent out to the blast sites to speak to survivors and gauge the situation on the ground. But at the same time, the police held official briefings giving out what information it had on hand. There was little room, or for that matter time, for speculation. Mainstream media at that time largely stuck to basic journalistic norms, “err on the side of caution and verify.” In today’s media sphere, that sounds like something in a foreign language. 

In the days following the Mumbai serial blasts, people were questioned, detained and some arrested. Those charged with what was seen as a “terror attack,” faced a trial, were convicted, sent to jail, and some even given the death sentence.

Yet, in July this year, 12 of these men who had been charged and convicted for the 2006 train blasts in Mumbai were acquitted by the Bombay High Court. The court held that the prosecution had “utterly failed” in establishing that these men had committed the crime for which they were charged.  

Indeed, one of the men acquitted earlier this year, Ehtesham Siddiqui, spent 19 years in jail, some of them on death row, before finally being acquitted. Although the Supreme Court has stayed the Bombay High Court ruling, those acquitted, including Siddiqui have not been sent back to jail. While in jail, Siddiqui wrote a book on his experience titled, “Horror saga”. His story is important at a time when once again, people are being interrogated, and some will be charged for a “terror attack”. 

Also worth reading is this article by Aditya Menon in The Quint about previous such incidents in Delhi.

To come back to the Delhi blast, a story that will continue to unravel in the days ahead, it is interesting to view the similarity of the reporting in the national daily newspapers following the incident. None of them could quote a single person from the government who was prepared to go on record. All the reporting was attributed to “sources” which, those who cover the central government will tell you, are based on informal messages sent out to journalists like this one: 

Sharing informally, kindly attribute it to sources: 

•⁠  Raids by security agencies across multiple locations in Delhi-NCR and Pulwama, recovering significant quantities of explosives, are believed to have led the suspect to act hastily under mounting pressure. 

•⁠  ⁠Earlier, during raids carried out on November 9 and 10, 2025, in Faridabad, Haryana, almost 3,000 kg of explosives, along with detonators, timers and other bomb making material were caught and confiscated.  

•⁠  ⁠The explosion was caused by panic and desperation due to raids carried out by the security agencies to nab them.

•⁠  ⁠The bomb was premature and not fully developed, thus limiting the impact.

•⁠  ⁠The explosion did not create a crater, and no shrapnel or projectiles were found.

•⁠  ⁠A major attack has been averted, credited to ‘pan-India alertness and coordinated crackdown’ on suspect modules.

Not surprisingly, the next day’s newspapers reported precisely what was contained in the message quoted above. Incidentally, the name of the suspect driving the car with the explosives, Dr Umar Nabi, was all over the media even before the DNA test had established his identity. As were the names of the other doctors who are suspects in what is being called a “white-collar terror module.” 

Perhaps, given the nature of the media today, with people looking to social media platforms first for “breaking news” followed by mainstream TV channels and only after that to the print media, there is little point in hoping that any of this feeding frenzy, especially after a “terror attack,” will ever change.  

Nor can we expect that this plethora of avenues for information and disinformation that exist today will disappear any day soon.

Reflecting in many ways the wishful thinking of those of us who still believe that credible journalism is possible and needed, Varghese K George, the resident editor of The Hindu in Delhi put out this comment on X after the Delhi blast:

“News cannot be, and should not be, a 24×7 affair. Can we turn back the clock and have news bulletins at periodic intervals? If not three times a day, perhaps four?

"The link between clean public information and democracy is a well-established fact. The positive correlation between misinformation and democratic decline is also an evident fact. Social media is often rightly blamed for this, but legacy media too is complicit in this decadence. At the core of the media’s collapse is the pressure for a constant, unending requirement for ‘updates.’

"The reality is that there is not, and there cannot be, and there should not be, minute-to-minute updates on any news – whether it is a Delhi blast or a Supreme Court hearing. 

"News should happen first, then be processed by experts, and only then transmitted to the public. That is what mediation of information should be about."

“Mediation of information.” Yes, in an ideal world, that is the job of the media.  But is that possible today? Can we really turn back the clock? Or has that train left the station, never to return?

Bihar’s silenced voters, India’s gagged press: The twin threats to Indian democracy

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 28, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/28/bihars-silenced-voters-indias-gagged-press-the-twin-threats-to-indian-democracy

The Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, probably expected that his August 18 press conference would settle the controversy surrounding the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar and Rahul Gandhi’s “vote chori” charge. He was wrong. This is a story that has refused to die, notwithstanding Trump’s tariffs, or even the tragic floods in parts of India.  

In fact, it should not die as it is, by a long measure, one of the most important stories that any self-respecting media organisation needs to investigate. For it is more than evident now that the state of our electoral rolls, as exposed by the SIR in Bihar and subsequent media exposes, raises many important questions about our electoral system and our democracy.  

