Abstract
India ranks 140th among 180 countries worldwide in the World Press Freedom Index (WPFI), according to the 2019 report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). In 2018, India was 138th in the same index and 136th in 2016. For the media of the world's largest democracy, this is disconcerting. The slide in the country's press freedom ranking is indicative of a complex and hostile social, political, and economic environment pushing at the boundaries of media that is struggling to perform independently as the fourth estate. This chapter takes a critical look at imminent threats to freedom of speech and expression faced by the Indian media in the contemporary situation. The first objective of the chapter is to identify diverse threats to the Indian media, specifically journalism. The second objective is to trace both immediate as well as distal factors that breed hostility towards the media, with a focus on press laws and constitutional provisions in India.
TopIntroduction
On September 5, 2017, while returning home from work, as Gauri Lankesh, editor-publisher of a Bangalore-based, regional language weekly newspaper, Gauri Lankesh Patrika, stepped on her doorstep, she met the deadly fate she had been dreading for a while. Three unidentified men riddled her body with seven bullets, piercing through her head, neck and chest, leaving her dead on the spot. The 55-year-old Lankesh, a journalist-activist, who was popular among the Dalit rights activists and several Left-wing groups, was an outspoken critic of the caste-based social stratification system in India. Lankesh was regarded as a fearless proponent of human rights and a vehement opponent of the recent rise of nationalism in India. Obituaries penned by her friends and sympathizers described her as incorrigibly argumentative and bold. She was an influential political organizer and mobilizer, who had taken several socially and politically marginalized voices under her wings.
Lankesh’s murder is the most high-profile, cold-blooded, murder of a journalist in India in a long time (BBC, 2017). Considering her stature and contribution to journalism, she was honored with the prestigious Anna Politkovskaya Award posthumously (The Hindu, 2017). Following Lankesh’s murder, a chill pervaded in the country’s newsrooms stirring speculation that many other journalists and activists were on the assailants’ target list. The prime accused in her murder, Parashuram Waghmore, admitted to killing Lankesh to save his religion. He also confessed to having never read Lankesh’s work. He claimed that he had learned from sources that it was blatantly against Hindutva, an ideology Waghmore passionately followed.
The World Press Freedom Index (WPFI) by Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) puts India at 140 among 180 countries. The ranking is an indicator of a complex undercurrent that is a combination of social, economic and political factors. The WPFI index, similar to the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) index, defines press freedom in a multidimensional sense. The WPFI uses a survey methodology to evaluate the perception of press freedom within legal, political, institutional and professional environments. To compute the rankings, the index assesses physical and psychological threats and attacks, perceived as well as real, among local and foreign press workers, media activists and other related non-governmental agencies in the country (Becker, Vlad, & Nusser, 2007). While the index is pinned on how threats to press freedom and journalistic safety are perceived, it has been established that journalists’ perception of political and economic threats is fairly concurrent with the real indicators of political freedom and ownership structures in a society (Hanitzsch & Mellado, 2011). According to statistics compiled by the Free Speech Hub for India, by the Indian media watchdog foundation, The Hoot, in the year 2017, three journalists were killed for their journalistic work, 46 were attacked for their reporting, 27 were detained, arrested or had cases registered against them, while 12 were threatened for their journalistic work (The Hoot, 2018). The report claims that the social and political environment in India has steadily grown worse for journalism and journalists since 2017. According to Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ), five journalists were killed in 2018. This warrants a critical look at the events that have occurred in the past to study their implications on the freedom of the press, journalist safety and journalistic integrity in the present and the future.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Occupational Health and Safety of Journalists: The term refers to a set of conditions related to health and safety of workers in the profession of journalism. It includes associated labor laws, human rights and organizational policy that have an impact on health and safety of journalists.
#MeToo Movement in India: It refers to the social movement wherein the #MeToo hashtag was used on social media by women journalists, media professional, and women from the fields of arts and entertainment, to publicly disclose personal accounts of sexual harassment at workplace by their colleagues, senior journalists and public figures.
Freedom of the Press: It is defined as the right of the press and the media to publish and disseminate information freely, independently and accurately without any external or internal pressures, curbs or censorship. According to the principle of free press, the press or the media also has the right and the duty to decide the public interest value of any information.