Dangers of journalism in India
Three recent killings in the country’s rural areas illustrate a global trend, with ominous consequences for freedom of expression
Recently, three journalists were killed in rural areas of India. You probably haven’t heard much about their deaths — or their lives — since they all worked for small local outlets, covering powerful interests who may have decided it was easier to murder them than to face their questions.
Their killers are unlikely to face justice. The issues the three journalists covered so passionately will continue to plague Indian society. And observers will mourn the slow decline of free expression in the world’s largest democracy.
Navin Nischal and Vijay Singh were run over by a car in the state of Bihar. Sandeep Sharma, a TV journalist in Madhya Pradesh, was riding his motorcycle when he was hit by a truck. In both cases, police arrested the drivers, who turned out to be linked to critical stories written by the journalists.
The problem of violence against reporters is not limited to India, of course. On March 27, Pakistani journalist Zeeshan Ashraf Butt was shot by a local politician outside a state office as Butt attempted to interview him. Then there’s the case of Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak, who was murdered in his home with his fiancee in February, allegedly by Italian mafia members accused of fraudulent dealings with the government in Bratislava. Or the murder of investigative reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia, killed in a car bombing in Malta last November.
We can’t always be sure that journalists are being attacked for their work. Yet, in all the cases mentioned above, there was good reason to believe that the victims were being targeted precisely because they had exposed the doings of the corrupt and the criminal. (Watchdog groups that track violence against journalists say that 2017 was the worst year ever for such attacks and that 2018 looks set to be even worse.)
The motivations in each case might turn out to be unique. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that many factors of contemporary life are enabling such acts of impulsive violence.
Most conspicuously, those in power are using harsh new language to attack journalism and its practitioners, thus implicitly legitimising violence against them.
The rise in violence against journalists coincides with the advent of a US president who chooses to mark members of the free press as the “enemy of the people”. He and other leaders around the world, often with the aid of armies of anonymous online proxies, have whipped up resentment against journalists, sometimes even urging their followers to take the law into their own hands.
As powerful interests around the world take an increasingly antagonistic approach to critical media, the problem will only spread. Silencing journalists is an effective tool that paves the way for more-repressive agendas.
Lack of proper investigation
In the case of India, it’s particularly distressing. The country has more newspaper readers — more than 400 million of them — than the United States has inhabitants. You’d think that all those readers would encourage an environment friendly to reporters. Yet, 11 Indian journalists were reportedly murdered in 2017. According to observers, few of those cases have been properly investigated or prosecuted, with ominous consequences for freedom of expression.
“This is definitely a new trend. The Indian media used to be one of the most vivid in Asia, although times have always been tough for journalists working outside big metropolises,” said Daniel Bastard, the head of Reporter Without Borders’ Asia-Pacific desk. The challenges facing rural journalists are different from those faced by big-city reporters, who usually write for the English-language press. Both communities, though, have been affected. Last September, Gauri Lankesh, a prominent reporter and critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, was shot and killed in Bengaluru, one of India’s biggest cities and capital of Karnataka state.
Indian journalists today face both the threat of physical violence when doing their jobs, but also the more widespread and insidious forms of intimidation — usually online — that are now commonplace around the world. There is also the issue of access, which the current government has greatly limited. Modi famously does not hold news conferences and rarely gives interviews. When he does, he tends to prefer sympathetic news outlets.
“Modi the candidate, and later Modi the Prime Minister have relied heavily on social media to reach out to people directly,” says Sevanti Ninan, a columnist and founder of South Asian media watchdog The Hoot. “He does not feel the need to talk to the media. There is a sense that the press self-censors if they want access, and if they are owned by large business houses which do not want to incur the animosity of the government, they have added reason to self-censor.”
But it’s the proliferation of hate speech that is helping to foster an atmosphere of impunity that makes killing reporters seem like a viable option.
As powerful interests around the world — both governmental and private — take an increasingly antagonistic approach to critical media, this problem will only spread. Silencing journalists — through arrests, online threats or physical violence — is an effective tool that paves the way for morerepressive agendas.
This is to be expected in places such as Russia, Iran and China. It’s what those regimes do. But when attacks against members of the press become prevalent in societies with long democratic traditions, how long can we continue to convince ourselves that we are somehow immune? ■ Jason Rezaian is a writer for Global Opinions. He served as the Post’s correspondent in Tehran from 2012 to 2016. He was jailed for 544 days by Iranian authorities until his release in January 2016.