It’s a critical time for journalists. 

CPJ spoke to reporters and editors across India about their plans for covering these historic parliamentary elections in a difficult environment for the media, which has seen critical websites censored, prominent editors quit and independent outlets bought by politically-connected conglomerates, while divisive content has grown in popularity. 

Here are their biggest concerns:

Political violence 

During the run-up to the 2019 vote, there was a rise in assaults and threats against journalists during clashes between political groups, particularly in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, and Jammu and Kashmir, according to data collected by CPJ and the Armed Conflict & Location Event Data Project. 

“Our state is now very famous or infamous for pre-poll, and post-poll, and poll violence,” Ishani Datta Ray, editor of Anandabazar Patrika newspaper in the eastern state of West Bengal, said at the launch of CPJ’s safety guide for journalists covering the election. “We have to guide them [our journalists] and caution them about the perils and dangers on the field.”

Dozens of citizens were killed in West Bengal’s 2019 and 2021 elections, largely due to fierce competition between the state’s ruling Trinamool Congress and the BJP.

Datta Ray described how she spent the night on the phone to one of her journalists who was part of a group who were beaten during a clash between two political parties and trapped in a building in Kolkata, West Bengal’s capital, as party activists attempted to set fire to one of the reporters, whom they had doused in petrol. The journalists were eventually rescued by police and locals.

“Nobody should die for a newspaper. Your life is precious,” said Datta Ray. “If there is a risk, don’t go out.” 

Mob violence

Many journalists fear that they will not receive adequate protection or support from their newsrooms on dangerous assignments. 

More than a dozen journalists were harassed or injured during the 2020 Delhi riots, the capital’s worst communal violence in decades, in which more than 50 people died.

One female reporter told CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, that she and a Muslim colleague were sent to out report without any safety gear.

“People were standing with knives and swords on the streets of Delhi and asking journalists for their IDs” to try to determine their faith based on their names, she said. 

The journalist’s colleague was beaten up and she was thrown on the ground by a rioter. After she posted about the incident on social media, her employer summoned her back to the office. 

“She said that everyone must be thinking that we are not protecting our reporters. I said, ‘Leave what everyone thinks. What are you doing? You are not protecting your reporter. In fact, you’re shooting the messenger,’” she told CPJ.

Datta Ray described how politicians sometimes try to turn their supporters against journalists by calling out their names at rallies and saying, “They are against us. Don’t read that newspaper.” 

“We’ve had to text people that ‘Just come out of the crowd … Don’t stay there,’” she said. “You don’t have to cover the meeting anymore. Just come out because you don’t know what could happen.’” 

Criminalization of journalism 

Since the last general election, a record number of journalists have been arrested or faced criminal charges, while numerous critical outlets have been rattled by tax department raids investigating fraud or tax evasion.  

For the last three years of CPJ’s annual prison census, India held seven journalists behind bars — the highest number since its documentation began in 1992. All but one of the 13 journalists recorded in CPJ’s 2021-23 prison censuses were jailed under security laws. Some appear in multiple annual censuses due to their ongoing incarceration. 

Six were reporting on India’s only Muslim-majority region, Kashmir, where the media has come under siege following the government’s 2019 repeal of the region’s constitutional autonomy. 

India’s longest imprisoned journalist, Aasif Sultan, was arrested in 2018 for alleged militant ties after publishing a cover story on a slain Kashmiri militant. 

Since 2014, CPJ’s research shows, at least 15 journalists have been charged under India’s anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which allows for detention without trial or charge for up to 180 days, since 2020.

Datta Ray also said she was dealing with a growing number of cases against local journalists.

“Every institution should have a very strong back up of a legal team,” she said, recounting how West Bengal police spent five hours raiding the house of Parkash Sinha, a journalist who covers federal investigative agencies for ABP Ananda news channel, which is part of the same media group.

“You don’t know if your write up, if your TV report, has angered any establishment, any police,” said Datta Ray, who worked with lawyers to advise the reporter via a conference call while the February raid was going on. “You can be slapped with any kind of charges.”

“They copied everything from his personal laptop and from pen drives … they cannot do but they did it,” she said. 

Sinha has denied the charges in the ongoing case, which relate to a land dispute.

Attacks by other journalists 

Under Modi, Indians have become increasingly divided along political lines — and that includes the media. Government officials have labeled critics as “anti-national” and cautioned broadcasters against content that “promotes anti-national attitudes.” 

