Unpacking the State of Freedom of Press in India

[00:00:00] A month after taking office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India's quote and quote democracy will not sustain if we can't guarantee freedom of speech and expression. However, eight years on the freedom of one of the fundamental pillars of democracy, the press has taken a nosedive.

[00:00:30] In 2015, the World Press Freedom Index, which is compiled annually by reporters without borders, ranked India at 136 out of 180 countries. This number in 2021 reached the all-time low of 142. While India has not slipped further down the index, reporters without borders continue

[00:00:47] to classify India as quote and quote bad for journalism, and termed it as one of the quote and quote world's most dangerous countries for journalists trying to do their job properly. And a February 2022 report by the Rights and Risk Analysis Group points exactly how dangerous it is.

[00:01:01] In its India Press Freedom Report of 2021, the organization states that at least six journalists were killed and 121 journalists including 13 media houses were targeted in India just in 2021. Time and again we hear about the state of freedom of press in India, how journalists

[00:01:16] have been selectedly targeted and attacked in India for the reportage and in some cases also for the religious identity. On the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, we take a look at how press freedom in India has shrunk over the years.

[00:01:27] Joining me to unpack this for today's episode we spoke to senior journalist Seema Chisti, Patricia Mukim, the editor of Long Times and Alishan Jafri, an independent journalist who covers hate crime in India. Get tuned into the big story, the podcast where we dissect the headline making news for

[00:01:45] you and I'm your host, Ahmed. Before we dive into press freedom in India, it is important to understand why press freedom is an important aspect of democracy which should be noted. Celebrated on 3rd May every year, the day acts as a reminder to governments around

[00:02:07] the world of the need to respect the commitment to press freedom. It is also a day when an assessment of the state of press freedom is made throughout the world. And when it comes to India, this assessment has been failing since the start of the century.

[00:02:19] According to reporters without borders, India stood at 80 on the World Freedom Index in 2002, this is when the Bhartija Antapati came to power and in the following year, India's rank fell to 128. Since then it has only incrementally risen on the ladder with the highest position being 105 in 2009.

[00:02:34] Just in the last decade, press freedom in India has further declined from its highest at 133 in 2016 and for the past two years it has remained stagnant at 142. According to senior journalist Seema Chastity, the press freedom index signals not only how

[00:02:46] journalists are treated in a particular country but also anyone who voices an opinion, be it comedians or filmmakers. So the world press freedom report which the reporters from the air put out, it's a very credible, recognised year on year account where India slipped miserably some three years

[00:03:03] ago and since then we've been stagnant and we find ourselves in appalling company which should really kind of scare, terrorise and actually leave everybody who's in charge, our representatives should hang their heads in shape. We slipped 20 points and we are 142 out of 180 countries and that's sort of really

[00:03:23] bad news. We are also not the highest in the region which is a pretty bad region to begin with. What matters of course it matters that journalists should be given protection, it's about their lives, it's about my life, your life etc.

[00:03:34] That is of course key and that's important but I think journalists are canaries in the coal mine. What you do with journalists is eventually what will happen with the rest of the country.

[00:03:44] So if you're not able to kind of speak your mind to say things, if you're not free, what it does is it signals, it's what's called a chilling effect. It signals to other people to other journalists first then to other comedians, to movie

[00:03:57] stars, to all kinds of people to essentially shut up and not criticise the government. Society loses as a result if they are not objective enough people coming out, debating, thrashing issues out, creating an environment where things can be spoken of, pointing out what is wrong, what needs corrections.

[00:04:15] Now how bad is the press freedom in India? We did some digging and a lot of this is hinged upon the current ruling dispensation. It is also important to note how the various opposition rule state governments have also contributed to the depreciation of India's press freedom.

[00:04:28] A look at the recent central media accreditation guidelines of 2022 throws a wide light on the state of press freedom in India, starting with how the guidelines refine who a journalist is. This policy basically dangles the threat of cancelling the accreditation of journalists

[00:04:41] if they quote unquote act in a manner which is prejudicial to the sovereignty and the integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement of an offense.

[00:04:56] See, Majesty, reason of why this is concerning and say is that if government agencies now decide the kind of reporting journalists do, then we are in a very difficult position. The key thing in the PIB rulings, which is very concerning is that the

[00:05:10] Press Information Bureau is of course a government thing. It is it was always something that allowed that asked for security clearances. Everybody who certified as PIB cleared has to have a Ministry of Home Affairs clearance, which is perfectly understandable because you know the most

[00:05:25] important people's representatives, you are allowed access to government functions, to ministers, to the Prime Minister, to the President in all kinds of high security events. So that is understandable that security is a criteria. But when they start defining what a journalist says, the kinds of views

[00:05:43] they hold after the security clearance. So kind of almost stamping approval or disapproval, then it's trouble. And also if you're going to start branding people as national, anti-national, then that's trouble. That's the same way that other things in IT rules that the government is trying

[00:06:00] to do at every stage to kind of do away with what's the courts or due process should decide if it's a violation or if it provokes hatred or it engages somebody's life. If government ministries are going to decide whether you're against them

[00:06:12] or for them, then we're in a very difficult situation. And I think that is what the PIB did. It tried to kind of give approval or disapproval to the kind of journalists you are and not to just recognize that you were a journalist.

