The Editors Guild of India, representing the major media organisations in the country in a statement in June 2021 said it was “shocked by the cavalier manner in which Uttar Pradesh Police is treating the mysterious death of TV journalist, Sulabh Srivastava, in Pratapgarh. Srivastava, who had been threatened by the liquor mafia for exposing their wrongdoings, had recently written a letter to the police expressing grave apprehensions for his life. Srivastava died a couple of days after he wrote the letter…” The police claimed that the reporter caused his own death ramming his motorcycle into a hand-pump. He was not the only journalist to meet a violent death in these months.
This is not the only suspicious death of a newsperson in recent months. There are more such cases from UP and elsewhere. The victims have been district reporters. Statistics are hard to come by in the silence of the two waves of COVID-19, but groups such as the Editors Guild, the Delhi Union of Journalists, the Broadcasters associations, and even the Indian Catholic Press Association have attempted to collate data on government restrictions on freedom of expression, as well as coercive action on the media by state and non-state actors.
As the representative associations of media professional noted, the last several months have seen Indian media “facing increasing pressures from central and state governments who insist that they follow the official narrative regarding the administration’s handling of the pandemic.” The police and the local authorities have used laws such as sedition and UAPA to file charges and arrest journalists. This, they note, is against the spirit of the judgment given by the Supreme Court in Kedar Nath Singh case and re-iterated in the recent sedition case against celebrated TV journalist Vinod Dua who was charged with sedition.
The judgement led the Indian Catholic Press Association (ICPA) to appeal to the Union and state governments to review all sedition charges and cases slapped on media persons and social activists in the country.
The Supreme Court’s assurance came at a time when targeting of journalists, and in particular field reporters and cartoonists critical of the government had peaked. Media persons were being targeted by friends of the ruling party on social media.
India’s ratings in the annual World Press Index placed India in 142nd position among 180 countries, below neighbours Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.
The report “India: Media’s Crackdown During COVID-19 Lockdown” collated and published by the Delhi-based Rights and Risk Analysis Group (RRAG), states that as many as 55 journalists “faced arrest, registration of FIRs, summons or show cause notices, physical assaults, alleged destruction of properties and threats” for reporting on COVID-19 or “exercising freedom of opinion and expression during the national lockdown between March 25 and May 31, 2020.” The highest number of attacks on media personnel during the period was reported from Uttar Pradesh (11), followed by Jammu and Kashmir (6), Himachal Pradesh (5), four each in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Odisha and Maharashtra.
At least nine journalists were subjected to beating, including two in police custody. While, one journalist was held hostage by a village sarpanch in Odisha, the house of another journalist was allegedly demolished because of a (COVID-19 related) report he had filed which involved a ruling party MLA in Telangana. A female journalist in Arunachal Pradesh was threatened for publishing a story on a ‘wildlife hunting spike’ during the lockdown.
By the end of May 2021, at least 474 Indian journalists fell to the virus, according to a database compiled by the Network of Women in Media India (NWMI).
The more recent case of government wrath was of Kerala journalist Siddique Kappan, who has been in custody since October 2020, under the draconian UAPA, for trying to report on the rape and death of a Dalit girl in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh.
Another case was of Fahad Shah, editor-in-chief of The Kashmir Walla, a Srinagar based publication, who was detailed for the third time. As it did against political opponents, the ruling dispensation used the full might of its police and quasi-police agencies to show its power to the media.
Freelance journalist Mandeep Punia who was reporting on the farm protest from Singhu border, was arrested by the police, even as the Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh Police registered FIRs against senior editors and journalists.
And in Manipur, two editors of the website The Frontier Manipur faced charges of sedition and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). The Manipur police arrested the Editor in Chief Sadokpam Diren, Executive Editor Paojel Chaoba and the writer of the reportedly offending article M. Joy Luwang.
And in the national capital, on October 16, 2020, Ahan Penkar of the news magazine The Caravan, reporting on the alleged rape and murder of a teenaged Dalit girl in North Delhi, was detained while covering as protest by the girl’s relatives at a police station. Penkar was the fourth journalist from The Caravan who has been attacked in the space of two months. Dhaval Patel, editor and owner of a Gujarati news portal, ‘Face of Nation’, was booked for sedition and detained by the state police on May 11, 2021.
The government’s desire for an obedient media is prompted by its need to have a firm grip on the narrative on every aspect of public life. The regime is still smarting from its realisation that even its friendly media could not ignore the tragedy in the first phase of COVID-19 when hundreds of thousands of migrant workers began walking hundreds of kms to reach their homes after the sudden lockdown was imposed throughout the country. This inability to control the tellers of the chronical is the only explanation of its abuse of draconian laws with vengeance. Sadly, and dangerously, the police are becoming keen accomplices of the political party in power.
(John Dayal is an author, editor and activist)
