In the last ten months, Shirin Dalvi has had practically no paid work. She has given one talk on All India Radio and had one article in Urdu, on madrasa reform, translated and published in the Economic and Political Weekly. Dalvi has been a journalist for 27 years, of which she spent five in editorial positions. She was the editor of the Mumbai edition of the Urdu newspaper Avadhnama, which, on 17 January this year, ran the cover image of an issue of Charlie Hebdo to accompany a story about the satirical French magazine. Just ten days earlier, many of Charlie Hebdo’s Paris staff had been murdered in a horrific attack on their offices by Muslim fundamentalists. The attackers were believed to be upset with the magazine’s controversial cartoons, which are often seen to mock Islam and violate its conventional prohibition on depicting the prophet Muhammad in images. A caricature of Muhammad was on the Charlie Hebdo cover that Avadhnama ran with their story.
The Paris magazine is still in business. The Mumbai edition of Avadhnama, shuttered after it printed the image, is history. In the last year, Dalvi has been sacked, hounded, charged with offending religious sentiments, and left near-impoverished. The Crime Investigation Department is currently conducting the official inquiry into multiple cases of religious offence lodged against her. She gets some translation work these days. In July, she told the Indian Express that she had made Rs 22,000 in the six months since she had been fired. The career she fought to build over decades has crumbled to nothing. “I just want to get back to work,” she told me. “I want to work in my field again.”
The bloodless violence done to Dalvi’s career inaugurated a grim year for media freedom in India, which hit a low point over the week it took for Jagendra Singh, an independent journalist from Shahjahanpur, to die in agony after he was set on fire in suspicious circumstances this June. In full view of television crews, slathered in the foamy ointment used to treat his horrific petrol burns, Singh claimed that a minister of the Uttar Pradesh government, against whom he had published a number of critical news items and views on Facebook, was responsible for his murder. In response, the Akhilesh Yadav government was quick to announce monetary compensation for Singh’s family, although it was staunch in its defence of the accused minister, Ram Murti Verma.
The story dropped out of the national pages after Singh’s autopsy report pronounced it likely that his burns were self-inflicted. Verma was cleared of suspicion by his party, and Singh’s family publicly declared that the journalist had set himself on fire. Local reporters have remained sceptical of these conclusions. BP Gautam, an independent journalist who covered the story in depth, told me, matter-of-fact, that the noise had probably quietened down due to “pressure” from the authorities.
Indian society tends to reserve immolation as punishment for some of its most marginalised people: death by burning is something caste Hindus inflict upon Dalits, and patriarchy upon women. It reflects a desire not simply to end life, but to inflict annihilation on a living body, literally visiting hell upon it. If Singh was killed for his line of work—an international organisation for press freedom, the Committee to Protect Journalists, continues to believe he was—it signals a kind of disgust and disregard that should should serve as a warning. “The question has never been about who killed Jagendra Singh,” Gautam wrote in one of several reports about the case on the website of his weekly, Gautam Sandesh. “It is about why Jagendra Singh died.”
This year may stand out for uniquely grave crimes against media workers that caught the attention of the national media. Yet we have persisted in seeing the assault, wrongful imprisonment and murder of reporters as discrete episodes, at best the fallout of personal or local concerns, rather than as an Indian problem. Some of the country’s highest-profile reporters and editors, especially those who are seen as aligned against the Hindu right wing, have allegedly received death threats offline. The spirit of violent repression running through these seems to find an echo in the torrents of abuse that they receive on the internet. (The senior Marathi journalist Nikhil Wagle, as well as the well-known NDTV anchor Ravish Kumar, have both said as much in the last year.) An atmosphere of polarised debate, ruling prime-time on television networks and social media, has caused the issue to go unnoticed at best, and, at worst, to be misrepresented as a conflict in which corrupt journalists seek to malign the well-intentioned Indian government, and exaggerate concerns for their safety.
Journalists are not the only Indians who find few state or social mechanisms to defend them when attempts are made to injure or curtail their freedom of expression, but brutality can be an occupational hazard for members of the profession. In a report on the safety of journalists released this July, the Press Council of India, which is a statutory authority, made a number of recommendations to the central government on ensuring adequate protections for reporters. These include a law to make threats or assaults directed at journalists a cognisable offence, special courts to conduct trials in such cases, and substantial compensations for journalists or their next of kin if they are victims of violence.