So far, only one mainstream newspaper, The Indian Express, has put its heft behind investigating the many lacunae in the SIR process in Bihar. More granular details have emerged from the stories done by independent platforms and journalists. 

Here are links to several important investigations carried by independent platforms, with several of them collaborating and pooling their resources. 

Journalist Ajit Anjum has assiduously followed up on people declared as dead in the list of 65 lakh people who have been struck off the electoral rolls. So has Saurabh Shukla of The Red Mike. 

The women and men declared dead are very much alive, as you will see in these reports. The common thread that runs through them is that these are poor people who are not even aware that the one right they have, to vote, has been denied to them because some official has decided they are dead. 

Others who have pursued this story include independent news platforms like Reporters’ Collective.   

While Reporters’ Collective found that an incredible 80,000 voters had been clustered together at addresses where 20 or more of them were supposed to be living in just three constituencies that they investigated, the latest report in Newslaundry goes further to show that even in places where people live separately according to their caste or religion, over 100 voters belonging to different castes and religions are shown as living in the same house.

For readers who would have missed much of the action because of the neglect of this story by mainstream media, it is worth taking the time to read these detailed reports and watch the videos. They tell us not only about the way this particular exercise is being conducted in Bihar but the reality of India, where despite boasts of “digital India” and elimination of poverty, millions of poor people do not have the proof that is demanded of them to establish that they exist.  

Interestingly, the latest story in the series in The Indian Express on SIR in Bihar tells us that out of 36 assembly constituencies in three districts, in 25 of them, the number of voters whose names have been deleted exceeds the margin by which the candidate elected won. Of these 25 seats, the governing alliance of the BJP and JD(U) won 18 seats. The story also shows through its data that women have been particularly disadvantaged. 

These stories graphically illustrate a very real problem we are facing, one that cannot be obfuscated the way the CEC attempted to do in his press conference. And as I have argued earlier, it is a legitimate story that the media, in a democracy, must pursue. 

Another development that has drawn attention to the importance of independent media is the series of cases filed against three prominent independent journalists, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire, Karan Thapar, whose weekly interview programme is widely watched, and Abhisar Sarma, a former mainstream TV anchor who now runs his own YouTube news channel. 

All three have had cases filed against them in Assam, a state governed by the BJP. And at least two of the people filing these cases are affiliated to the BJP or ABVP (read here).

This development tells us two things. One, that even if the government might dismiss these independent news platforms as being limited in their reach, it apparently is concerned about their reporting. Otherwise why bother to charge them. 

The second point this development illustrates is the strategy this government is following with impunity: label journalists who question as “anti-national”, or “urban Naxals” or “terrorists sympathiser” and then file cases against them, or even jail them as in Kashmir. 

Incidentally, Israel follows a part of the same strategy. It also labels Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives. It’s another thing that it even proceeds to eliminate them in targeted attacks. Most recently, five Palestinian journalists were killed even as they were reporting. 

There will be long-term consequences for freedom of speech, and the media, in India if this strategy being used by the government is not challenged and checked. The most persuasive argument on this has been made by retired Supreme Court judge, Justice Madan Lokur in an op-ed in The Hindu.

Justice Lokur points out that this government has weaponised a provision in the law that was supposed to have replaced the previous colonial sedition law. He suggests that Section 152 in the BNS is nothing more than sedition in “sheep’s clothing”, and that while the earlier law had a chilling effect on freedom of speech, the new provision has a “freezing effect”. 

Going further, he spells out what the deliberate misuse of this provision means for the future of freedom of speech in India: 

“Try and imagine any journalist or anybody in a panel discussion on television or otherwise having the courage to be critical of anything to do with any policy of the Government of India. Somebody can misinterpret it and bring national security into play, and the police can take cognisance and summon the alleged offender. Freedom of speech can be bulldozed or demolished because one individual out of a billion anywhere in the country believes (without evidence) that national security is in danger or that the armed forces are demoralised or that dissent is ‘strategic subversion’ undermining the sovereignty and the integrity of India.” (Emphasis added)

This then is the future we are looking at in India as far as freedom of the press is concerned. 

In media reports on a wall collapse in Mumbai, evidence that the lives of the poor don’t matter

 

If a poor person dies during what is deemed a natural disaster, they become a statistic, nothing more.

Published in Scroll.in on August 22, 2025

Link: https://scroll.in/article/1085767/in-media-reports-on-a-wall-collapse-in-mumbai-evidence-that-the-lives-of-the-poor-dont-matter

Every monsoon, India’s richest city has its tales of horror: of submerged railway tracks, of flooded roads, of open manholes into which people fall, of trees that collapse, often on passersby, and of hillsides that give way.

This year has been no different. People living in Mumbai are more than familiar with the images we see in newspapers and on television.

But the story that mostly escapes attention is the impact this has on the poor, those who must work rain or shine, with no means to protect themselves or their temporary dwellings from being submerged or even washed away.

