Backstory: Gulfisha’s Voice Breaches Prison Walls Despite Media Apathy
The nation in its majesty can afford to overlook one prisoner helplessly struggling with the enormity of the injustice being done to her. After all, this country counts 4,34,302 unfortunates as undertrial prisoners (2022 data), so what is one more?
But let us look a little closer at this figure: Gulfisha Fatima, dwarfed by towering prison walls. Half a decade has gone by and she has not been granted bail during this entire span, not even an interim one. Five years spent in the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the Indian criminal justice system, where FIRs like 59/2020 – drawing on the draconian provisions of UAPA and the IPC – are like fine steel mesh designed to trap and bleed lives. Three benches of the Delhi High Court have cogitated over it but have not been able to move the young Muslims named in this FIR and who continue to be incarcerated an inch closer to bail. As for Gulfisha Fatima, she happens to be the only woman charged in that FIR who is still in jail.
Has this horrendous scenario provoked even a ripple on the calm surface of the national media?
Do they spare a fleeting thought on the way the years have been stolen from a woman who was 27 in 2020, when she was jailed, with her whole promising future ahead of her? Have newspapers ever asked themselves if their niggardly, cursory coverage of this case suffices to bring the story home to their readers? Do their occasional paragraphs measure the length and breadth of the overweening cruelty of a carceral state? By failing to pay the necessary attention to her case, have they not strengthened the will of the State to continue its repression? As information gatherers and interpreters are they not bound by their professionalism to deliver what scholars term as epistemic justice? Have they ever asked themselves whether they are ending up playing the role not of journalists but of masons, cementing up the walls around Gulfisha?
It is to break the intolerable silence of the media, the impossible sluggishness of courts, and the incalculable viciousness of the police, that a remarkable week-long campaign – the Free Gulfisha Campaign – was launched by gender activists and civil society actors on April 9. It saw individuals from across the country speak out against this obvious injustice because the media did not, thus breaching prison walls despite media apathy.
But there’s a twist here. The videos they made of themselves reciting poetry or reading passages, were from Gulfisha’s own prison notebooks. In the silence and isolation of her five years of prison time, she turned herself into her own witness. Words shot through with pain and passion were laboriously set down on prison stationery. As a Wire article noted: “Over the five years, despite the five years, Gulfisha has kept writing. She documents her every thought, her every emotion, her every dream… She writes to keep sane. She writes to retain her humanity…” (‘Living in the Time of Gulfisha Fatima’, April 9)
There are many striking aspects of this body of work but let me highlight three of them. First, it emerges from a woman, locked away by an inhumane system, whose every word testifies to her own living humanity. The pleasure she takes when a fellow prisoner is released is palpable as a diary entry of January 24, 2022 reveals: “In the evening, (censored) had told me that her lawyer informed her that she would leave jail tonight. After bandh ginti, my ears were waiting to hear the announcement on the speaker. .. The moment her name was announced, I hurled a short scream into the air.”
Despite her own dire situation, it is Gulfisha’s concern for her aging parents that emerges strongest of all ('I Long for Freedom': Gulfisha Fatima on Five Years of Incarceration, April 13, 2025):
“Last time in the courtroom, noticing my father stuttering, I asked him since when you have started getting such difficulty? He whispered, “Hamesha darr ka ehsaas hota rehta hai jaise abhi kuch bura honewala hai isliye atak jata hu bolte bolte [I am constantly afraid that something bad is going to happen, and so I get stuck while speaking]”.
“After my bail rejection, at least 4-5 days were very depressing for Ammi Abbu. Even I was unable to speak to them with my usual cool temperament…I could say nothing. Ammi also was trying to hide her despair by pretending to have sore throat…”
Second, there is the sharp and candid awareness of passing time and the impact it is having on her mind and body (‘'I Long for Freedom': Gulfisha Fatima on Five Years of Incarceration’, April 13, 2025):
“Though incarceration has done no harm to my body, “, she writes, “yet it has successfully managed to inflict on my mental health. The retention power of memory has deteriorated so badly that I forget even to call my mom very often...”
On May 23, 2022, a diary entry went:
“These days I have not been so well due to which I remain in bed 2-3 days, BP goes down sharply randomly. This restlessness caused some poetry, I hope you would like it. Ever since the third year of imprisonment started, my hopes of release have been declining despite useless efforts to stay hopeful.”
But she tries to draw strength from every resource that comes her way, and that is the third notable aspect. Eid is a chance to dress up.
“The coming Eid-ul-fitr will be my 6th Eid to be celebrated over here. For that day I have bought some jewellery designed [at the] stitching center and Kaajal. I don’t spare any chance of celebrating, be it Raksha bandhan, women’s day, Holi, easter etc. When I tie Rakhi, I ask my fellow inmates to protect me from ……in lieu of Rakhi. Hehehe… in fact I grab every opportunity to fill myself with auspicious vibes of festivity (‘I Long for Freedom…’).”
