Around seven months ago, in a discussion on a documentary on him, journalist Ravish Kumar said that he had initially wondered what there was about his life that could possibly be filmed. “I left home, went to the office, entered a small room, and typed,” he said. Events that marked Indian media since then proved Kumar wrong. His employer NDTV now has a new owner, Kumar has left the channel and his popular primetime show on it and While We Watched, the documentary in question, has grown to become a testament to the decline of India’s media freedom.
Kumar’s words, though, express a justified discomfort. Journalists brave unfriendly governments, layers of obfuscation and personal danger to do their work. They thrive in anonymity. Although many appear on shows online and on television, their roles are defined – they are truth tellers, no more no less. Now that India has secured a hefty rank of 159 among 180 countries in the world in press freedom, and while India grapples with a sycophantic mainstream media, there is more attention than ever on the figure who gets the news.
Even when a journalist enters her room and types – like Ravish Kumar said he did – she is in the spotlight simply because she exists. While she presents the news, now, the journalist is the news. And this attention to her comes at a steep cost at times.
In the last year, India has figuratively ousted two foreign journalists by placing clear government hurdles on their path. Vanessa Dougnac, the longest serving foreign correspondent in India who has reported for multiple French publications, had to leave in February after the government issued a two-week revocation of her Overseas Citizen of India card. In April, ABC News’s Avani Dias had to return to Australia after the government refused to extend her visa until it was too late and informed her that her reporting had ‘crossed a line’. In a live broadcast, Al Jazeera said its correspondent who would travel to India to cover the elections was not given a visa.
Remaining foreign correspondents have issued two statements decrying this atmosphere and the two became headlines in the global press. On Hindutva websites, hit pieces followed on Dougnac and Dias, collecting morsels from their online lives to make claims that their ouster was justified. One noted, in a leap of putting women in their place, that Dias left India because she had got married in December 2023.
‘A target on your back’
Homegrown journalists have had it worse. Eight are in jail. Kashmir journalist Aasif Sultan has been jailed since 2018, Punjab independent journalist Rajinder Singh Taggar was arrested last week, Gautam Navlakha has been in jail and house arrest since 2020, Kashmir’s Sajad Gul since 2022, Jharkhand reporter Rupesh Kumar Singh since 2022, Kashmir reporters Irfan Mehraj and Majid Hyderi since 2023, and Newsclick-founder Prabir Purkayastha since 2023. Purkayastha’s arrest, notably, involved raids across Newsclick employees’ houses and workplaces, placing a target on the backs of all individuals who had dared to be associated with the site.
In varying degrees, also because the charges against these journalists are under sections and laws that invoke fear, these journalists are made out to be larger-than-life evil-doers with hundreds of comments on social media on their allegedly nefarious financial ties to Maoists and absolutely all countries other than India.
A young journalist who has worked at three independent news outlets says that he first realised that he was being watched at a Hindu Mahapanchayat in Manesar. “Monu Manesar came and sat beside me and began showing me his videos. He seemed keen on putting me in a spot and asked me what I did and I had to lie and say that I was a college student making a documentary. I knew full well that if he did a google search with my name, I’d be found out,” he says, requesting anonymity. The journalist has an FIR against him for reporting on a mosque demolition.
Unlike this journalist, for many, to have the camera trained on them – to the point where they themselves become the story – puts an effective pause on their reporting itself. Google searches with any of these journalists’ names gives you news on their incarceration, journey home, or trials with the law. Their reports are snowed in.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
‘Activists’
Senior media person, Natasha Badhwar, who now teaches Media Studies in Ashoka University, feels that the personalisation of the profession began when television journalism began. Once the journalist became the face of the story, Badhwar says, it became a losing battle to pretend otherwise. But she doesn’t see this as necessarily a bad thing. Building a persona is a tool to grab as many eyeballs as you can.
In driving attention from the story to the teller, a crucial role is also played by censorship. After government orders to take stories or entire YouTube news channels down, in the absence of the reports themselves, commentators focus on the journalists, seeking to establish their motives in reporting on a topic or choosing to criticise a policy or its executors.
In the process, is the journalist made into an activist? Is the telling of the truth then co-opted into the serving of a purpose and does that hurt the story itself?
Badhwar’s rejoinder is interesting. “If a democratic state becomes authoritarian, telling the truth gets labelled as activism. At this point every responsible citizen is an activist – actively involved in preserving democratic values enshrined in our constitution. We need to use language to illuminate realities, not to criminalise those who speak up against authoritarianism,” she says.
‘No reason to hold back’
But not all situations where the journalist is the story are wrung from a lack of press freedom.
The Wire’s Sukanya Shantha reported on widespread caste (and other) discrimination in India’s prisons. The Rajasthan high court suo motu took up the issue and changed the prison rules, but no big overhaul followed. For three years Shantha waited for rights groups to take up the matter. After that, she says, she decided to move the Supreme Court herself. “If change is what we expect to bring about through our journalistic work, I don’t see any reason we should hold back. If moving the court is well within our capacity (I got incredibly lucky as some brilliant lawyers agreed to handle the case pro bono), why should we not?” she asks.
But this onus to see to it that right is done is a big one. It also does not help that despite negligible financial investment in news, society expects journalists to adhere to an image where she is impoverished and yet, forever taking on hostile powers. It is a year since the 48-year-old reporter Shashikant Warishe was killed for drawing attention to a government refinery project’s environmental violations in Maharashtra. In such a space, we find non-journalists who are established in society and enjoy a degree of protection, taking up the roles of journalists. So it is that a senior advocate and politician hosts a talk show on a news platform. In the UK, the most popular news podcast is hosted by two public figures, one the world’s most well known political strategist and the other, a politician.
