Pamela Philipose 
How can the Indian mainstream media claim to be trustees of the truth when it is gripped by an overwhelming fear of stating the facts? In the shadow of that silence, the world is speaking out.
UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Turk, was unequivocal when he observed on March 4 that even as he appreciated the country’s secular and democratic traditions, he was concerned over “increasing restrictions on the civic space – with human rights defenders, journalists and perceived critics targeted – as well as by hate speech and discrimination against minorities, especially Muslims.” The scale of the forthcoming election with its 960 million voters (the Election Commission has since updated that figure to 970 million), he noted, is “unique in scale” and demands “an open space” and “meaningful participation” (UN Human Rights Head Calls Out Pressures on Civic Space, Minorities; Modi Govt Says ‘Unwarranted’, March 5).
The Kejriwal arrest on March 21, five days after the election was formally announced prompted the United States to state that it would “encourage a fair, transparent, and timely legal process for chief minister Kejriwal.” Germany too made a pointed comment that the chief minister was entitled to a fair and impartial trial: “We assume and expect that the standards relating to the independence of judiciary and basic democratic principles will also be applied in this case.”
Such remarks couched in diplomatic language though they were – and despite India’s stern rebuttals — nevertheless come as a reminder that all is not well with Indian democracy. A functioning media within the country should have been signaling this disturbing downturn and interpreting it for the Indian public. Instead, they continue to wrap themselves in the Modi colours. Since campaigning began in full flow, their principal narrative faithfully reflects the talking points that Prime Minister Narendra Modi chooses to emphasise during his electoral campaigns.
Things have come to such a pass that newspapers and news channels now have a hard time describing Modi’s innumerable takedowns of the Opposition. I followed the lead front page headlines of one newspaper (not naming it because there are so many of its ilk). They went: ‘TMC, Congress, Left are spreading lies, rumours about CAA, says PM’ (April 5); ‘Work in last 10 years appetizer, main course yet to come: PM’ (April 6); ‘Phir ek baar Modi sarkar: PM’s big push in UP, Raj’ (April 7, second lead) ; ‘It wants corrupt to go free: Modi tears into TMC in WB’ (April 8); ‘Building of Ram Mandir upset Cong, INDIA alliance’, says PM’ (April 9); ‘Modi greets supporters during a roadshow’ (April 10, photograph as second lead); ‘Opp. Facing bankruptcy of new ideas, says PM’ (April 11, second lead); ‘Modi guarantee that corrupt will go to jail: attacks Opp.’ (April 12).
One must pity poor chief sub-editors struggling to come up with variegated verbs to reflect the substance of prime ministerial speeches which essentially boil down to one idea: ‘Modi Good, Opposition Bad’. So the word most commonly used to headline the average prime ministerial speech is ‘tear’ in two basic tenses: ‘Modi tears into Opp.’, ‘Modi tore into Opp’. Once in a way the reader may come across ‘Modi mocks’, ‘Modi hits out’, ‘Modi takes a dig at’, ‘Modi makes a scathing attack’, ‘Modi takes a swipe at’…But try as they might, nothing can really replace ‘Modi tears into Opp.’ As the prime ministerial rhetoric plummets to new depths and the eating habits of the Opposition get cited to frame them as betrayers of the Hindu faith, so does the media coverage.
If these newspapers and news channels were to pull their heads out of sand, they may finally come to realise that what civil society organisations in the country and the world have been doing during this election season is what they should have been doing all along. Various individuals and groups marshaled evidence that the fear of stolen elections is not a fabrication of the Opposition but a very real and present possibility.
Take the joint letter that 11 civil society organisations (Article 21 Trust; ADR; Campaign Against Hate Speech; Common Cause; Internet Freedom Foundation; LibTech India; Maadhyam; MKSS; NAPM; Rajasthan Asangathit Mazdoor Union; Software Freedom Law Center) recently dispatched to the head office of the Election Commission of India (ECI) at Nirvachan Sadan. Many issues were raised in terms of digital communication. The ECI, it said, should adopt “internationally acceptable, rights-respecting standards for regulating political expenditure on online ads and targeted campaigning”, and monitor online campaigning and surrogate ads.
They cited the Indian Express analysis of Meta’s ads library which revealed that among the top 20 advertisers on Facebook and Instagram during March 17 to 23, seven accounts ran ads favourable to the BJP and no other advertiser in the top 20 list ran surrogate ads for any other political party, while a BoomLive investigation showed that over Rs 3.7 crore was spent on surrogate ads on Facebook in the month of March 2024 alone, mainly targeting the opponents of the BJP. The emergence of deepfakes in campaign material using generative AI technology is another cause for concern, they argued, as also voter surveillance. “Use of facial recognition and video surveillance technology at polling booths can deter the right to vote without fear or coercion, may violate the right to privacy, and is antithetical to a free and fair election.” Surveillance technologies used in electoral processes must meet the “strict standards of legality, necessity and proportionality”.
