A creeping quiet in Indian journalism? By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
There is a creeping
quiet spreading across India’s otherwise loud and lively journalism. Front
pages, websites, and news programs are brimming with stories, but “people are
afraid”, one editor told me recently in Delhi. “We come under a lot of
pressure” says a journalist from Chennai. “I have never experienced anything
like this” is how a veteran reporter from Calcutta put it. They are among the
journalists I spoke to on a recent trip to India, all of whom describe how a
combination of government pressure, harassment by political activists,
commercial actors including both some advertisers and some media owners is
exercising a chilling effect on Indian journalism.
Not everyone is
silenced. In October, the non-profit news site The Wire published The Golden Touch of Jay Amit Shah showing how Jay Shah,
the son of Amit Shah, the president of the ruling BJP party, had seen a
dramatic increase in his business fortunes since Narendra Modi became prime
minister. The article used company balance sheets and annual reports filed with
the Registrar of Companies (RoC) to show how Shah’s Temple Enterprise had seen
revenues increase 16,000-fold after Mr Modi and the BJP party his father
presides over took power. The response was interesting. On the one hand, Jay
Shah, his lawyers insisting he was a private citizen entitled to privacy, filed
a criminal defamation case and a civil defamation case seeking a billion rupees
($15.5m) in damages. On the other hand, a number of high profile government
ministers and BJP officials defended Shah publicly and attacked the Wire for
publishing the story.
In parallel, the Indian
Express has reported on allegations that a top official at the Indian
Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) had repeatedly dismissed tax fraud
allegations against various parts of the Adani Group, a large Indian
multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Mr Modi’s home state
Gujarat and seen by many as closely aligned with the Prime Minister. (As the
business paper the Mint reported, “[Gautam] Adani has travelled with Modi in the
past year more than any other billionaire, helping him emerge as the most
prominent face of India Inc.”)
Following up on earlier stories first published
by the Economic and Political Weekly in 2016, the Indian
Express in August reported that the adjudicating authority of the DRI K
V S Singh had passed an order striking down all proceedings against the Adani
Group firms. In October, the paper reported that Singh struck down another
case, alleging that an Adani subsidiary had inflated the declared value of
imports to avoid taxes. The sums involved are estimated to be in the region of 15bn rupees ($233m).
What is striking is
how little attention these stories have generated in other news media. Imagine
if ProPublica reported that Donald Trump Jr. had seen a 16,000-fold increase in
his business income after his father took office, or that the Washington
Post found that federal officials had repeatedly dismissed allegations
of tax evasion by the Trump Organization. Every serious and self-respecting
news organization in America would cover the story and follow up to see what
else they could find.
After the The Wire broke the Jay Amit Shah story, NDTV,
the country’s leading English-language news channel, began to do exactly that.
A follow-up story focused on the loans given to Jay Shah, asked whether this
was “cronyism or business as usual”. But while a video version is still available, the web version of
the story was taken down briefly after, according to NDTVbecause it was being “legally vetted”. As
of early November, the story has yet to be republished. The
case has been widely discussed on social media under hashtags like #AmitShahKiLoot, but news media have covered the coverage
more than the substantive allegations.
Similarly, the Economic and
Political Weekly and Indian Express coverage of the
Adani Group has been mentioned by some other major news media, like the Times of India as well as digital-born news sites
like Scroll and the Quint, and has been discussed on social media under
hashtags including #adani and #stopadani.
But the substantive allegations have not received the attention one might
expect of what could look like an explosive mix of politics and private
business at the highest levels. What we see instead is what the media watchdog
site NewsLaundry calls “an eerie silence in the media.” Both the Jay Amit Shah
case and the Adani case play out against a backdrop of what many journalists I
spoke to in India describe as a climate of fear.
People are reluctant to be
quoted, so I will not name names here, but in my conversations, journalists and
editors point to five different factors.
· First, public
attacks on the press by prominent politicians, including for example the BJP
minister VK Singh referring to journalists as “presstitutes”, another BJP minister Kiren Rijiju telling journalists to “stop this habit of raising
doubt, questioning the authorities”, and the Rajastan state government trying
to limit reporting of public officials and withdrawing government advertising from some papers.
· Second, private
pressure by government ministers and elected officials. One journalist I spoke
to described how he had overheard editors reluctantly negotiating the wording
of headlines of stories about government initiatives with politicians before
they were even published—others asked whether the Central Bureau of
Investigation’s raid on NDTV and on the NDTV founder Prannoy Roy’s
private home in June 2017 and the 2016 decision to force the station off the air for 24 hours over its coverage of a terror
attack in Pathankot were intended as warning shots for the media.
· Third, systematic
trolling of journalists by both volunteer militants and paid provocateurs,
especially by right-wing Hindutva activists, sometimes allegedly orchestrated by political parties. Much of this is online,
but sometimes goes beyond that to involve offline harassment and even
officials, as in the case of a journalist in Uttar Pradesh charged with defamation by the police for sharing a
satirical video of Mr. Modi in a WhatsApp group… read more:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-creeping-quiet-in-indian-journalism_us_5a046be2e4b0204d0c1714bb