Press Freedom in India Under Greatest Threat, Time to Fight Back!
Saturday, October 28, 2017
Press freedom in India has always remained an illusion used by the ruling clique of big comprador and crony capitalists, foreign monopoly and finance capital-owned big corporations and feudal landlords to deceive the people, especially the middle-class of the country, in believing that they are living in a free, open and democratic society. The mask of democracy and press freedom worn by the Indian ruling class had fallen off several times, showing the grotesque bedrock of the quasi-fascist state to the people, but with the support and help of its toady journalist battalion, the ruling classes somehow managed to keep the sham “press freedom” mask on and wiped off, quite successfully, the instances of the past violation of press freedom from the public memory. The freedom of the press never existed in the country and the recent updates reinforce this now popularly-held view more strongly than ever.
BJP President Amit Shah’s son Jay Amit Shah recently got a shot-in-the-arm when the Modi government stood in support of him in his bid to gag the independent media outlet, The Wire, for publishing a story that showed how one company owned by Shah Jr., Temple Enterprises, experienced a sudden meteoric rise in its turnover after Narendra Modi became the prime minister in 2014. According to the report in The Wire, Jay Amit Shah’s company’s turnover increased from ₹50,000 in 2014-15 to ₹80.5 crore in 2015-16, a massive 16,000 times increase in turnover, only for the company to pull down its shutter in October 2016, a month before the demonetisation exercise unfolded. The questions raised by the article were also shared with Jay Shah, but it suddenly brought the government into action, which even allowed the ASG Tushar Mehta, who happens to be a family friend of Modi and Shah and a trusted man of the duo who helped them dilute cases against the accused of the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 during his tenure in Gujarat, to appear personally for Jay Shah in the court. The threatening issued by Union Minister Piyush Goyal, the brute challenge of Amit Shah to the opponents and the total media silence on the issue showed how the corporate-controlled mainstream media acts as mere puppets of the regime and desists from raising uncomfortable questions or challenge the narratives of the regime. The issue of Jay Shah and the impunity with which he dared to attack a media outlet simply asking some valid questions by quoting from the publicly available documents with the ROC, showed that the BJP government led by Narendra Modi only asks for subservience from the media in the country and it will use the SLAPP, i.e. Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, itself or through its crony corporate funders like the Adani group, to gag the investigative journalist endeavours in the country by demanding hefty ransom through lawsuits and defamation cases.
The opposition ruckus over the Jay Shah case didn’t fully subside that the notorious BJP government of Chhattisgarh arrested Vinod Verma, a former editor of BBC’s Hindi news service and Amar Ujala, on the charge of blackmailing a minister of the state. Mr Verma was arrested from his Ghaziabad residence at 3:30 am on 27 October and was accused of blackmailing a Chhattisgarh minister using a “sex CD” of his. However, according to the journalist fraternity, the real reason why Vinod Verma, a member of the Editor Guild, was arrested by the police was because of the crucial role he played in highlighting the poor state of press freedom in Chhattisgarh, where the police and the state allows only PR communication instead of objective journalism, while investigative journalism into the goriest crimes committed against the tribal people by the paramilitary and police force is strictly prohibited. Apart from Kashmir, it’s in Chhattisgarh that the Modi government and the Raman Singh government has jointly locked the largest number of journalists in jail by accusing them of “anti-national” activities and blaming them of being Maoist supporters in the tribal people's resistance struggle against the government’s effort to evict them from their villages and forests so that the big mining corporations, with which the government has signed MoUs for mining mineral resources, can come and plunder the resources of the state. Vinod Verma raised questions, troublesome questions on the poor state of press freedom in Chhattisgarh and became a thorn in the eyes of the BJP.
Reporting about the crimes committed by the state machinery in Kashmir or Bastar of Chhattisgarh is equally condemned by the ruling clique and its sycophants. The journalists are only asked to act as the PR agency of the government and broadcast the story that the government wants them to say. While the Congress government led by Indira Gandhi forced the press to crawl before it during the emergency period, much of the prostration by the big media houses and their acting as PR agency of the government is voluntary and self-inflicted at present and has some ulterior motives. Big media houses are owned directly and indirectly by those corporations whose shares are directly or indirectly owned by big foreign monopoly and finance capital-owned corporations and therefore, these media houses act in accordance with the business objectives of their investors and advertisers. As the big corporate media entities earn nearly 90 percent of their profit from advertising revenue and by creating paid content/featured news to promote brands and corporations, news and its quality remains at the lowest echelon of priorities. Editorial policies and guidelines are created in the modern corporate media houses to muffle the critical journalistic habits, blind allegiance is demanded from the journalists to such policies in order to protect the interests of the investors, advertisers, banks and the government. Everyone oils everyone in the media industry to keep the profit rolling up and occasional pep-talks on “free press” and “journalistic ethos” are organised by these media outlets to show that they are still a part of the church despite denouncing its canonical laws in public.