In February, India’s news regulator ordered three news channels to take down anti-Muslim content that it said could fan religious tensions, while the Supreme Court has called for divisive TV anchors to be taken off air.

Journalists are not immune.

“Indian media is very, very polarized now,” Dhanya Rajendran, editor-in-chief of The News Minute, said at CPJ’s launch event. “We are seeing a clear divide in the Indian media, where one side is continuously egging the government to go arrest people from the other side, to take action, branding them as ‘anti-national.’”

She highlighted October’s police raid on the news website NewsClick, which has been critical of the BJP, and the arrest of its editor Prabir Purkayastha, who remains behind bars on terrorism charges for allegedly receiving money from China.

“We saw many Indian TV anchors go on air and ask for the arrest of the editor Prabir. They continue to call him all kinds of names,” said Rajendran, as she called for more solidarity among journalists and newsrooms.

Online harassment

Ismat Ara was among 20 Muslim women journalists whose pictures and personal information were shared for a virtual “auction” in 2022 by an online app called Bulli Bai, a derogatory term to describe Muslim women. Ara filed a police complaint which led to the arrest of the app’s creators.

Trolling is still a regular occurrence for her. This month, she posted on social media about being on an election assignment in the northern state of Uttarakhand, which is known for its Hindu pilgrimage sites. One of the comments on X, formerly known as Twitter, said, “In future you will have to apply for visa to visit these places in India.”

Since she was chased by a mob at the Delhi riots, Ara said she usually hides her Muslim identity while reporting.

“I think it helps not to be visibly Muslim,” she said, adding that she removed a picture of herself in a hijab on X after a BJP aide asked for her handle to check for “negative stories.” 

Some journalists at The News Minute receive abusive comments whenever they publish stories, Rajendran said.

“People have disturbed sleep patterns, they lose their confidence, they self-censor themselves, they do not want to tweet out stories,” she said, urging journalists to talk about their experiences with friends and colleagues.

Online censorship

In recent years, India has become a world leader in imposing internet shutdowns, according to the digital rights group Access Now. 

Government requests to platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, to take down or block content and handles in India for defamation, impersonation, privacy and security, or inflammatory content have increased multifold in the last few years. From October to December 2023, India had the most video takedowns globally with over 2 million YouTube videos removed. 

In early April, YouTube blocked prominent Hindi language news channels Bolta Hindustan and National Dastak without explanation. 

On Tuesday, X said it had blocked several posts by politicians and parties, which made unverified claims about their opponents, in compliance with orders from the Election Commission of India, while noting that “we disagree with these actions” on freedom of expression grounds. 

Digital rights experts have criticized India for failing to respect a 2015 Supreme Court order to provide an outlet that has allegedly produced offensive content with a copy of the blocking order and an opportunity to be heard by a government committee before taking action.

Device hacking 

Digital security is another growing concern. After The News Minute was raided by the income tax department, Rajendran said she organized a training for her staff on how to respond if an agency wants to take your device or arrest you.

Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of The Wire news website, has been repeatedly targeted with Pegasus spyware. 

“We need to fight for our right to work as journalists without this sort of intrusive, illegal surveillance,” he told CPJ. “A first step is to educate ourselves and devise technologically sound strategies to cope with surveillance.” 

In the wake of the revelations, Varadarajan’s devices were analyzed by a committee established by the Supreme Court but its findings have not been made public. 

“Until recently, journalists were primarily trained to uncover and disseminate the truth,” Rajendran concluded. 

“In today’s landscape, it is equally vital to educate both aspiring journalists and seasoned professionals on methods to safeguard themselves, their sources, and their personal devices.”

B.P. Gopalika and Naresh Kumar, chief secretaries of the states of West Bengal, and Delhi, respectively, did not respond to CPJ’s emails seeking comment on authorities’ efforts to protect journalists during the election.

Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Sanjay Jaju did not respond to CPJ’s email seeking comment on social media censorship. 

Secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology S. Krishnan did not respond to CPJ’s email seeking comment on the allegations of hacking.

CPJ’s India Election Safety Kit is available in English, हिंदी, ಕನ್ನಡ, தமிழ் and বাংলা

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Kunal Majumder/CPJ India Representative.