Then there is Faiz, who himself faced prison and who wrote poetry about that experience:
“He shall always remain in our hearts and spirits. You know in my most melancholic moments, particularly in the mournful nights, he accompanies me, sharing strength and solidarity with the balm of his beautiful poetry. I feel he wrote these 2 ashaars for us…” (Diary entry, May 25, 2022).
There are other small pleasures too, a bright moon, a semal tree, a little girl (“most cutest baby of the world”), for whom Gulfisha procures rubber bands from the canteen to tie a pony tail. It makes her “look like an angel”!
Then there is the possibility of love. An extremely touching poem goes like this:
"My love,/for you beat two hearts/in my bosom/forever in strife…A heart restless/to be touched by you,/the other self-appointed sentinel/forbidding the briefest rendezvous./ A heart unfettered/in the confines of its fantasy,/the other turns the key/of a heavy lock/on your very memory.”
This is Gulfisha Fatima, in her own words. This is the woman the State has chosen to lock up indefinitely. There will be a time of reckoning for this blatant and perverse incarceration, of that we can be sure. And with it too will come a moment of truth for the Indian media.
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Recalling Robert McChesney
Over the years, Robert W. McChesney, one of the world’s leading critics of corporate media, was the academic most consulted for an understanding of the global media scene. The very first book he did in co-authorship with Edward S. Herman in 1997, The Global Media The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism, indicated the depth he brought to the subject. Using a decidedly left wing prism, the book noted the “dramatic restructuring of national media industries, along with the emergence of a genuinely global commercial media market” from the early 1980s. Herman, an economist who died in 2017, was already well known for his 1988 book, co-authored with Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. In a sense, The Global Media took forward took many of the arguments raised in the earlier study, including its sharp assessment of how propaganda models work.
For young McChesney, tracing the evolution of corporate media was an unusual line of work. He was a stringer for a news agency and a music buff who also earned some income selling advertisements. This eclectic early training may have helped sharpen his perception of the patterns of big capital formation within the media universe. A doctorate in media studies from Washington University followed. As Joshua Benton, founder of the Nieman Lab, observed in his obit on McChesney, the dissertation, entitled ‘The Battle for America’s Ears and Minds: The Debate over the Control and Structure of American Radio Broadcasting, 1930-1935’ – was “a prefiguration of his later work on the intersection of new technologies, government regulation, and the public sphere.”
This was precisely what McChesney did best and he did it over the next three decade. He was among the first to understand what government and corporate control of the media do to the public sphere. Even as technologies changed, bringing with them new forms of media, what was constant in McChesney’s assessment was the close nexus between corporate media and political power which in turn created both a compliant media and a passive citizenry.
When the Internet first came along, it appeared as a potential tool of liberation. In the early ‘90s, Silicon Valley’s ambitions were unknown, there were no profits being generated, and nobody was very sure about the business model of this new technology. The hunch was that the Internet would deepen democracy and allow personal autonomy to flourish at a scale previously thought unimaginable. But McChesney perceived even then a curious development that indicated to him that industrial bigwigs were smelling money in the Internet. He pointed out in ‘The Global Media’, that “all the major media firms have significant stakes in Internet content, because none of them can afford to be outflanked by their competitors.”
Over the next decade, the pattern became clearer. The title of a major essay that McChesney co-authored with John Bellamy Foster for The Monthly Review, ‘The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism’ (2011), encapsulated their argument. By now it was evident to the authors that the Internet had failed to deliver on its promises and that “technologies do not ride roughshod over history, regardless of their immense powers. They are developed in a social, political, and economic context.” Herein lay the paradox of the Internet: subjected to the capital accumulation process like other media technologies, meant that “What seemed to be an increasingly open public sphere, removed from the world of commodity exchange, seems to be morphing into a private sphere of increasingly closed, proprietary, even monopolistic markets.”
The authors came up with a counter-proposal: any media institution, including the Internet, must operate on public interest values; it must be a public utility. There was a simple reason for this, especially for digital media: “The entire realm of digital communication was developed through government-subsidised-and-directed research and during the postwar decades, primarily through the military and leading research universities. Had the matter been left to the private sector, to the ‘free market’, the Internet never would have come into existence.”
The authors go on to point out that the Internet, in its early years, was “not only noncommercial, it was also anti-commercial.” Yet , as the years went by, “Internet-related industries quickly, inexorably, generated considerable market concentration at almost every level, often beyond that found in non-digital markets.” Google, by then, owned 70 percent of the search engine market. Today, as the authors foretold, it controls 90 per cent of search operations.
