After the long-running saga of alleged media co-option by the State, last month’s exposés in The Indian Express on the Election Commission of India (ECI) have made the narrative on India’s media more nuanced than before. As the government at the Centre continues to face flak over major and minor issues, enough media outlets are paying a price for not only exposing it but also choosing to keep doing so.
Elections in India’s states have become increasingly challenging for a ruling party unsure of the outcome. Hence the urge to intervene in the process and risk the outcry that may follow. The advent of the Cockroach Janta Party, born to mount protests against misgovernance and non-governance, has contributed to raising the decibel
level of opposition to the government’s revision of the electoral rolls. This provides both the Opposition parties and the media with daily fodder.
In countering the protests and exposés, restricting and delegitimising the media have become part of the government’s larger game plan. But given the sheer pervasiveness of print and digital media outlets, countering them is not easy. The Rejinagar and Nandigram by-elections earlier this month in Murshidabad and East Midnapore districts, respectively, were a test case for what State intervention in the electoral process could deliver for the ruling party. The Supreme Court declined to intervene, terming them “only by-elections”. But reporters from a range of media outlets were at hand to document the heavy-handed State role in subverting the electoral process. A Scroll.in video recorded the police asking journalists why they were entering homes to talk to people they did not know.
Scroll.in’s headline from Rejinagar said it all: “Ground report: Muslim voters stopped, Opposition arrested, journalists blocked in Bengal bye-poll.” The Telegraph also reported that in Bengal’s Rejinagar and Nandigram bypolls, voters were inked but “not allowed” to vote. A telling detail in the Scroll.in report said that a third tactic the police used in Rejinagar was to block the social media pages of a number of prominent local journalists for the week leading up to the bypoll. Many of them were unblocked only after voting concluded, it said.
AltNews was also at hand to confirm that at least a dozen Facebook pages run by local journalists from Murshidabad had been temporarily restricted — pre-censorship with a little help from Meta. Both the publishers of Murshidabad Today and Murshidabad News Time, which had lakhs of followers each on Facebook, got takedown notices from Meta, the former for specific videos about the police detaining workers of the Aam Janata Unnayan Party in late-night drives. Scrutinising hyper-local reporting that could capture polling irregularities became part of local electoral strategy.
But when police and election managers are up against journalists at large, they tend to forget that media scrutiny can be quite indefatigable, not ending even after the election noise and dust have died down. The by-election is over but the reports keep coming. Just two days ago, The Wire published a long and detailed story on how the ECI software had deleted 5.38 lakh Bengal voters with auto-generated rejections without citing a reason. Should the courts eventually decide to render post facto justice, the evidence is accumulating.
The Delhi protests over the past month saw multiple physical attacks on journalists reported as well as the government’s efforts to discredit the reporting on social media. While hearing petitions on alleged police excesses, the Supreme Court was told by the solicitor-general, Tushar Mehta, that authorities struggle to distinguish a reel-maker from a genuine freelance journalist. Derogatory narratives from mainstream television channels such as CNN-News 18 have amplified this theme, referring to evidence from open-source intelligence and naming sums allegedly paid to individuals for putting out damaging reports with no specific hard evidence cited. The term, content creator, now pops up in headlines referring to the protest reporting. As in “Protesters & Content Creators Detained As Delhi Tightens Security Amid CJP Protests” (Republic World).
What journalists did not do through this whole period of protests against the chief election commissioner is give enough space to other protests happening across India around the same time, with many triggers — farm loan waivers, student hostel facilities, better roads, noise pollution, irregularities in government recruitment exams, such as one conducted by the Maharashtra Public Service Commission which saw paper leaks, apart from protests in the states over the functioning of the ECI. Sugarcane farmers were protesting in Maharashtra and blocking the Pune-Bengaluru national highway. In Uttar Pradesh, MBBS doctors protested over pay disparity and pending salary arrears and announced a work boycott. Also in Uttar Pradesh, Bijnor farmers broke police barricades to protest over pending sugarcane dues and a leopard menace.
There is a class dimension to which protests make news for the English media but those governing are nonetheless aware of the scale of wider discontent and what it might mean for future elections, including the polls in Uttar Pradesh next year. Political analysts have been suggesting that the government will not give in on removing the CEC if its political future is at stake. But for the same reason, many levels of journalists across the country will be driven to continue investigating, despite the risks.
Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator and was founder editor of TheHoot.org. She runs the Worker Web newsletter on Substack and a WhatsApp channel of the same name