Anchor’s arrest seen as muzzle
One of India’s most famous television journalists was arrested last week on charges of abetting a suicide, a move criticized by politicians and members of the news media as an attempt to muzzle the press.
Arnab Goswami, a conservative news anchor, was arrested by Mumbai police after a high-voltage drama at his residence in the city, India’s financial capital.
“This is not the way to treat the press,” Prakash Javadekar, India’s information and broadcasting minister, said in a tweet.
Goswami has made a name for himself by shouting down opponents, embracing right-wing causes and aggressively backing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-leaning administration.
Many saw the arrest as a vendetta against Goswami for his criticism of the Mumbai police over a recent homicide investigation, as well as the latest example of an assault on press freedoms in India that has come from many directions.
The twist in this case is that Mumbai, which is part of Maharashtra state, is controlled by an opposition political party. Some commentators said what Mumbai authorities were doing was similar to the pressure that the Modi administration has put on progressive journalists elsewhere.
In recent years, Indian news outlets, particularly the television networks, have taken an increasingly conservative turn. Supporters of Modi and his governing Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, often brand critical voices as “anti-nationals,” as if equating patriotism with support for the current government.
The few journalists who question the government’s record on human rights, income inequality, joblessness or, most recently, the handling of the pandemic are often demonized in the right-wing ecosystem.
Early this year, Reporters Without Borders, a Parisbased non-profit that works to document attacks on journalists, said India had dropped two places on a global press freedom index, to 142nd out of 180 countries. It cited press freedom violations and constant pressure on the media to toe the Hindu nationalist government’s line.
Goswami, 47, is no stranger to controversy. Early this year, Mumbai police opened an investigation into his channel, Republic TV, accusing it of fomenting hatred against Muslims by targeting a mosque outside a railway station, linking it to a nearby protest by migrant workers.
The latest case against him pertains to the suicide of an interior designer, Anvay Naik, and his mother in 2018. According to Naik’s family members, he named the journalist in his suicide note, accusing Goswami and two others of not paying money that was owed to him.
Akshata Naik, the widow of Anvay Naik, said that her husband had worked hard on a design project for Republic TV, but that not being paid for the work for over a year had left him penniless and forced him to kill himself.