Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Kerala, Telangana — the list of states where the media comes up against State repression is growing longer. This is increasingly where the challenges to free speech are, with bureaucrats honing their media management skills and the local police making arrests with alacrity. States across the country are restraining and detaining reporters seeking to do their job. The courts step in sometimes to give bail or dismiss the case.
Just last week, in Telangana, a journalist with a digital portal called Telugu Scribe was granted bail by the Nampally court after he was arrested for posting a video seven months earlier featuring a farmer praising the former chief minister, K. Chandrashekar Rao. The farmer praised KCR and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi’s policies, particularly the Rythu Bandhu scheme, and said that he had financial difficulties under the current administration. The journalist, Gowtham Pothagoni, faces four first information reports, allegedly for promoting public disharmony.
The provocation varies from state to state. Earlier this month, the Kerala High Court declined to pass orders imposing restrictions on media reporting on the rehabilitation and the reconstruction being undertaken by the state government after the landslides in Wayanad. The government had sought a directive to the media to remove investigative content that it termed factually erroneous news that would demoralise the disaster management teams that were working on rehabilitation in Wayanad. The court said that it expected the media to exercise due care and caution while reporting news on the matter. “We cannot ignore the settled law governing the right to freedom of speech and expression of the media, which clearly states that reasonable restrictions in addition to what is already mentioned in Article 19(2) of the Constitution of India cannot be imposed on the media,” it said.
In the meantime, three press associations have expressed concern over the detention of several journalists in recent months in Bihar’s Vaishali and Muzaffarpur districts. Their statement referred to two murders of journalists in Muzaffarpur and the recent arrest of the YouTuber, Mithun Mishra, who was held for a day after he tried to report on flood management in the area. He was arrested while recording a clash between demonstrators, who were protesting regarding flood relief efforts, and the police on the NH-77 in Muzaffarpur. The FIR names over 20 people as accused.
To add insult to injury, the Uttar Pradesh government introduced a new digital media policy in August this year, designed essentially to use social media content creators for advertising. It set out to empanel social media influencers and content creators and issue them advertisements about the state government’s schemes and achievements with monthly payments ranging between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 8 lakh to each entity. Its officials assiduously worked out criteria for applicants in terms of subscribers and the number of original videos posted.
The government said the idea was to reach millennials. You could read that as millennial voters in light of the Bharatiya Janata Party's dismal performance in the state in the Lok Sabha elections. If this was the carrot, the stick was a clause which said legal action would be initiated against content creators by the Director of Information of the Uttar Pradesh government for content deemed anti-national or for painting the government in a bad light. The policy contained a provision for punishment ranging from three years to life imprisonment (for anti-national activities). It said that an accused could also stand trial for criminal defamation for posting indecent and obscene content on social media. What view the courts will take of such excesses remains to be seen.
No state, though, has suffered as much as the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir in recent years, both in terms of press freedoms and free speech. In the first two years after the abrogation of Article 370, more than 40 journalists in Kashmir had either been called for a background check, summoned or raided. They were forced to present themselves to explain their stories, social media conduct and even general movement. Surveillance of their daily lives and movements, including of their family members, became another form of intimidation.
Newspaper archives — the repository of the history of the Kashmiri people — disappeared overnight in Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir, Kashmir Reader and the pre-2019 digital archives of many other Urdu and English-language papers were partially or completely expunged.
Journalists here have also been charged under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 or the Public Security Act or other sections of what used to be the Indian Penal Code. In 2022, the National Crime Records Bureau registered a 17.9% increase in UAPA cases, the majority from Jammu and Kashmir (Free Speech Collective). Will the recently-concluded elections there usher in a more hopeful period? Will the use of UAPA recede?
Arrest under UAPA is a long-term punishment for both civil rights activists and journalists as cases from elsewhere in the country show. It has been four years since Siddique Kappan, a journalist then working in Delhi, was arrested while on his way to report on the gang-rape of a Dalit woman in Hathras in October 2020. He was arrested under the UAPA. Later, while in jail in Lucknow, a case was also registered against him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002. No charges are ever proven but the hearings go on. The Supreme Court granted him bail in December 2022. Since coming out of Lucknow jail, stringent bail conditions have made it difficult for him to earn a livelihood.
The weekly reporting to a police station in Malappuram district, five kilometres from his home, ensures that he cannot get work in a city, in Kerala or anywhere else. He filed a petition in the Supreme Court earlier this year for total relaxation of bail conditions which is likely to be listed next week.
In recent months, it has seemed like the courts are batting more frequently on the side of beleaguered journalists. In September, the Bombay High Court struck down as unconstitutional the Central government’s power to form fact-check units to uncover ‘fake’ news about itself. This power was vested by Rule 3 of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2023. The judgment said that Rule 3 violated the constitutional rights to freedom of speech and the freedom to carry on a trade or profession. For instance, the profession of a comedian — Kunal Kamra was one of the petitioners against Rule 3 — or a satirist would be shorn of all edge if Rule 3 became operational. The right to freedom of speech, said the judgment, is not the right to truth. Besides, Rule 3 would make the government the judge of ‘truth’, which was unacceptable.
But the real suspense today is over whether the Supreme Court will rule definitively, any time soon, on the use of the UAPA and the sedition laws by governments.
Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator. She also publishes the labour newsletter, Worker Web. https://workerweb.curated.co/issues