Press freedom under attack in Modi’s India
Indian Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government appears to be rattled by the protest of tens of thousands of farmers camped on the outskirts of the capital New Delhi in the biting cold since November 26, 2020. These farmers are demanding the withdrawal of new agricultural laws by Modi’s government that they say will end guaranteed pricing, place them at the mercy of corporate buyers instead of government controlled markets, leading to the possible loss of their small holdings of land. Despite decades of economic growth, up to half of India’s population still relies on growing crops on small parcels of land, typically less than three acres. The hitherto huge but peaceful farmers’ protest took on militant hues on India’s Republic Day on January 26, 2021, when a contingent of protestors, taking advantage perhaps of the mass breach of barriers erected by the police, entered the Red Fort in Delhi and raised a Khalistan flag instead of India’s national tricolour. In the ongoing melee, a witness and relative of a man who died reported to journalists on the ground that he had been shot dead by the police. Reports in mainstream and social media to this effect followed, but were later negated by the clarification that the man had in fact died when his tractor overturned. The Modi government has pounced on the earlier incorrect reports to have its supporters in at least five states file charges against several veteran journalists, including Rajdeep Sardesai, a prominent anchor on the India Today TV channel, and Vinod Jose, executive editor of Caravanmagazine. The cases by residents of those states (largely those ruled by the BJP – no surprise – according to Anand Sahay, President of the Press Club of India) were filed under as many as 10 legal provisions, according to the Editors Guild Of India, including sedition, promoting communal disharmony, and insulting religious beliefs. In language disconcertingly similar in all the filings, the journalists named are accused of having provoked the protestors for political and personal gains through false, misleading information online. In blatant kowtowing to government pressure (and not acceding to legitimate ‘requests’, as Twitter’s mea culpa pretends), Twitter blocked about 250 accounts and tweets, including farmer protestors and a prominent news magazine. Indian media associations and international press freedom organisations such as Reporters Without Borders have condemned all these actions, including Twitter’s, as a shocking case of blatant censorship.
Anand Sahay has rightly described the Modi government’s move as a criminal act to ascribe the reporting of a developing story to motivated reporting. He may well have added that this is not the first occasion the Modi government had attempted to stifle the media, nor, given its Hindutva agenda, is it likely to be the last. Authoritarian, right wing, fascist regimes are endemically prone to shooting the messenger. Of course for this to be happening in the ‘largest democracy in the world’ certainly gives pause for thought. Press freedom in India has shrunk under Modi, while being marked by attacks on and intimidation of journalists. Of course the BJP government goes blue in the face denying this. However, India slipped two places in the annual World Press Freedom rankings by Reporters Without Borders in 2020, which noted constant press freedom violations, including political violence against journalists and increased pressure on the media to toe the Hindutva line. It is regrettable that journalists all over the country are now more or less in the same boat as the media in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir since its illegal annexation. But that should encourage journalists across the length and breadth of the country to unite and fight in the cause of press freedom, without which democracy runs the risk of being reduced to either a hollow sham or the expedient handmaiden of the Hindu Rashtramobs.
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