“Google is a classic example of economies of scale and monopoly power; as it grows larger, its search engine becomes ever more superior to erstwhile competitors, not to mention it gains the capacity to build up traditional barriers-to-entry and scare away anyone trying to mess with it,” the authors noted. Similarly, they pointed out, Microsoft, exploited the dependence of various software applications on its operating system, which ensured that it could set prices and control the market for operating systems. Ditto, Apple and its products.
Given this state of play, a major concern for McChesney was its impact on journalism, which he always saw as a public good, and very crucial for a functioning society. A question he often raised was this: How can credible news media sustain itself given how capitalist control over the news space clashes so severely with independent reporting? As a teacher and thinker, media reform absorbed him for much of his working life. He saw such reform being made up of four parts: one a media policy that reflects the issues of the day; two, active social support being extended to independent media; three, developing media curricula and critique; and, finally, building a movement among media producers, especially workers, journalists and those who contribute through their creativity.
He also tried to actualise such reform. Joshua Benton recalls how he testified before the Federal Trade Commission in favour of what he termed a ‘Citizen New Voucher’, or a grant of $ 200 to every American adult who could then donate it to a nonprofit news outlet of their choice. He also helped to found n group known as the Free Press which tried to promote norms and values that undergird independent journalism. As the media world gets more enmeshed in the interests of Wall Street by the day, McChesney’s sane and informed counsel will be greatly missed.
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Readers Write In…
Gold bonds in today’s times
Hyderabad-based Sushil Prasad responds to the Wire piece, ’Golden Dreams, Costly Reality: Sovereign Gold Bonds Have Become a Rs 1.12 Lakh Crore Burden’ (March 21).
“Two sets of questions arise on reading this piece: First, whether the effective borrowing cost on SGBs too high, and second, did the scheme achieve any of its slated objectives, ie., was the higher borrowing cost (if any) offset by other non-financial benefits.
“The article mentions, inter alia, that in 2015, ten grams of gold were worth Rs 26,300 and today it is worth Rs 84,450. Assuming GOI had raised Rs.26,300/- on 01/01/2016 towards which it had to repay Rs.84,450/- on 30/06/2025, the IRR on the borrowing comes to 10.16% per annum compounded semi-annually. That is, the effective ROI on the borrowing works out to about 10.16% pa.
“Now, during this period the highest RBI repo rate was 7.75% pa, the lowest 4.00% pa (currently 6.25% pa). Therefore, prima facie, it appears that SGB borrowing cost was rather high. However, the article does not discuss whether GOI had any options of borrowing at lower effective cost at that point of time and as to why such borrowing was resorted too.
“There are no absolute highs or lows as far as cost of capital is concerned. It depends primarily on the purpose for which the funds are required. Higher cost of borrowed capital is perfectly justified if the expected returns, after adjusting for risk, are higher than the cost. If the borrower can reasonably expect, say, 24% return on investment, it makes sense to borrow at say 20%. This is the essence of leveraging, provided one can find a lender at those high rates (incidentally, the microfinance industry operates on borrowing at rates of up to 10% per month and more) because it is able, on an average, to generate even higher returns on the investment. Of course, it would be helpful if ROI was lower for microfinance borrowers but for that to happen extensive governance and policy reforms in the financial markets industry are required.
“Moreover, in dire circumstances (eg, a medical emergency), borrowers are perfectly willing to pay higher rates of interest. For example, the India Development Bonds 1991, when the country desperately needed forex to tide over its balance of payments crises, was another such scheme which was quite costly on account of both higher coupon as well as forex risk. SGBs did not have forex risk, but it had embedded market risk.
“It would have been more meaningful if the article had also examined what really prompted GOI to float the SGB scheme beyond the explicitly stated benefits.”
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Giving away the climax
A response from Ali Ahmed, to the Wire piece, ‘A Pakistani Serial That Should Inspire Hindi Filmmakers’ (March 19).
“The author lets on on the climax…“But, the last ten minutes of the episode yanks us into reality when a mob is wilfully fed lies through a fiery speech. Sonu, they are told, had desecrated a “holy place”. It doesn’t matter that dancing is not desecration or that he had not danced in a “holy place”. But, the mob doesn’t care. Religion is a mass sentiment. The mob doesn’t think, it only acts. Over a searing song, sung to the beats of ankle bells, the three friends are lynched to their deaths. Their innocent dreams ending with them.”
“Avoidable.”
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A note of appreciation for Wire
LB Singh, chair, Ex-Serviceman Association JK, has this to say:
“Respected founding Editors: I realised on going through your esteemed news portal that it is the only real living pillar of journalism. Please keep it going and save our democracy.”
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.
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