Media houses that swear allegiance to "ethical journalism" shed their inhibitions at the drop of hat and start hitting back at those journalists on their payroll who raise tough questions for the Modi government and its corporate masters. It was due to his investigations into the Adani group’s nefarious business practice and the patronage it received in terms of tax relaxations by the Modi government in tune of hundreds of crores that Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, the former editor of the once-famous Economic and Political Weekly, got fired from his job. In a similar fashion, self-styled anti-establishment media outlet, NDTV gagged its employees from criticising the Modi government over the latter’s dubious claim about a “surgical strike” along the LOC in 2016 and it even dropped investigative reporting by Sreenivasan Jain from its website. The Times of India removed news about Amit Shah’s 300 percent increase in wealth in the last five years, while the Hindustan Times forced its former editor Bobby Ghosh to resign in order to appease Narendra Modi, whom the proprietor of the newspaper invited for its signature leadership summit. Bobby Ghosh started a campaign Hate Tracker that kept a tab on the Hindutva fascist hate mongering on the internet. It caused serious discomfort for the BJP. There are even instances where senior journalists are found to be brokering deals between corporate houses and the government, working as liaison officers to bridge the gap between their organisation and various bureaucrats, helping ministers and leaders of the ruling clique with PR consultancy. No wonder, for the whole country and its people, the mainstream media is - simply a “sold out” entity- with no credibility.
This belief prevailing among the people that the media is sold out and that it publishes or shows only such content that is convenient to them that the fast-growing fake news industry is able to make a kill, especially on digital platforms. The fake news industry is expanding and curating misleading propaganda and vitriol to meet a particular purpose, i.e. to bolster the political dominance of the Hindutva fascist forces represented by the RSS and the BJP and to veil the immense amount of corporate sponsorship these outfits receive from India and abroad. These outlets, mushrooming throughout the internet, are expert in spreading lies and vicious propaganda, especially those curated by the RSS and the BJP on the basis of their bedrock ideology of Hindutva fascism. They are making a kill by promoting bush telegraphs to lure people in believing the narratives set by the fascist forces. The industry is growing, feeding on the discontent of the people against the mainstream media and by judging the potential of the business, even big corporations are now plunging into what they call - alternative news industry - and are promoting another venomous modus operandi which is allowing them to spread misinformation and slanders in the name of alternative news. In India, the BJP MP and crony capitalist Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s TV channel Republic TV, which has the BJP gadfly and champion of yellow journalism, Arnab Goswami as its chief protagonist, is playing a key role in deceiving the people with misinformation, manufactured news and slanders wrapped in the package of alternative news. There are several websites and social media channels, including WhatsApp groups that are disseminating vitriol against Muslims and also against the opposition using slanderous and libellous propaganda dressed as authentic and alternative news.
Amidst this fierce competition among the mainstream corporate media houses to become the most valued and loyal government PR agency and yet wear the press tag, it’s only the crowdfunded small media outlets that are trying to become key players in honest, critical and answerable media movement by sticking to the ethics of journalism, especially its critical and analytical aspect and thereby, it’s only these small organisations who are raising questions, bitter and uncomfortable questions, which are causing discomfort to the regime. Small and crowdfunded people’s alternative journalism is not only criticising the government and exposing its crimes to the people, one by one, using the power of internet and social media, but it’s also empowering a new generation of journalists to acquire the true ethics of journalism and then bust the fake news module that is trying to become mainstream at the moment. The proactive alternative journalism model that is gaining strength by actually being anti-establishment and anti-corporate, is causing a severe disturbance in the status quo achieved by the Indian ruling classes, their government and their established mainstream press in the sphere of information management. The disturbance caused by these new alternative media organisations is now dealt with an iron fist by the regime and its corporate backers. They are hell bent to punish each and every alternative media organisation that dares to defy the restrictions set by the government and refuse to self-censor themselves.