[00:06:23] You were allowed to say the things, hold views and be done with it. Beyond definitions, there's also some very hard data on how journalists have been targeted and attacked in India over the past decade. According to an analysis by the Free Speech Collection between 2010 and 2020,

[00:06:39] 154 Indian journalists were arrested or are facing government hostility for their professional work. 40% of these cases were in 2020 alone. Not only physical threats, but journalists are also being targeted and harassed online for their work. New legislation like the IT Rules 2021 gives the centre more power

[00:06:55] to regulate content on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp. Essentially, it allows the centre to block the publication of certain posts or websites. And India, according to available Twitter data till January 2020, has surpassed the entire world when it comes to legal demands

[00:07:10] to take down posts with 1,38,600 demands. Not just this, there have also been strategically planned attacks on journalists, especially female journalists by the use of mobile apps. The news publication The Wire examined the app Techfog, which was reportedly used by political operatives

[00:07:26] affiliated with the BJP to drive propaganda at scale in India and discovered how this app collates data on female journalists who were active on social media, whose work or posts ran counter to the BJP's official narrative and used it to harass them.

[00:07:38] For example, journalists like Rana Ayub, according to The Wire report, received over 22,500 abusive tweets from 1st January 2021 to 31st May 2021. Others like Barkha Dutt and Nidhi Rastaan received 19,785 and 18,797 abusive tweets respectively in the same period. And the latest press freedom index report by Rights and Risk Analysis Group

[00:08:01] also paints a grim picture of the current reality of the treatment of journalists in India. The report states that at least 6 journalists were killed and 121 journalists, which included 108 journalists in 13 media houses or newspapers, were targeted in India just in 2021. At least 24 of these journalists were physically attacked,

[00:08:18] threatened or harassed in 2021, of which the report says 17 were allegedly beaten by the police. According to independent journalist Alishan Jafri, a press card which was enough to guarantee some amount of safety does not add up to much since mobs nowadays are indifferent about it.

[00:08:32] I think it's an assumption that all journalists have a press card. I don't think that all journalists have a press card. I don't have a press card. Many freelance dependent journalists do not have a press card. And even journalists who do have a press card,

[00:08:47] it's not something that always works in their favor. Even if you show your press card to a mob that you're doing your job as a journalist, the mob will read your name on the press card.

[00:09:00] And if they do not like your name, we can possibly lynch you also. And we have seen this very recently in the case of the Burari Hindu Mahabanchayat head speech event where journalists from the quaint, from Article 14 and from Makhtub media, they were heckled by,

[00:09:22] heckled and even assaulted by right-wing groups. Alishan Jafri adds that with the rise of communal tension in India, the situation is worse for Muslim journalists. He weighs in on the added stress and anxiety it causes. I think it's not very difficult and not something very hard to imagine

[00:09:40] that how would it feel to cover your own humiliation, your own death injustice against yourself? And in that sense, I think that specifically, Muslim journalists who are doing this work, they are extending their bodies to bear witness to excruciating violence and pain that is directed at their existence

[00:10:01] and that is very painful. We just saw our friend Akhlad Khan who was also doing this work, he passed away last month and just three days before his death, he had advised me to not take this violence to my heart and it was a second heart attack at 28

[00:10:20] and he was going through immense pain and anxiety because of this work. There are 19-year-olds who are doing this work and 18-year-olds who are doing this work and they're as passionate as they can be and they want the world to know what is happening. So it's something,

[00:10:41] it makes a journalist who's a Muslim when their story comes out and when more and more people get to know about what is happening, they do feel happy about it because they have done their job as journalists to inform a wider public

[00:10:56] about something that they think is important. At the same time, it is also extremely painful and it takes a huge toll on their mental health and on their sanity where if they just go on and on in covering these stories.

[00:11:12] Now, if the freedom of press is so dire, you may be thinking, how has a legal system responded to it? While the courts in India have reiterated the importance of press freedom and judgments, they have also passed gag orders, particularly in cases involving high-profile litigants.

[00:11:26] In the former, there are quite a few examples where the courts have upheld the freedom of press and in some cases even overturned judgments of lower courts. For example, in March 2021, a civil court stopped over 14 media houses from publishing allegedly defamatory statements about a member of the BJP

[00:11:42] but the high court of state of Karnataka went in the opposing direction, reinforcing the voter's right to have complete information about their candidates and one of the biggest judgments about press freedom came in October 2021 when a Supreme Court bench led by C. J. Ramana

[00:11:56] said that the protection of court and court journalistic sources is one of the basic conditions of the media's right to free speech and expression. However, there have been cases of courts failing to uphold freedom of the press. Patricia Mukim, the editor of Shillong Times, encountered such an instance

