India cracks down on journalism, again - Columbia Journalism Review
▻https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/india_modi_farmers_protests_journalism.php
Last Tuesday, as India celebrated a national holiday commemorating its democratic constitution, thousands of farmers marched and drove their tractors through New Delhi. It was the latest in a series of protests against agricultural reforms that many farmers fear will allow large corporations to crush them. Police tear-gassed the demonstrators and charged at the crowd with batons; as Vidya Krishnan wrote in The Atlantic, “the dueling images—a celebration of India’s democracy on the one hand, the crushing of dissent on the other—were carried on a split screen by many news channels, inadvertently offering the perfect visual metaphor for modern India.” A twenty-five-year-old farmer named Navreet Singh was killed during the protest; officials claimed that he died in a tractor accident, but witnesses said that police shot Singh in the head—an account supported by photographic evidence. Singh’s family has alleged a cover-up. “One doctor told me that my grandson was hit by a gunshot,” Hardip Singh Dibdiba, Singh’s grandfather, told The Guardian, “but said they could not write that a bullet killed him.”
Indian authorities have since filed sedition and other charges against at least nine journalists who reported on, or merely tweeted about, Singh’s death and the protests; some members of the press have been subjected to extrajudicial harassment and threats. Under Indian law, sedition carries a possible penalty of life imprisonment. The editors of two prominent independent news outlets—Vinod K. Jose, of the magazine The Caravan, and Siddharth Varadarajan, of the news website The Wire—were among those charged. On Saturday, police detained two more reporters—Mandeep Punia, a Caravan contributor, and Dharmender Singh, of Online News India—as they covered ongoing farmers’ protests in New Delhi. Kanwardeep Singh, a reporter with the Times of India, told The Guardian that his phone is under surveillance. The government, he believes, is trying to send him a message: “Either I stop writing and stay safe or be ready to live my remaining life behind the bars.”
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