India’s press freedom conundrum

Free speech is criminalized while purveyors of hate speech are free and, even if arrested, manage to obtain bail within days

Geeta Seshu is a co-founder of Free Speech Collective and has been documenting the attacks on Press Freedom in India.

Rana Ayyub

There’s a strange thing about the Indian government. It remains blind to the killing of journalists, it maintains a radio silence over attacks on reporters on the field, it is deaf to the protests of journalists’ bodies over the arrest of journalists, often on the flimsiest of charges, and is unresponsive to the long periods of incarceration they are subjected to. But when international press freedom groups bring out their annual reports on India’s fall in press freedom ranking, various functionaries of the government express outrage and fulminate about these indices.

The disconnect with reality manifested itself in the recently concluded G7 summit, where India was a joint signatory to a statement that affirmed a commitment to promotion of open debate by “protecting the freedom of expression and opinion online and offline and ensuring a free and independent media landscape through our work with relevant international initiatives”.

India’s media is huge and noisy. With 1,44,520 registered publications  (as on March 31, 2021) and around 400 news television channels, a vibrant digital news media and the largest user bases for social media networks in the world, why does it fare so poorly on all those indices? For the world’s largest democracy, how did we get here?

While freedom of expression is guaranteed under the Indian Constitution, with all its ‘reasonable’ restrictions, it has never been more under attack than now. In the dragnet are a range of citizens, from stand up comedians, artists, film-makers, citizens who post their views on social media platforms. Journalists are vilified on social media, with trolls demanding their arrest. Media houses are raided and detained when they do not toe the line. Across the board, free speech is criminalized while purveyors of hate speech are free and, even if arrested, manage to obtain bail within days.

Politics of Revenge here to stay

Over the last week, targeted attacks were launched on prominent voices of dissent and on journalists who called out members of the ruling party for hate speech. The Sabrang editor and human rights activist Teesta Setalvad was detained on June 25, 2022 and formally arrested a day later, hours after India’s Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s interview to a news agency, terming her over 20 year campaign for justice for victims of the violence in Gujarat in 2002 as “politically motivated.” A day earlier, a Supreme Court judgement on Gulberg Society, one of the sites of the horrific violence, gave a clean chit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then the Chief Minister of Gujarat.

On June 27, 2022, Mohammed Zubair, the founder of the popular fact-checker site, Alt News, was picked up by Delhi police from his residence in Bengaluru and taken to Delhi, ostensibly for routine questioning in a case lodged against him for a tweet he posted in 2020. Instead, he was arrested on the basis of a fresh First Information Report (FIR) for a tweet posted in 2018 of a picture from an innocuous Hindi film made in 1983.!

Barely a couple of days later, Indian authorities prevented award-winning photojournalist Sana Irshad Mattoo from flying to Paris on work. Indeed, journalists from Kashmir have faced the gamut of harassment, intimidation, interrogations and arrests for years now.

Zubair’s arrest shows how the law can be bent at will. Typically, more charges were thrown at him, from criminal conspiracy to foreign funding. His electronic devices were taken for forensic examination. As senior criminal lawyer Rebecca John said, in an interview, the accused is given virtually no protection accorded by law.

Repressive laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), 1967, are deployed against journalists. Aasif Sultan, reporter with Kashmir Narrator, has been in jail since September 2018, charged with terrorism for doing a profile of militant leader Burhan Wani, killed in an encounter with security forces in 2016. In April this year, he was granted bail but re-arrested under the Public Safety Act, wherein accused persons can be held in in preventative detention without trial for up to two years .

Siddique Kappan, who was picked up by Uttar Pradesh police in October 2020 while travelling to Hathras to cover a heinous gang-rape and murder of a young Dalit woman, has also been charged under UAPA. Languishing in jail, his bail application is pending before the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court.

Today, at least thirteen media persons are in custody in India and journalists and editors of media houses and digital news portals face cases ranging from spreading disharmony to economic offences. Reporters on the field, including women journalists, are viciously attacked and in some utterly sickening instances, been blinded by pellet guns or forced to drink liquor laced with urine or urinated upon. Aggressive state power is exemplified by the death of journalist Raman Kashyap on Oct 5, 2021 in Lakhimpur Kheri in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Kashyap was covering a farmers’ protest when he was mowed down by a vehicle driven by Ashish Mishra, son of Ajay Mishra Teni, Union minister of state for Home Affairs.

In other cases, justice delivery is a long and punishing process. And impunity rules. In ‘Getting Away With Murder’, a study on the killing and attacks on journalists between 2014-19 (authored by Urvashi Sarkar and this writer) that followed up on the justice delivery in cases of killing and attacks on journalists, the conviction rate was dismal and perpetrators of attacks roamed scot free, secure in the knowledge that the criminal-administration nexus that operated in their area would keep them out of jail.

Many of the journalists killed, attacked or arrested come from small towns and cities. They report on local issues of corruption, illegal deforestation, quarrying or sand mining in riverbeds or mismanagement of local administrative authorities. Their stories are silenced.

Shrinking space for News

The sustained attack on the media has resulted in a drastic shrinkage of space for independent information in India.

The divisions within the media have never been as severe as now. A majority of India’s big media is shockingly partisan and offers tacit support or actively enables hate speech, with scant regard for the law. This section, along with another which would occupy a more “neutral’ ground, is heavily dependent on government advertising revenue and invested in business and politics.

Media houses acquiesced to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘request’ for positive stories just before the unprecedented lockdown was imposed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, the news was hard to hide. More than fifty journalists were arrested or charged for reporting on lack of health care facilities, the plight of migrant workers abandoned by the state to their own devices or even, in one utterly absurd case, for a tweet on the over-reaction of a jittery administration. The massive retrenchment of journalists in employment a month into the Covid-19 pandemic threw experienced news-gatherers out of work. Self-censorship is increasingly normalized, save for a few journalists who do speak out, risking their jobs and future avenues of employment.

While independent digital news media sites grapple with restrictive and financially crippling internet guidelines, a small but vociferous section of the media continues to report and write independently. The mantle of protecting freedom of expression lies with these voices. Will the Indian government fulfil its commitment signed at the G7 meet by silencing them?