Ten Years that Crippled the Independent Media
S K Pande
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“Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe”------- Shakespeare.
INDEED, it is doubly so today, for the bulk of journalists in India, on the eve of what is billed to be the costliest democratic election seen in India, with a new era of hop step and jump defections gaining momentum. This is part of the general picture, of a vicious attack on democracy where one can also see the independent and critical press receiving its worst battering in recent years as the last ten years indicate. In this atmosphere, a new era of repression of independent journalists in all forms of media from print, broadcast to digital has begun, though many in the outside world, may not be realising it. What we see today is targeted press bashing, a new era of surveillance by government and its agencies, besides select attacks on all forms of independent journalism and journalists critical of the government. Notable features are specific McCarthyist plus revanchist fascistic attacks on independent journalists and even their livelihood. Simultaneously, clearly visible is a selective carrot and stick approach to appease a handpicked few journalists for selected government ‘scoops’ besides newer forms of an emergent media bond to the Government.
To a journalist who experienced some of the emergency and press censorship tremors one can see wider undeclared emergency tremors in different phases with more ferocity in the last five years but discernable in the first five years of BJP rule too. Our own study shows that the Central Hall of the parliament for press coverage, is a thing of the past. The long and distinguished category of journalists is also no longer there. In fact, the Press Information Bureau, nicknamed by some the Police Information Bureau during the Emergency and press censorship days, has now even without a declared Emergency been given new policing roles in various names and guises.
Following the raids and other forms of harassment on the Wire, Caravan and other independent outlets raids and witch hunt by Delhi Police on 46 journalists of the news portal NewsClick and arrests of its editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha and HR head Amit Chakravorty all part of another organised attempt to stifle the voice of the free independent media. The NewsClick raids and arrests are part of a growing authoritarian trend in India to harass and intimidate media by misuse of police and State agencies to suppress the critical journalism, commentators and contributors.
The freedom of press in our country is facing tough challenges from the Narendra Modi regime. India’s ranking in the Press Freedom Index slipped to 161 (among 180 countries) in 2023 from 150 in 2022. 16 journalists, from various parts of the country, are currently charged under the draconian UAPA. Seven among them are in jails or under arrest. Eight journalists are on bail with UAPA charges on them. One journalist is charged but not arrested and one has been acquitted of the charges. In Kashmir, journalism has been reduced to total farce and curbs on internet and harassment of journalists are assuming new heights in the past ten years.
This seems part of a clear strategy of the government to muzzle independent media which voices the issues of workers and farmers, artists, writers, teachers and students besides women and downtrodden minorities.
Recently the Caravan was told that if it fails to take down an article on the Poonch killings from its website within 24 hours, the entire website would be taken down. Information Technology Act rules amended in 2021-22 were being used against media houses, and controversial IT Rules give the information and broadcasting ministry emergency powers to summarily take down content from digital platforms, including news websites, without giving a hearing to the publisher. Several media houses and others, including The Wire, have challenged the rules in court and the petitions are being heard. All this should be seen in the backdrop of the circulated Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill 2023 which constitutes another step by the Modi government to stifle press freedom.
It may be recalled that prior to this the government had brought in the Tele-communication Act of 2023, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023 and earlier the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The last of these have already been stayed by the Bombay and Madras High Courts on grounds of violating the constitution. The Broadcasting Services Bill in fact seeks to bring in provisions similar to the ones in the IT Rules of 2021. All of these laws and rules are marked by a common theme: increasing control of the government on the expanding universe of media and digital data and arbitrary powers to penalise or stop transmission on vaguely defined grounds. The Broadcasting Bill as has been pointed out by some journalist bodies is a charter for censorship providing for expanding government control and regulation overall types of media-from television channels and films to OTT platforms. It is seen in totality as nothing short of a crude attempt to silence protest and dissent and expanding a new era of censorship to newer areas like, from TV channels, to films, platforms like Netflix and Prime Video, You Tube, radio, even Instagram and other social media platforms as well as news websites and journalists. The Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, 2023 comes on the heels of the Telecom Act of 2023, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the IT Amendment Rules, 2023. How the ghost of Pegasus haunts select journalists in this period too is well known. Many journalists like us are of the considered opinion that such a bill could wait till the formation of a common body like a Media Commission of India comprising experts and stakeholders who could look into all aspects of self-regulation rather than inviting government control.
The First Press Commission was appointed on 1952 followed by the Second Press Commission. Since then there has been no such mechanism and today there is indeed a much more widened media, there is a necessity of Media Commission of experts but more autonomous than the previous, to look into the new much wider media and its increasing problems from press freedom to freedom of association, to journalists working conditions. Recall the second such commission’s report was way back in 1982. It wanted a free press working as a responsible and constructive critic of the government.
Once a great national News agency today the United News of India is virtually gasping for breath. Yet, the United News of India (UNI) was once conceived as a competitive news agency to the Press Trust of India (PTI) and for a while it indeed got some reputation. It had an English unit, Hindi unit, UNI Varta and an Urdu news service the first of its type in the country.
Contrast this to government’s boost to Hindustan Samachar, which was born in 1948 with the aim of making the RSS’s thinking predominant, which is putting a question mark on the future of national news agencies, such as PTI and UNI. This indeed is now blossoming with booster doses under the present government. Over 70 years after independence, the government under Narendra Modi has ensured that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) dream of 1948, of a right-wing national news agency spreading its tentacles even to rural areas, through Hindustan Samachar.
Today it is not only freedom of the press but freedom of association with trade unions of choice that has been killed in the past seven years leading to a new form of ‘Godi” media which is reflective in all forms of the media. While some characterise this period as an undeclared Emergency, many look up on it as a new fascist model that is increasingly becoming visible in the run-up to the country’s elections in 2024. Of course today it is not only the Working Journalist Act that has been reduced to a mockery but even the last wage board, Majithia remains totally unimplemented with cases in court seeing no fruition, as journalist unions hunt for members and newspaper plant unions by and large have been turned out of offices and split badly by both managements and governments in a variety of ways.
In this period too, some of the most regressive labour legislation in the country’s independent history were rammed through first as ordinances by state governments, then as ‘codes’ by the centre. Some of the ordinances promulgated set Indian workers back by a century, by suspending that gold standard of labour rights – the eight-hour day and several of those journalists who would have been game to take this on – were jobless, having been thrown out by their media owners. A journalist body was told by the labour ministry way back in 2018: “It is informed that the Working Journalist Act is already proposed to be subsumed in the Code on Wage Bill which is currently in the Lok Sabha and there is no proposal presently to constitute a Wage Board.” Ironically the states have since virtually started a go slow as far as the working journalist wage board implementation cases are concerned.
When CAA is again back on the eve of elections, one remembers the fact that the Newsclick journalists were interrogated about the Delhi communal riots and the CAA agitation of 2019-20, the farmers’ protest of 2020-21, and whether they used encrypted phone messaging applications such as Signal. The phones and laptops for all the employees, contributors and consultants of the news portal were also seized.
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