By Shashi Tharoor
NEW DELHI – A raft of attacks on freedom of the press in recent months has raised troubled questions about the state of Indian democracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India has often had a free and non-verbal press. But the situation has changed dramatically since the Modi government came to power in 2014.
At the end of January, police filed criminal charges – including a tragedy, which carries a life sentence – against eight journalists who dealt with a protest in Delhi that turned violent. Their crime: reporting the claims of a dead protester’s family that he was shot and killed by police. I am facing the same allegations for having tweeted their application when it was reported.
Six journalists and I (Congress party MP) have been accused of “misrepresenting” facts surrounding the death. We are facing allegations in four provinces controlled by the Bharatiya Janata Modi Party (BJP). The publisher, editor, and executive editor of investigative news magazine The Caravan faces ten disaster cases in five provinces for telling the story, and the magazine’s Twitter account was briefly suspended by government order.
We are hardly an isolated case. In 2020 alone, 67 journalists were arrested, while nearly 200 were physically assaulted in the 2014-19 period, including 36 in 2019, according to a study by the Free Speech Collective. A journalist arrested on his way to report the aftermath of a gang rape in Uttar Pradesh state has been in prison for six months, only being allowed a brief permission to visit his sick mother in Kerala province, more than two thousand kilometers ( 1,243 miles) away.
Conversely, government-sympathetic reporting goes on unchecked, even if inaccurate, propagating or inflammatory, especially when retailing bigotry against minorities or discredit on the political opposition. The mainstream media, whether print or television, has been stunned and tied up to cheer for the Modi government.
Once dominated by government programs, India’s visual media landscape is now full of private offerings, with over one hundred 24-hour television news channels today in multiple languages. My province in Kerala has 13 all-news channels in the regional language, Malayalam.
But competition has fueled a race for eyeballs and advertising revenue that has steadily eroded the quality of Indian journalism. While the Fourth Estate once placed a premium on editorial standards and journalistic ethics, it has leaped to a grotesque platform driven by curiosity and attenuation. The news has to be broken – and so, it seems, the news maker has to. The government and its nails are almost never targets: the opposition, civil society, and dissenting individuals.
As more Indians enjoy the fruits of increased literacy and affordability of smartphones and lower data costs, India has been witnessing a boom in print circulation as well as in social media as a news source, especially among young people. But newspapers are also aware that they have to compete in a tight media environment, where television and digital media are setting the pace. They know they have to reach readers who have already watched TV and read WhatsApp every morning. Newspapers therefore feel the need to “break” news in order to surpass their TV and social media competitors.
The result of this is that the Indian media, in their rush to run a story, has fallen prey to foreseeable dangers, often becoming a ready helper of the highly motivated leak and the malicious allegation, trading integrity for access to sources government well placed. In this environment, the BJP has undermined the free press by co-opting and threatening, thus ensuring that much of the press produces only news that is sympathetic to the causes that the ruling party management holds them dear, or distracts the public from government failures.
India’s news media should be holding the government accountable, not promising it. The good news is that not everyone has forgotten the responsibility of the watchdog that free media must exercise in democracy. The Editors Guild of India has asked Modi to revoke the Information Technology (Media Guidelines and Code of Ethics of Digital Media) Rules, 2021, arguing that the new rules undermine freedom of the press.
The bad news is that such developments are a major reason for the recent decisions of democracy housekeepers Freedom House (which downgraded India from “free” to “partially free”) and the V-Dem Foundation (now calling India “autocracy” electoral ”) expresses fear over the health of the country’s democracy. “India, the world’s most populous democracy, also sends signals that holding government accountable is not part of the press’s responsibility,” wrote Freedom House.
The Modi government’s weapon of choice is colonial-era disaster law: an overwhelming majority of disaster cases have been filed in the seven years since Modi and his BJP came to power, according to data collected by the website article14. In a criminal justice system that has changed little since the colonial era, detention, accusations, police investigations and trials ensure that, even if actual convictions are rare, the process is the punishment itself.
Freedom of the press is ultimately the best guarantee of freedom and progress. The mortar that binds free society together – and it is also the open window that, in Mahatma Gandhi’s famous translation, allows the winds of the world to blow freely through the house. If Modi’s attempts to de-institutionalize what was once a dynamic and independent Fourth Estate continue, public confidence in the media will steadily decline, as will confidence in Indian democracy.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021.
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