On 3 October, the homes and offices of over one hundred journalists and researchers across India were raided by the Delhi Police, which is under the jurisdiction of the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs. During this ‘act of sheer harassment and intimidation’, as the Committee to Protect Journalists called it, the Delhi Police raided and interrogated the Tricontinental Research Services (TRS) team. Based in Delhi, TRS is contracted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research to produce materials on the great processes of our time as they play out in the world’s most populous country, including the struggles of workers and farmers, the women’s movement, and the movement for Dalit emancipation from caste oppression. It would be a dereliction of duty for TRS researchers to ignore these important developments that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians, and yet it is this very focus on issues of national importance that has earned them the ire of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Is it possible to live in the world as a person of conscience and ignore the daily struggles of the people?

At the end of the day, the Delhi Police arrested Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty, both of the media project NewsClick.

During the raid of the TRS office, the Delhi Police seized computers, phones, and hard drives. I very much hope that the Delhi Police investigators will read all of the materials that the TRS team has produced with great care and interest. So that the Delhi Police does not miss any of the important texts that TRS has produced for Tricontinental, here is a reading list for them:

1. The Story of Solapur, India, Where Housing Cooperatives Are Building a Workers’ City (dossier no. 6, July 2018). Balamani Ambaiah Mergu, a maker of beedis (cigarettes), told TRS researchers that she used to ‘stay in a small hut in a slum in Shastri Nagar, Solapur city. When it rained the hut used to leak, and there wouldn’t be a single dry patch inside’. Since 1992, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has campaigned to secure dignified housing for workers in this town in the state of Maharashtra. Since 2001, CITU has been able secure government funds for this purpose and build tens of thousands of houses, a process led by the workers themselves through cooperative housing societies. The workers built ‘a city of the working class alone’, CITU leader Narasayya Adam told TRS.

2. How Kerala Fought the Heaviest Deluge in Nearly a Century (dossier no. 9, October 2018). In the summer of 2018, rain, and subsequent flooding, swept through the southern coastal state of Kerala, impacting 5.4 million of the state’s 35 million residents. TRS researchers documented the flood’s rage, the rescue and relief work of organised volunteers (largely from left formations), and the rehabilitation of both the Left Democratic Front government and various social organisations.

3. India’s Communists and the Election of 2019: Only an Alternative Can Defeat the Right Wing (dossier no. 12, January 2019). To understand the political situation in India in the lead-up to the 2019 parliamentary elections, the TRS team spoke with Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat. Rather than confine her analysis to the electoral or political sphere, Karat discussed the challenges facing the country at a sociological level: ‘Cultures promoted by capitalism and the market promote and glorify individualism and promote individualistic solutions. All these add to the depoliticisation of a whole generation of young people. This is certainly a challenge: how to find the most effective ways of taking our message to the youth’.

4. The Only Answer Is to Mobilise the Workers (dossier no. 18, July 2019). In April–May 2019, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, prevailed in India’s parliamentary elections. In the aftermath of the elections, the TRS team met with CITU President K. Hemalata to talk about the periodic massive strikes that had been taking place in the country, including an annual general strike of nearly 300 million workers. Whereas working-class movements in other countries seemed to be weakened by the breakdown of formal employment and the increasingly precarious nature of work, unions in India displayed resilience. Hemalata explained that ‘the contract workers are very militant’ and that CITU does not distinguish between the demands of contract workers and permanent workers. One of the best examples of this, she said, is the anganwadi (childcare) workers, who – along with Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) workers – have been on the forefront of many of the major agitations. Both of these sectors – childcare and health care – are dominated by women. ‘Organising working-class women is part of organising the working class’, Hemalata told TRS.

5. The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India (dossier no. 21, October 2019). P. Sainath, one of the most important journalists reporting on rural India and a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, traced the impact of the crises of neoliberal policies and climate catastrophe that are simultaneously imposed on India’s farmers. He documents the work of Kudumbashree, a cooperative made up of 4.5 million women farmers in Kerala, which he calls ‘the greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programme in the world’ (and about whom we will publish a longer study in the coming months compiled by TRS).

6. People’s Polyclinics: The Initiative of the Telugu Communist Movement (dossier no. 25, February 2020). In the Telugu-speaking parts of India (which encompass over 84 million people), doctors affiliated with the communist movement have set up clinics and hospitals – notably the Nellore People’s Polyclinic – to provide medical care to the working class and peasantry. The polyclinics have not only provided care but have also trained medical workers to address public health concerns in rural hinterlands and small towns. This dossier offers a window into the work of left-wing medical personnel whose efforts take place outside the limelight and into the experiments in public health care that seek to undercut the privatisation agenda.