[00:12:10] by the Meghalaya High Court which refused to quash a complaint against her for her Facebook posts in July 2020 where she demanded legal action against a group of youths who allegedly assaulted six non-tribal youths playing basketball in Los Angeles. See, when we speak of press freedom today,

[00:12:34] we also have to include social media users, right? They also are media persons in their own right. They have the freedom to use social media to get public opinion on what they feel on certain issues. And we're increasingly seeing that the government is punishing people

[00:12:56] even for voicing those opinions. What happened to Jignesh Mivani is a good case in point. It happened with me as well, but it wasn't the government in this case that filed a case against me. It was the traditional institution that felt that I had sort of, you know,

[00:13:16] stepped on their toes for questioning why they didn't take action on certain gundagiri that happened where young boys playing basketball were beaten up just because they were in a tribal dominated locality. So I questioned that and I questioned the chief minister and the police department

[00:13:36] on why these sort of things keep happening. And for me, it was a genuine question of upholding the rule of law, but the traditional institution, and I think in, you know, in connivance with some MLE of that area, filed that FIR,

[00:13:54] then that FIR, we tried to quash it in the, we went to the high court asking to quash that FIR because we didn't see any, you know, any reason for that FIR. But the high court also went along with that, you know, with the traditional institutions,

[00:14:12] these traditional institutions, they, you know, they sort of bear very heavily on people, on the tribals because tribals feel that they should safeguard these institutions just because they are traditional. But actually these institutions have been, they reek of patriarchy, they haven't reformed over the years.

[00:14:38] They even say that women should not be part of these traditional institutions, much less of, you know, being the executive members or even contesting for the post of the head of the traditional institutions. So when we came to the Supreme Court,

[00:14:55] we were so grateful that the court quashed this FIR. And it also, you know, spelled out a lot of reasons why this FIR had to be quashed and that there is no merit in saying that my post was intended to create communal disharmony.

[00:15:15] So yeah, so now the media is a very large section of the society, the community, the population, the citizenry, you know, and it's all getting enmeshed. So on the one hand, we as media persons, we really have to be very careful what we write,

[00:15:36] what we say for the simple reason that going to court is so expensive, you know, hiring a lawyer, especially in these circumstances post COVID when we're all suffering from you know, financial crisis of sorts to again have to go to court,

[00:15:55] especially to have to go to the Supreme Court is very difficult. So what we have done as a result is we're all becoming self-regulating, you know, self-regulatory bodies, which is not a good thing for press freedom at all. She recounts the way the court treated the case

[00:16:15] and how in another case, a court actually questioned her qualifications of being a journalist. This one was when we questioned one of the High Court judges who on the eve of his retirement listed out a whole, you know, sort of shopping list

[00:16:30] of what the government has to provide a retired judge from the security to the mobile phone and to even citing the cost of the mobile phone. So our caption of the story was when judges judge for themselves. So that was not taken very well

[00:16:52] and that judge actually questioned me in the High Court asking me, what are your qualifications? So what can be done? What are the essential safeguards needed to ensure press freedom in India? Seema Chhasti, Wazan. So it's not as a journalist or judges

[00:17:07] and they need to point fingers at those of government but they need to enable an environment where debate is possible. They need to kind of be the people who call things out and who hold government to account.

[00:17:17] So if the CIG report has come and it just gets stuck away, no, you need journalists to come out, speak about it, ask questions and hold people accountable. But all of that doesn't happen because journalists are being imprisoned and are being killed

[00:17:31] and the government is quiet about it, then it's trouble. Number two, and that's a more worrying thing which has happened after the pandemic as well and India has the maximum number of journalists who've been put into jail. I mean, imagine countries in Africa

[00:17:44] which we caricature et cetera as places which we should be worried about or other countries in Asia. Well, India beats all those countries. We have a maximum number of journalists sent to jail or threatened to be killed. When mobs are allowed,

[00:17:57] when all that governments can do is shield the mob and protect what mobs do or they hold the same opinions as those killer mobs or intermediary mobs do about the person killed then that puts everybody's lives. It puts essentially rights of country men and women

[00:18:15] in danger and that's why they should care. This is not about kind of, oppressed probably we are issuing a statement to protect lives of 100 journalists or 200 journalists it doesn't matter. But they usually kind of, they are usually the animals who kind of first tell you

[00:18:29] that an earthquake or a tsunami is about to come. You need to listen to what's happening to them and that's why they matter. It matters to democracy. And as a result, the circle, the impunity of government keeps kind of getting more and gets better or rather,

[00:18:44] better I mean, better in a worse sort of way because you attack journalists and you think nothing happened. So you attack, you know, comedians, satirists, then cinema gets attacked then they start self-sensoring themselves and eventually you have a quiet nasty dark place.

[00:18:59] And of course a place without any public feedback without democracy really being allowed to play out eventually the feedback will come. And when that comes, I'm afraid it'll be in the form of an explosion which will not be good news for even governments in power.

[00:19:11] So I think it's really important to have journalists allowed to do their jobs properly. It's equally important for even governments in power to be allowed to do that. So not doing this is harmful for journalists, health and safety, but beyond that, it's hazardous for Indian democracy.

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