Several retired bureaucrats from across the country have emerged as spokespersons for the people they had served in long and distinguished careers. Recently the Chief Information Commissioner had to express “severe displeasure” to the ECI over its failure to respond to an RTI demanding information about what it is doing on a representation handed in over a year and a half ago from eminent citizens who had raised questions on the credibility of EVMs and VVPAT machines during polls.
Concerns of this kind have in turn prompted international scholars like those constituting the Independent Panel for Monitoring Indian Elections (IPMIE) to also look more closely at the poll process (‘Panel of Five Scholars Will Be Monitoring India’s 2024 Election’, March 17). Analysts at ACLED (The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project) are planning a special ‘India Special Election Series’, focusing on rising sectarian and ethnic tensions during the lead up to the polls.
The first has already appeared: ‘India Votes 2024: Economic Discontent Deepens Ethnic Divisions Ahead of Elections’. The reputed health journal, The Lancelet, in its latest analysis (‘India’s elections: why data and transparency matter’) makes it a point to highlight that the Modi government’s “spending on health has fallen and now hovers around an abysmal 1·2% of gross domestic product, out-of-pocket expenditure on health care remains extremely high, and flagship initiatives on primary health care and universal health coverage have so far failed to deliver services to people most in need.”
A raft of assessments from international think tanks are emerging, thick and fast, whether it is from the influential US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (‘India Elects 2024’) and Franklin Templeton (‘Consider This: Indian Elections 2024), or rights organisations like Human Rights Watch (‘India’s General Elections, Technology, and Human Rights Questions and Answers’) and the global #KeepItOn coalition, comprising 300 international civil society organisations which battle internet shutdowns, including poll-related ones.
Also read: Backstory: What Has Changed in the BJP Poll Campaign Since 2014 and What Hasn’t?
This unprecedented attention being paid to India’s General Election 2024 can of course be seen as evidence of international curiosity over a country laying claim to being a global giant presided over by the most popular prime minister in the world. But it could also be reflective of anxiety over India’s catastrophic decline in terms of human and minority rights, its plummeting disparities and sinking credentials as a functioning democracy.
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Al Jazeera death toll
Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, which is fissuring the earth beneath the feet of Palestinians through its military machine, is being supplemented by aggressive information/disinformation warfare which counts the targeted killing of journalists as part of legitimate war strategy. According to the latest figures put out by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as of April 10, at least 95 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war began on October 7.
What the CPJ also notes is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has made it known that it cannot guarantee the safety of journalists reporting from the Gaza Strip. But even if we were to ignore this, the IDF’s murderous policy of specifically targetting journalists is a grave violation under International Humanitarian Law which recognises journalists as civilians and therefore persons who may not be attacked under any circumstances in conditions of war.
Another facet of Israel’s disinformation warfare is now coming into view. Last Monday, the Knesset approved legislation that allows Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shutdown foreign media organisations. He didn’t take much time thereafter to announce that he will now move to prevent Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news organisation, from operating in Israel. Not only does the move undermine Israel’s claim to be a democracy, gagging Al Jazeera will also deprive the Israeli public of crucial information that could somewhat balance the war propaganda that is being currently fed to them.
It is yet another confrontation between Israel and a news organisation that has long been in its crosshairs. A list of these face-offs appeared in a piece put out by Al Jazeera recently (‘Shutdown threat: When has Israel targeted Al Jazeera before?’, April 4). They include the barbaric felling down by IDF personnel of Al Jazeera’s long-time correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, long before the current genocide.
As Israel’s hostilities in Gaza raged on, a string of Al Jazeera personnel have paid an unbearably heavy price. Wael Dahdouh, the bureau chief of its Arabic bureau emerged as the “face of the channel’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and a symbol of the resilience of Gaza’s people” (‘Hamza, son of Al Jazeera’s Wael Dahdouh, killed in Israeli attack in Gaza’, January 7). Last October his wife, son, daughter and grandson were killed in an IDF bombardment. In mid-December, he was caught in an brutal drone attack in Gaza’s Khan Younis, which left him injured and his colleague, cameraperson Samer Abudaqa, bleeding to death because the IDF did not provide permission for health workers to attend to him in time. Several other Al Jazeera personnel have lost close family members in Israeli strikes, which seem to suggest that not just targeting mediapersons but their families too have become part of IDF strategy. There was also, let it not be forgotten, the bombing in May 2021 of the al-Jalaa Tower in Gaza city, where both Al Jazeera and the Associated Press had their offices.
