At noon on Saturday 13 February the writer Githa Hariharan appeared via Zoom at a literary festival organised by Shoolini University, 300 kilometres north of New Delhi where she lives. Looking wan and tense, Githa talked about her growth as a writer, from her Commonwealth Award-winning debut, The Thousand Faces of Night, to her latest novel, I Have Become the Tide, which deals with themes of justice and caste. Addressing an invisible audience from her computer screen, Githa’s tone grew urgent as she spoke of her literary values and her disagreement with the idea of writers as silver-tongued illusionists.
This is no time “to wax lyrical”, she said, but “to use words as what they are, weapons”: the challenge is to discover solidarity, imagine multiplicity and connectedness. This is necessary, she added, if we are to resist the ascent of a “homogeneous story” which “invariably leads to the exclusion of people […] to censorship […] to what the poet Seamus Heaney called ‘the government of the tongue’, and today that’s where we are in our country”.
Githa’s words were all the more striking given her situation. It was four days since officials from the government’s financial investigation agency, the Enforcement Directorate, had confined her and her partner, Prabir Purkayastha, to their house, blocking them from contact with the outside world, including lawyers. Her appearance at the literature festival, by special leave, was the first glimpse of her since the enforced disappearance. Halfway through the interview, she noted that it was exactly 100 hours since the Enforcement Directorate had taken over her life. They would remain for another 14 hours.
While Githa and Prabir were effectively held hostage in their home, Narendra Modi’s government had been planting stories against them. That very morning, the Indian Express, a leading national daily, had carried a report about some 30 crore rupees (£3 million) in foreign “remittances” received by Prabir’s media company, PPK NewsClick, payments the Enforcement Directorate was investigating. The report mentioned that the Express had not heard back from emails and texts sent to Prabir and NewsClick’s editor, Pranjal Pandey.
Had the newspaper tried asking around, it would have discovered that no one could reach Prabir. When the raids began on the morning of 9 February, from the NewsClick office to the homes of seven of its staff members – including Prabir and Pranjal – their access to phones and other electronic devices was suspended. As Githa addressed the Shoolini Literature Festival, the sleuthing carried on around her. The Express was not alone with its one-sided report. On 9 February, another national daily, the Hindustan Times, had published the government’s claim that NewsClick was being probed for money laundering.
Tax raids, sedition and anti-terror laws
Raids like that on NewsClick have become routine in India: between 2011 and 2020, over 1,700 raids were carried out in connection with 1,569 investigations of tax evasion and money laundering. Only nine cases in this period ended with a conviction in court. The real punishment arrives with the long wait for a trial: bank accounts are frozen and questioning continues, as do raids and the harassment of employees. “The process becomes the punishment,” as Prabir wryly sums it up.
In July this year, after a devastating second wave of Covid exposed the government’s unpreparedness for a health crisis, both the television company Bharat Samachar and the Dainik Bhaskar Group, owner of one of the highest-circulating newspapers in Hindi, were raided – the latter at over 30 locations in five states. The two media houses had reported on the discrepancy between the government’s low count of Covid fatalities and the real numbers logged by graveyards and cremation grounds.
Tax raids have also been used against global organisations. In September 2020, Amnesty International was forced to halt operations in India after a succession of raids by the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate. Amnesty had been sharply critical of human rights abuses in the wake of the Modi government’s 2019 decision to rescind the constitutional recognition of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and again of the government’s use of repressive new laws, whether in Kashmir or elsewhere in the country.
If the Bureau and the Directorate don’t sound Orwellian enough, there is also the National Investigation Agency, which handles cases of sedition and terrorism. Anti-terror laws and charges of sedition are a variation on the tax raid, freely used to silence critics. Sedition cases have shown a 28 per cent increase each year since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. At the start of its second term in 2019, the government also sharpened an already harsh law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). The amended law permits the government to designate an individual as a terrorist before proving the charge in court.