The BJP government of Chhattisgarh, with full support from the previous Congress-led UPA II government and now from the Narendra Modi government, has implemented some of the most draconian policies that not only curtails the freedom of the press in the conflict zone of Bastar, where the government is waging a violent barbaric war since a decade to oust the tribal people from their land and forests in order to help the big mining corporations plunder the mineral resources hidden beneath the soil. Journalists are forced to only accept stories from the paramilitary and police officials and publish them in good faith, without doubting their integrity, validity or intention. Any attempt to go beyond the government’s restricted zone and seek information from the tribal people, write or publish stories on their plight and agony will make a media organisation or a journalist vulnerable of getting the “Maoist sympathiser” stamp and they can be then jailed or killed with impunity by the state machinery, as Chhattisgarh is the only state where “thinking” against the government is also considered
Throughout the world, the rise of the corrupt and neo-fascist power has unleashed a severe attack on the free press. Donald Trump managed to usurp power in the US only by using the mass hatred against the pro-corporate mainstream media that prevailed in America to his own advantage and thereby promoting the most notorious fake news industry to manipulate the people's thought process. Vladimir Putin in Russia uses the same “anti-mainstream news” rhetoric to run racist and fascist propaganda through the state-sponsored Sputnik and RT, two hardcore right-wing white supremacist and Islamophobic media outlets, calling them pioneers in alternative and investigative journalism. Narendra Modi has nurtured his own media lackeys; from the Zee News led by BJP MP Subhash Chandra to the Republic TV owned by BJP leader Rajeev Chandrasekhar, from the Times group to the India Today group, the Hindutva camp has monopolised its control over all form of mainstream media outlets and yet it also attacks the remnant of critical journalists as “sold out” journalists, “presstitutes” and “Pakistani agents” with an intention to rob them of their credentials. All these when their own media outlets spread rumours and use slanderous campaigns to malign opposition leaders and parties and the people’s struggle for justice. Following the cue from Chhattisgarh, the Rajasthan government of BJP’s Vasundhara Raje is trying to bring forth an anti-democratic and anti-free press bill, which has become infamous as “gag bill” and even few of the BJP’s lawmakers have raised strong objections against the fascist characteristics of the bill, which threatens the existence of any right to question the government and its policies. The strong growth of the fascist powers has unleashed a reign of terror against those journalists who dare to stand with the truth. Gauri Lankesh, a firebrand anti-establishment journalist was shot dead in front of her house in Bengaluru by assailants; the investigative journalist who blew the lid off the Panama Papers in Malta, Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in a car bomb blast in Malta. Many journalists are being killed, maimed and gagged using state terror throughout the world and in India, every day, incessantly, to farther the cause of corporate tyranny over the world.
These atrocities against journalists and the total subordination of the mainstream corporate press make it imperative to build up a strong resistance against the fascist-corporate-government assault on the idea of the free press, which is an essential pillar of a healthy democracy. As both the corporate controlled mainstream press and the fake news industry that feeds racism and bigotry have openly declared a war against the idea of free press, with support of the fascists in power, therefore, time is now ticking for the journalists, who swear allegiance to truth and objectivity, to strongly unite against this onslaught and by leaving the sham cover of “neutrality” and “impartiality” they need to join the larger struggle waged by the working class, the peasantry, the common people of the country against the Hindutva terror-supporter and corporate sponsored regime of Narendra Modi. It’s very important for the sake of democracy and freedom of the country that the fascist regime is brought down through large-scale democratic struggle under the leadership of the progressive and patriotic forces and in this struggle, the small crowdfunded people’s media outlets need to play a very crucial role, stronger than what the Indian patriotic newspapers played during the colonial rule of the British imperialism. It’s on the degree of their ideological struggle against the fascist government and in their effort to expose the misdeeds of the regime and its hypocrisy that these media outlets, who are challenging the monopolised narrative of the corporate media outlets, will be able to tear the veil that covers the grotesque face of the Modi regime and will arouse the people, their readers, viewers and millions of people, to fight for the cause of democracy and change. It’s the need of the hour and everyone, who identifies themselves as journalists and swears allegiance to the cause of the profession, which is quite different than PR and communications, must take upon themselves the task to propagate truth by using the available mediums and reach out to the people with fact-based objective reporting. Only truth derived from facts through investigation has the absolute power to usher the nation towards a greater change by breaking the shackles of fascism.
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