Let's renew our vows for a free and courageous press

As an Indian journalist, I feel proud that many of those who fought for independence and laid the foundations of my country were also journalist-writers. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was associated with six journals, two of which he was the editor. Bhimrao Ambedkar wrote in the journals Mooknayak, Bahishkrit Bharat, Janata, and Prabuddha Bharat. Mooknayak translates as the voice of the voiceless, and he was the founder but not the official editor. Bhagat Singh wrote in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi and English in many journals (some under an assumed name), and he was learning Persian in his final days in jail.

As an Indian journalist, I can feel no pride in the state of the media in my country today. Most recently, in 2022, Altnews' co-founder Mohammad Zubair, a fact checker par excellence, was subjected to an unconscionable misuse of the criminal justice system. (We saw the spectacle of FIR after FIR from multiple venues till the Supreme Court recently gave some relief, though the cases continue).

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We began a journey 75 years ago with an awareness of the importance of a free press as an essential pillar of a healthy democracy. The first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a journalist-writer himself, was in the early years of the foundation of the Republic, even reportedly attuned to the potential conflict between owners' interests and a free press. In 1952, invited to speak at a conference of Editors, he said in the course of a speech, quoted in The Democratic Journalist — the Journalist in Nehru by M R Dua: "Does the freedom of the press ultimately mean the freedom of the rich man to do what he likes with his money through the press?"

Those words sound prophetic today when the very same corporations that have thrived in the current age and make large donations to India's pre-eminent ruling party, consolidate their media acquisitions. The quid pro quo is so obvious that there
is no point elaborating on what cronyism means and the terrible implications it has for a healthy press.

We must worry as this is a regression. Among the colonised nations of the world, many of which attained freedom in the same age, we had the most successful tryst with democracy and did not lapse into a dictatorship or a military junta. Yes, we had the abomination of the 1975 Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, the daughter of the same liberal first prime minister, an indicator of how quickly the good can go bad. But with the exception of that dark 21-month period, the media felt free, in spite of its many imperfections. There were always creeping issues such as media owners having larger business agendas, regimes getting pissed off, and ministers and prime ministers calling editors, but we could still breathe.

I write this from the perspective of a one-time daily beat reporter in the national capital whose media house was raided by income tax officials following stories done by the publication, whose editor fielded prime ministerial complaints that he
chronicled in his autobiography but never considered a sacking or even a beat removal. And yes, there were pressures during NDA-I, but they did not vanish during UPA I when a cover story invited a somewhat threatening call from a family member of a leading minister and another, a visit to the editor by a friend of the Gandhi family. For a scribe covering politics in the national capital, such pressures were inbuilt into the job definition. Yet, one was never fully gagged or told to self-censor on the scale that is the norm today.

The balancing act was to have the access and do the stories, but today access necessitates shutting down the stories and doing public relations for the regime instead, sometimes in a plausible manner, more often in a display of craven sycophancy. Forget the cliché of speaking truth to power, most of our so-called national news channels, with notable exceptions, are now quite incapable of speaking the truth about power. Asked to bend, they crawl and then crawl some more, kicking up a huge ruckus as they do so, contributing not to informing the public but dividing society.

There are outlets and media groups that bravely hold out, as do many of the online news portals, both of which struggle to pay salaries and raise funds for the reporting even as some face an onslaught of FIRs, tax inquiries, defamation cases and orchestrated social media campaigns. Add the internet shutdowns and crushing of journalism in Kashmir, and no wonder India, which once held out the promise of being a model in the post-colonised world, is tanking in the World Press Freedom Index. In 2020, we fell to 142 among 180 nations, and in 2022 we slid to 150 in the Index prepared by the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontier (RSF).

We live in a world where there is an alarming redefining of freedoms in general along personal, social, religious and cultural lines as social media runs wild with polarising themes. Everyone is 'reporting' even as fewer resources are available to allocate to genuine reporting and investigations. We must keep our feet more firmly to the ground as big tech and low politics destabilise the old media.

I briefly divert to interject myself into this column. In the course of the year, I have been named in two FIRs, a civil defamation case that arose from tweeting a story done by another news outlet and was reportedly "auctioned" on an app named Bullibai on the first day of this year along with other Muslim women. I mention this as I did briefly become the news (as opposed to covering it) but say so because this reflects poorly not on me but on the state of affairs vis a vis media rights in my country — and those rights are in greater peril if the journalists in question have particular names.

There is also a grotesque irony that I should be named in any complaint for inciting hate as besides political journalism, my passion project has been to promote pluralism and highlight syncretism: In the early years of my journalism career, in the post-Babri Masjid demolition era, I would spend two years on the road travelling across India chronicling plural traditions in our popular culture, in music, shrines, communities, first published as a column in The Indian Express, later put into a book titled In Good Faith, published in 2012 by Rupa, also translated into Marathi and Tamil.

We probably needed some good fact-checking here to ask what I could have in common with the priest of the Dasna temple, Yati Narasinghanad, accused of making several hate speeches, to be reportedly named in the same FIR.

One consequence was that the same RSF, which continues to rank media and cause us international embarrassment, would come out with a demand that the complaint against me be withdrawn and used the term "Kafkaesque" to describe it. What also counted with me, as I was out of the country, was the positions taken swiftly by media forums in the national capital, such as the Press Club of India, Indian Women's Press Club (IWPC) and Delhi Union of Journalists, condemning the selective targeting. These are elected media bodies where internal elections have taken place this year, so traditional media still has its feet planted in the old values and is speaking up for them.

As someone who has loved the profession that has given me a vantage view of contemporary times, I will not be drowning in the filthy pond of abuse and threats. I am a traditional journalist and intend to remain one. It is beneath my dignity to respond to filthy social media campaigns and place myself at the centre of any story. And I am no victim when there are activists such as Teesta Setalvad (who also ran a media platform) and many more in jail. I am a fully empowered citizen of India who knows the core values of my profession and believes it is necessary for all of us to renew our vows to the foundational values of the Republic.

(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and author.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.