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Poll carousel
Perhaps the least biased pieces of reportage in our daily news during this election season are the vignettes, asides and videos that keep emerging.
Modi on the election beat, for instance, is an endless source of wonder – spiked with merriment. Why did he literally drag UP chief minister off the stage when the latter paused a moment to exchange notes with another colleague? Was it fury over the younger man daring to share the frame with him, or did it indicate a longstanding irritation for someone Modi seems to consider a “useful idiot”? The mainstream media did not dare to go deeper into the story although it was rife with possibilities.
Modi may in fact be already be tiring of having to endlessly campaign in all kinds of conditions – and thanks to the schedules that his party no doubt drew up for the ECI, there is a whole month and a half of campaigning left. What will be the state of play be by the time verdict day June 4 comes into view? Over the last two weeks we have seen unforeseen developments like an elderly man within shoulder rubbing distance of the prime minister collapse on the stage, with the latter not even pausing a moment to check out on what happened. Similarly, when cheering supporters on a platform adjoining the road along which the prime ministerial motorcade was passing suddenly disappeared from view as the structure under them came crashing down, the Modi tableau passed by without even a pause. The show, and the road show, must go on! But perhaps the funniest of these vignettes is a scene from Tamil Nadu where as the motorcade comes into view one hears cries of “Modi, Modi”, interlaced with “Ab ki baar, Choco Bar”. The police and the prime minister’s security personnel glance angrily at the crowd but all they see are people shouting, “Modi, Modi” even as the “Ab ki baar, Choco Bar” slogan suddenly sneaks into the air.
The other aspect that journalists should watch out for, and amplify, are political repartees and counters that are especially useful to disarm the opponent in the age of social media. The response of Tejashwi Yadav called out for eating fish during Navratri by hoary cynics like Giriraj Singh who accused the young leader of insulting “sanatan” and doing “appeasement politics” was classic. Yadav tweeted: “I was taking the IQ test of BJP people. The dates are mentioned in the video (which showed him eating fish), and it was shot on April 8 (Chaitra Navratri began on April 9). These people don’t know how to read or write.” Then he went on to make the moot point, “The BJP will never say anything on issues like unemployment, migration and poverty and will jump on non-issues.”
More important to document are the actions of civil society. When tribals in Maharashtra’s Palghar return election offerings like saris and bags, saying that they want jobs instead, it shows a new kind of civic awareness. Or take the way some churches responded to the blatantly political move of the Catholic diocese of Idukki to screen The Kerala Story, a film based on fake facts, to ostensibly “educate the public” on ISIS terrorism. They took to screening Cry of the Oppressed, on violence in Manipur, instead.
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Readers Write In
Why a design change? And at this time?
While I have received verbal endorsements of The Wire’s new design in casual conversations, there was also this very emphatic negative response from Kurush Canteenwala:
‘I am a reader and supporter of The Wire and I find its latest revamp a terrible disaster, primarily due to the completely lacklustre, poorly organised, informational design approach. What may I ask prompted these changes? More so, what a time to choose to make these changes!
‘When more eyeballs are out seeking news regarding the upcoming elections, they are to be met with this unfamiliar and poorly organised interface. Please prevail on the powers that be to just let things be as they were!’
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No ‘manels’, please
N. Jayaram writes in: ‘Mr Karan Thapar’s shows on The Wire could benefit from gender balancing. In addition to Mr Thapar’s brilliant conversations, we now have Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal offering many illuminating ones around law and democracy, and so on, hosted by The Wire. Most welcome indeed. Perhaps they could consider inviting female voices?
‘On ANY subject under the sun, you can find highly competent female experts to hold forth. These are merely three submissions: On law and the constitution and the functioning of the SCI (and many thanks to The Wire, Mr Thapar and now Mr Sibal for several good sessions): Might Mr Thapar and Mr Sibal consider interviewing Justices (Retd) Anjana Prakash, Prabha Sridevan, (the very brave retired) Judge Jyotsna Yagnik, Sr Adv Indira Jaising, Nandita Haksar, Usha Ramanathan, Kamini Jaiswal, Vrinda Grover, Saumya Uma, Thulasi K Raj, Rebecca Mammen John, Maitreyi Misra, Karuna Nundy, Jayna Kothari, Arundhati Katju, Maja Daruwala, Flavia Agnes, Pratiksha Baxi, Nitya Ramakrishnan, Lara Jesani, Sudha Bharadwaj (author of a recent award-winning book stemming from her experiences during a wholly unjust incarceration). There are other notable names, apologies for not bringing them to your notice. On the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians (and I thank Mr Thapar for the many interviews he has conducted on the subject and The Wire for hosting), I can supply you with literally dozens of names of prominent Israeli/Jewish women opposed to the ongoing second Nakba, if you are interested.’
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in