It is not easy to be a journalist in India in a decade that has shown a dismaying fall in both media freedoms and general freedoms of expression. My respect for the ones who do manage to produce good, original, questioning work has risen in the last few years.
Journalists in India face multiple hazards. In conversations in rural and small-town India, the two things journalists mention most often is the risk of violence from “big bosses” in business, and the often open harassment from local politicians or local officials. Both urban and rural journalists struggle with legal challenges that obstruct and challenge reporters from across the spectrum.
It is becoming harder for journalists to predict what might give offence and call down either legal retribution or threats from mobs, which are often fronted by political parties or religious fundamentalists. In the first few months of 2015, for example, a subeditor with the regional Oriya-language daily Samaj in Cuttack was charged under a law that makes “hurting religious sentiments” an offence, for publishing a picture of the Prophet Mohammed in the paper’s 14January edition. The paper’s offices were attacked. In the same month, aggressive Hindu nationalist protestors burnt photographs of the Indian Express’s national editor Praveen Swami. This came after the Express published Swami’s story critiquing the government’s handling of an incident where a fishing boat was blown up in contested circumstances.
A few weeks later, Mumbai-based editor Shireen Dalvi was forced into hiding and continues to receive threats of violence. She was arrested and released on bail, but was unable to return to her home or her office after she republished Charlie Hebdo covers in the Urdu newspaper Avadhnama. Multiple cases were filed against her under the increasingly notorious s. 295(a), which makes it a crime to outrage religious sentiments with malicious intent.
The casual ease with which bans are now used in India to shut down books, conferences, art and film has spread to the media. On 8 March 2015, the national television news channel NDTV ran visuals of a flickering lamp for one hour in a silent protest against the government’s restraining order prohibiting the screening of Leslee Udwin’s documentary India’s Daughter. But for many of us, what was even more alarming was that some of the most vicious and strident attacks on NDTV came from the rival channel Times Now.
The Times Now anchors called NDTV “anti-national” for supporting the documentary. “Anti-national” is increasingly becoming a dangerous slur, a way of targeting and shutting down journalists, human rights activists or NGOs who clash with the state or the ruling party. Some editors I spoke with expect more aggression from pro-government media groups against neutral or sceptical media houses over the next year.
Inside media houses, senior editors speak of how they feel “strangled” by laws (ranging from sedition to offence laws) that ringfence journalism. Cases can take from a minimum of two years to sometimes ten years to move through the backlogged judicial system. This is a serious deterrent for independent magazines that don’t have access to either funds or legal resources. While the courts often return favourable verdicts, the many demands made on defendants by the process tends to make media corporations risk-averse and unwilling to hire reporters or editors who might get them into trouble.
A year ago, veteran media watcher Sevanti Ninan raised warnings about the growing corporate and political control of the Indian media, questioning the sackings and the restructuring of various media houses as a new right-wing government came in. “India’s feisty press turns reticent when called upon to report on its own,” she wrote.
Television channels in particular seem far more partisan these days; the high-decibel reliance on successive cycles of outrage, each burning issue of the day forgotten as soon as the next story breaks, masks the equally high levels of self-censorship within channels. A less serious but still troubling development has been the deliberate attempt to discredit or harass journalists and media groups whose critical and often objective reporting is perceived to be “anti-Hindu” or “anti-national”, on social media forums such as Twitter.
The chilling effect on media groups is considerable, and one extremely troubling development for journalists (and other authors) publishing non-fiction books is that they face unofficial pre-censorship from publishing houses. The dangers of the legal department being handed editorial control over content are enormous, but in many media houses and publishing houses, this is now the norm.
But I am often reminded that there are worse risks besides the risk of censorship or of blinkered reporting. The most vulnerable of India’s journalists remain those reporting in parts of the country away from the relatively protective spotlight of media attention, or from conflict zones. Though the number of deaths of journalists came down sharply in 2014, from eight to two, the nature of the two deaths reported was telling. Tarun Acharya in Odisha and MVN Shankar in Andhra Pradesh were both killed after they had turned in reports critical of local business interests. The 11 journalists killed in 2011 were reporting from places like Bastar, Bulandshahr, Muzaffarnagar and Etawah – important but non-metropolitan centres. As with Acharya and Shankar, their investigative reporting was crucial, disruptive, and in the end had deadly consequences.
To read the India Report in full click here.
Imposing Silence is the result of a joint research project by the International Human Rights Program (IHRP) at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law; PEN Canada, the Canadian Centre of PEN International, PEN International and with special thanks to PEN Delhi members.