There is a familiar ring to demands for more laws, speedier delivery of justice, and sterner punishments. Suggestions much like these acquired credence, then became reality, in the struggle to address violence against women that has gained ground over the last three years. Indeed, the PCI report, which gathered information and studied material going back at least two decades from all around the country, stated that of a plethora of cases of violence against journalists, only one had resulted in a conviction—not coincidentally, the 2013 rape of a young woman photojournalist in the Shakti Mills area of Mumbai.
As with India’s crisis of gender violence, there are two dimensions to any effective resolution. The first, like the PCI report’s recommendations, is procedural and responds to the symptoms of the problem. Sumit Galhotra, the Asia researcher for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said that the implementation of laws to protect journalists would be a good first move, “given the glacial pace of India’s legal system.”
But any narrow focus on legislation ignores a more complex social dimension to the problem. As new laws to prosecute sexual violence were being formulated in the wake of the murderous gangrape of a young woman in 2012, many commentators pointed out that legislation would not root out the inequity fundamental to a patriarchal system—that work would have to be done by society itself. This is true, too, of the harm the PCI is trying to address. A society in which the work of journalists is peripheral to its public life has signalled, to no small degree, that the lives of journalists are similarly peripheral.
Tellingly, some of the PCI’s recommendations try to accommodate prevailing assumptions that journalists are, to put it baldly, a nuisance. It suggests that journalists take “refresher courses” in how to cover sensitive issues in conflict zones, involving the police or armed forces—but this deflects attention from the source of much of the actual stress of journalism in such zones. (Not for nothing did five newspapers in Nagaland publish blank editorials last month, in protest of security measures aiming to curb their reporting freedoms.) Galhotra, recalling that a police officer was allegedly complicit in Jagendra Singh’s immolation, remarked that some of these agencies might well arrange for lessons on how to deal with journalists. “Over the years, Indian police, paramilitary forces and the military have attacked journalists with little to no accountability,” he pointed out.
Further evidence of this disdain is writ large in our political culture. In 2015, the National Democratic Alliance government did little to indicate that it had any interest in defending civil liberties related to media freedom. At a moment of fever pitch over revelations of the mysterious deaths of several people connected with the Vyapam educational scam in Madhya Pradesh, the young Aaj Tak journalist Akshay Singh, reporting from the home of one of the deceased, suddenly took ill and died himself. As suspicions of foul play were raised, it fell to the Bharatiya Janata Party veteran Kailash Vijayvargiya to voice what many assume India’s elected representatives think about the press. “Forget about journalists,” he was captured saying on camera. “Is a journalist more important than I am?”
Nikhil Wagle, who has been critical of the right-wing governments in Maharashtra and at the centre, was allegedly issued a death threat by the fanatical Sanatan Sanstha earlier this year. Many factors separate militant outfits, such as the Sanstha, from the sea of armchair media critics on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where much of the national news is now shaped, analysed and supplemented. Still, there is a critical similarity in the way both spheres view large sections of the mainstream media for doing its job—with utter bad faith, and increasing disregard for the line between criticism and intimidation.
The steady normalisation of this violence has sanctioned an atmosphere of majoritarian thuggery that is both suspicious of the media’s powers, and contemptuous of it. Mayank Jain, a young reporter from Scroll, was detained on his way to cover a beef-eating demonstration in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi late this summer. “The law can protect criminals, but it won’t protect sinners like you,” a constable told him. He also said that if Jain went near the protest, he, the policeman, would cut him up and throw away the pieces—“kaat ke phenk doonga.” This righteous hard-line spirit has moved from the margins of public consciousness to its forefront. Yet journalists, as the messengers of this shift, seem currently to be playing the role of Cassandra, destined to be ignored at best, and blamed for their own misfortunes at worst.
By some accounts, there are just over a dozen other countries in the world where it is easier to harm a journalist for their work. India was one of the countries to make it to the ignominious Global Impunity Index compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists—a list of 14 countries, which include South Sudan, Syria, and our famously repressive neighbours, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. “It should raise eyebrows that India—a vibrant democracy and emerging economic power—is among the top countries in the world where there is little to no accountability in crimes against journalists,” Galhotra said. Eyebrows may not be raised, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that India has been on this index for eight straight years. Neither a vibrant democracy nor economic growth have been able to salvage Shirin Dalvi’s career for her. It remains to be seen whether the memory of Jagendra Singh, dying on our television screens, will save the lives, and the work, of others like him.