Bail is virtually impossible to obtain under the UAPA, and the government has the right to hold an accused person in custody for up to 180 days without presenting a charge sheet against them. The Bureau and the Agency handle cases under this law; both sedition and UAPA charges have been levelled at journalists on a regular basis.
In October 2020, while covering the story of a caste atrocity – the gang rape and torture of a young Dalit woman that had led to her death – the journalist Siddique Kappan was arrested and charged with being a terrorist. More than a year later, he remains in prison awaiting trial. Once again, the rate of conviction is low, at less than 2 per cent of the 7,840 arrests made between 2015 and 2019. The rate of pendency (cases waiting to reach trial) stands at 83 per cent – the harrassment being the point.
Modi’s “unofficial Emergency”
Opposition leaders and the commentariat often compare what is unfolding today to Indira Gandhi’s suspension of democracy in 1975, terming it Modi’s “unofficial Emergency”. Gandhi’s 21-month-long dictatorship had entailed the suspension of fundamental rights, imprisonment of opposition leaders and pervasive press censorship. Modi’s “Emergency” is more insidious. Rather than a straightforward authoritarian regime with a single author, it is built upon interlocking circles of collusion, an elite consensus that amplifies the government’s message and supports its disruptive behaviour. India’s mass media is no simple victim but part of this convergence of interests, and it is complicit in the gutting of democratic citizenship.
At first glance, India’s media landscape in print and broadcasting looks diverse: in 2018, there were over 118,239 publications, along with more than 380 news and current affairs channels on television. This appearance is deceptive: just a few media houses dominate the market. Their business models tend to rely on earnings from advertising, which makes editorial and journalistic freedom vulnerable to “soft pressure” from both government and corporations.
Modi has set a record by becoming the first Indian prime minister to complete a full term in office without calling a single press conference. He did, however, spend twice as much on advertising in his first five years as the previous government did in ten.
Meanwhile, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s “Democracy Index” charts a steep decline in India’s position. In 2014, it was ranked at 27 out of 167 countries; by 2020, it stood at 53, and was reclassified as a “flawed democracy”. International surveys echo this finding. This year’s “Democracy Report”, published by the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, describes India’s lapse from an “electoral democracy” in 2010 to an “electoral autocracy” in 2020. The grim proof of these assessments is the derisive manner in which they are reported on – or, frequently enough, not reported – in India’s newsrooms.
Palagummi Sainath, founder of the People’s Archive of Rural India, points out that the Indian media systematically overlooks 70 per cent of the country’s population. Coverage of rural issues makes up 0.67 per cent of front-page news in the national dailies, while crime and entertainment dominate the middle pages. Can it even be called “mainstream media”, he asks, if it studiously ignores the mainstream? And can its coverage of farmers’ protests be fair when the billionaire Mukesh Ambani, who gains from new laws that bring agriculture under corporate control, also happens to be India’s biggest media owner?
Despite lack of resources, small and independent digital platforms increasingly do the heavy lifting in terms of both news coverage and breaking stories. NewsClick, set up in a shabby one-room studio 12 years ago, saw viewership rise dramatically with its coverage of the farmers’ protest movement that began in 2020. Erupting with renewed vigour in early February this year, the farmers had the Modi government on the back foot when the Enforcement Directorate came calling on NewsClick.
Inequality in India’s media houses
Inequality is entrenched in India’s media houses. Oxfam India and the digital platform Newslaundry helped to expose this reality with their 2019 study “Who Tells Our Stories Matters”, which examined the representation of different groups in the media, including the indigenous Adivasis or Scheduled Tribes, and the Dalit communities (Scheduled Castes). Dalits make up 16.6 per cent of the national population, and continue to face widespread discrimination and violence, despite untouchability being outlawed. The study examined a selection of print, television and digital platforms in English and Hindi, finding that the Scheduled Tribes, who make up 8.6 per cent of the national population, were virtually absent from newsrooms. In prominent dailies such as the Times of India and the Economic Times, all the writers on caste issues turned out to be members of the upper castes.
