‘A solitary endeavour’: Watchdogs chart the decline of press freedom in India

Press freedom in India has progressively declined since prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government assumed office in 2014 and was re-elected five years later, according to media watchdog non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF), the Paris-based NGO revealed recently that India had slipped 11 places in its press freedom index to 161 out of 180 countries surveyed.

Based on criteria such as media independence and transparency and legislative frameworks, RSF’s report concluded that India’s press freedom standing was lower than that of Afghanistan, ranked at 152, Pakistan graded at 150 and Somalia at 141.

RSF said an average of three to four Indian journalists were killed each year in pursuit of their work, while numerous others critical of the government were subjected to unrelenting campaigns of “all-out harassment”.

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Ten other overseas NGOs, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Committee to Protect Journalists, have claimed that Indian authorities are increasingly targeting journalists for their criticism of government policies and practices by prosecuting them under colonial-era sedition statutes.

They said numerous media outlets, especially nationwide television channels, are owned by businessmen with multiple commercial interests in other sectors that provoke a conflict of interest in objective news coverage. Additionally, they said several smaller media outlets across the country, which exercise influence locally, are run by politicians who aggressively advance their respective agendas unchecked.

The RSF report asserted that a majority of media organisations are financially dependent on government advertising. Federal and state governments, also led by the BJP, awarded them adverts to impose their respective narratives in newsrooms, RSF added.

Senior journalists like Ravish Kumar agree. One of India’s best known television reporters, Kumar, who has received many death threats over his news coverage, recently said that being a journalist in India today had become a “solitary endeavour”. Uncompromising journalists, he said, were forced out of their jobs by news organisations for their objectivity and their corporate owners were never questioned or held accountable.

Kumar says the media-businessman-politician nexus has spawned a lapdog press which mixes populism and pro-BJP propaganda. This has included celebrating the arbitrary bulldozing of the homes of Muslim activists, or trolling those who criticise Mr Modi or the BJP.

Kumar quit NDTV last November, after it was acquired by one of India’s richest businessman, Gautam Adani, believed to be close to Mr Modi.

Meanwhile, India’s Information Technology Amendment rules, released last month, dealt another blow to press freedom by empowering the federal authorities to constitute a “fact-checking unit” with untrammelled powers to determine what was “fake, false or misleading news” with regard to reporting governments matters, and to take it down.

India’s Editor Guild reacted sharply to this directive, saying the BJP government had given itself “absolute power” to determine what news was fake or not, as well as the authority to compel the concerned news organisation to withdraw it.

The guild said the government had neither specified details of the fact-checking unit nor provided any judicial oversight in accordance with established Indian legal statutes to withdraw news content or block social media handles.

Indian officials, however, dismissed the RSF report as baseless.

“I was amazed at our number [press freedom rating]”, said foreign minister S Jaishankar, ”considering that India has the most uncontrollable press”. He said the RSF’s evaluation was little more than a subjective “mind game” based on the NGO’s personal dislikes.