And when some of them die, when a wall collapses or they fall into an open drain, they appear the next day as a statistic in the media: 9 dead, two from tree fall; 6 dead including one in an open drain, etc.

Sometimes the dead have names. But just that. Names. We do not know anything more about them. Were they migrants? Did they have families in Mumbai? And who will be held responsible for what are routinely registered by the police as “accidental deaths”.

Worse still, even in death, there is no dignity of those mentioning their names bothering either to get the names right or their ages right.

A loud sound

Take for instance Satish Tirkey. This 35-year-old from Chhattisgarh worked as a watchman in Godrej Baug on Malabar Hill, one of Mumbai’s wealthiest localities. He lived with his wife in Simla Nagar, a large settlement next door that is home to drivers and domestic staff who work in the homes of the well-heeled residents of the locality.

Also living in Simla Nagar are taxi drivers, delivery workers, construction workers and others with jobs across Mumbai.

Tirkey’s job included stepping out of the complex to find taxis for its residents. On August 18, despite the heavy rain, he set out to do that. As he walked down the road, sheltering under a large umbrella, the wall on the side of that road collapsed right on top of him.

Residents of the building facing the wall heard the loud sound and rushed out to their balconies to see what had happened. But they did not realise at first that someone had been crushed by the debris. They watched in horror as stones, mud and water cascaded down as if a dam had broken, filled the road, and flooded their building.

Even before the fire brigade arrived, they saw a man dressed in a yellow raincoat being carried out by three young men. These were the first responders. They were residents of Simla Nagar who saw the wall crumbling, rushed to pull Tirkey out and take him to the nearest hospital. They said he was still breathing when they carried him out despite the barbed wire from the wall having penetrated his body. But by the time they got to the hospital, Tirkey had died.

A cascade of water

Meantime, the cascade of water that had shattered the wall continued unabated. It took the fire brigade and the municipality hours to clean up the road, remove the rocks, clear the stormwater drain and cut a tree that was precariously poised on the broken wall. All this in pouring rain.

The next day, some newspapers reported Tirkey’s death. In some, he was mentioned as a watchman. A few articles gave his name. In practically all his age was wrong – it ranged from 55 to 75.

Most reports repeated what the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation must have told the journalists, that the man died due to a tree fall. A couple mentioned that he was crushed by the wall. What no one wondered was who had built that wall and who was responsible for the flood of water that led to the wall collapsing.

If the person injured or dead in such circumstances had been one of the residents of the buildings of Malabar Hill, how would the media have reacted? Would they not have made sure to get at least the basic details such as name and age and cause of death accurately? Would they not have gone further to investigate why the wall collapsed? Was it just the rain or something more? Who built the wall?

The fact they did not is because Tirkey was a poor man, a migrant worker, one of the millions of such workers who literally hold up a city like Mumbai. These are the men and women who cook, clean, deliver, build and repair. They are mostly invisible. Even when they die, they are noticed in passing, but just as a statistic – a victim who succumbed in an “accidental death”.

In this case, I know that this was an accident waiting to happen because I live in the building that was flooded after the wall collapsed.

Raised wall

The wall in question skirts a garden meant exclusively for senior government officers who live in Hyderabad Estate, which once belonged to the Nizam of Hyderabad. The gates to this large park are kept locked in a city that is starved of open space.

At some point, the height of the wall was increased. The residents of the area and those who regularly use the road would probably not have noticed this.

The original wall was thick, low and made of stone. The extension made it several feet higher, not as thick but with a heavy iron frame and barbed wire on top. Why this was needed to protect the garden is unknown.

What was also not noticed by residents of this neighbourhood is that alongside the wall, a water body with concrete sides had been built. What purpose it served is also not known.

What residents discovered, through their own effort to trace the source of the unending flow of water from the broken wall, was that this pool was overflowing and did not appear to have a drainage system to deal with excess water.

Furthermore, the builders of the wall had left holes in it from where the excess water could drain –onto a road used by thousands of people every day. An old cobbler who conducted his business next to the wall had complained about the outflow of water from these holes. But who listens to what old cobblers say?

A routine event

Two days before the disaster, residents of my building noticed that water was gushing out of several holes in the wall, flooding the road and subsequently our compound. This ought to have been a warning signal. But as this happened on the first day of the deluge that drowned the city, it passed as something that happens when it rains.

Except that this time, after the collapse and the subsequent flood, the water did not stop flowing, even when rain stopped. The municipal corporation would not answer the queries of residents. No one representing Hyderabad Estate was visible during or after the catastrophe.

I narrate all this to emphasise several points.

One, as I mentioned earlier, if a poor person dies during what is deemed a natural disaster, they become a statistic, nothing more.

Second, because it is a poor person who has been killed, there is practically nothing by way of follow-up to fix culpability. The authorities – in this case the municipal corporation and the Central Public Works Department, which is responsible for the garden and the wall – simply throw up their hands or pass the buck. When the rain stops, everything is back to normal.