India’s media is not an outlier here. Social exclusion is rampant in corporate boardrooms, the judiciary, bureaucracy, research and teaching positions in universities, and notably in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the mothership of Hindu nationalist ideology. A secretive and profoundly undemocratic organisation that reaches into every sphere of public life, the RSS has been led through the 96 years of its existence by six unelected men in succession, five of them from India’s highest caste, the Brahmins (the remaining one was a Kshatriya, the second-highest caste).
Away from traditional media institutions, however, excluded social groups have a vibrant presence in the digital and social media space. Among their demands is an all-India caste census (the last one was published in 1931). A new caste census, the journalist and public intellectual Dilip Mandal points out, would disclose each caste group’s share in the national population, and in wealth, income, savings, credit, higher education and employment. This is precisely the kind of information suppressed by the elite consensus, whether between government and capital or that of upper-caste cohesion, for it would expose Hindutva to some painful truths. The last thing they want is for caste to be acknowledged as a dividing line within the Hindu social order, between entitlement and deprivation.
Over the past three years, the prison population of underprivileged Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims has been joined by some of the country’s most distinguished anti-caste scholars, lawyers, journalists and rights activists, all of them charged with terrorism under the UAPA. Self-assertion, whether by subordinate caste groups seeking their rightful share of resources, or by the anti-caste movement – which identifies Hinduism as the basis of caste – is a grave threat to the RSS’s projection of a homogeneous and conservative Hindu nationhood.
The force of Hindutva
Promoting Islamophobia offers an escape route from the subject of caste and has proved useful for Modi in broadening Hindutva’s base. “Modi hai tau mumkin hai” – “Modi makes it possible” – was the insinuating slogan that returned the BJP government for a second term in 2019. The party’s increased vote share and parliamentary majority were swiftly parlayed into a mandate to reshape the constitution. On 3 August that year, the amended UAPA overturned the presumption of innocence as a legal principle in terror-related cases. Two days later, the central government revoked Article 370 – which had granted the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir special recognition – and also trifurcated the state. Led by a raucous media, public opinion across the country cheered the dissolution of Kashmir’s constitutional status.
By the end of 2019, the central government had passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which obstructs Muslim immigrants from obtaining Indian citizenship. Amit Shah, the minister of home affairs, promised to launch a National Register of Citizens next. The poorly documented among India’s Muslims, citizens included, saw themselves at imminent risk of being derecognised and interned.
To supporters of Hindutva in the mass media, these were powerful moves. Primetime shows fanned the hatred, accusing Muslims of bizarre, wholly imaginary crimes, from waging “love jihad” (marrying Hindu women) to “UPSC jihad” (seeking jobs in the civil services), and even “corona jihad” (deliberately infecting Hindus). With this free pass for Islamophobia came a fresh contempt for facts and reasoning. This disdain was also extended to defenders of secular values: cued by BJP leaders, television studios denounced human rights activists as the “bits-and-pieces gang” of “anti-national” subversives, and as “urban Naxals” – secret agents fomenting a communist insurrection. When a group of writers returned their state awards in protest at the government’s inaction against violence by lynch mobs attacking Dalits, Muslims and other minorities, they too were deemed “anti-national”. In these ways, the mass media has helped transform Modi’s electoral victory into an epistemic coup.
Githa’s latest novel, I Have Become the Tide, shows an India where old forms of bigotry continue to defeat struggles for public reason, inclusion and dignity. However, the novel ends by marking a fresh start, as a great swell of people advances to confront a decaying culture. The ending is not a poetic consolation. Githa also put together a companion volume of non-fiction, Battling for India, that collates accounts of political resistance and ground-level organisation – by women, Dalits, Adivasis, writers, artists, religious, ethnic and sexual minorities – rallying against Hindutva and the neoliberal oligarchy.
It may not be Birnam Wood and the troops advancing on Macbeth, not yet, but this force has the courage of its convictions. India’s mass media, dwindling and demoralised, ignores this swell of resistance at its peril.
This piece is from the New Humanist winter 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