7. One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India (dossier no. 32, September 2020). Not long after the October Revolution brought the Tsarist Empire to its knees in 1917, a liberal newspaper in Bombay noted, ‘The fact is Bolshevism is not the invention of Lenin or any man. It is the inexorable product of the economic system which dooms the millions to a life of ill-requited toil in order that a few thousand may revel in luxury’. In other words, the communist movement is the product of the limitations and failures of capitalism. On 17 October 1920, the Communist Party of India was formed alongside scattered communist groups that were emerging in different parts of India. In this brief text, the TRS team documents the role of the communist movement in India over the past century.

8. The Farmers’ Revolt in India(dossier no. 41, June 2021). Between 1995 and 2014, almost 300,000 farmers committed suicide in India – roughly one farmer every 30 minutes. This is largely because of the high prices of inputs and the low prices of their crops, a reality that has been exacerbated by neoliberal agricultural policies since 1991 and their amplification of other crises (including the climate catastrophe). Over the past decade, however, farmers have fought back with major mobilisations across the country led by a range of organisations such as left-wing farmers’ and agricultural workers’ unions. When the government put forward three bills in 2020 to deepen the privatisation of rural India, farmers, agricultural workers, and their families began a massive protest. This dossier is one of the finest summaries of the issues that lie at the heart of these protests.

9. Indian Women on an Arduous Road to Equality (dossier no. 45, October 2021). Patriarchy, with its deep roots in the economy and culture, cannot be defeated by decree. In the face of this reality, this dossier offers a glimpse of the Indian women’s movement for equality and maps the range of struggles pursued by working women across the country to defend democracy, maintain secularism, fight for women’s economic rights, and defeat violence. The dossier closes with the following assessment: ‘The ongoing Indian farmers’ movement, which started before the pandemic and continues to stay strong, offers the opportunity to steer the national discourse towards such an agenda. The tremendous participation of rural women, who travelled from different states to take turns sitting at the borders of the national capital for days, is a historic phenomenon. Their presence in the farmers’ movement provides hope for the women’s movement in a post-pandemic future’.

10. The People’s Steel Plant and the Fight Against Privatisation in Visakhapatnam (dossier no. 55, August 2022). One of my favourite texts produced by the TRS team, this dossier tells the story of the workers of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, who have fought against the government’s attempts to privatise this public steel company. Not much is written about this struggle led by brave steel workers who are mostly forgotten or, if remembered, then maligned. They stand beside the furnaces, rolling the steel out and tempering it, driven by a desire to build better canals for the farmers, to build beams for schools and hospitals, and to build the infrastructure so that their communities can transcend the dilemmas of humanity. If you try to privatise the factory, they sing, ‘Visakha city will turn into a steel furnace, North Andhra into a battlefield… We will defend our steel with our lives’.

11. Activist Research: How the All-India Democratic Women’s Association Builds Knowledge to Change the World (dossier no. 58, November 2022). The dossier on Visakha Steel was built in conversation with steel workers and reflected the evolving methodology of TRS. To sharpen this method, the team met with R. Chandra to discuss how the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) has used ‘activist research’ in the state of Tamil Nadu. Chandra shows how AIDWA designed surveys, trained local activists to conduct them among local populations, and taught the activists how to assess the results. ‘AIDWA’s members no longer need a professor to help them’, she told TRS. ‘They formulate their own questions and conduct their own field studies when they take up an issue. Since they know the value of the studies, these women have become a key part of AIDWA’s local work, bringing this research into the organisation’s campaigns, discussing the findings in our various committees, and presenting it at our different conferences’. This activist research not only produces knowledge of the particularities of hierarchies that operate in a given place; it also trains the activists to become ‘new intellectuals’ of their struggles and leaders in their communities.

12. The Condition of the Indian Working Class (dossier no. 64, May 2023). In the early days of the pandemic, the Indian government told millions of workers to go back to their homes, mostly in rural areas. Many of them walked thousands of kilometres under the burning hot sun, terrible stories of death and despair following their caravan. This dossier emerged out of a long-term interest in cataloguing the situation of India’s workers, whose precariousness was revealed in the early days of the pandemic. The last section of the dossier reflects on their struggles: ‘Class struggle is not the invention of unions or of workers. It is a fact of life for labour in the capitalist system. … In August 1992, textile workers in Bombay took to the streets in their undergarments, declaring that the new order would leave them in abject poverty. Their symbolic gesture continues to reflect the current reality of Indian workers in the twenty-first century: they have not surrendered in the face of the rising power of capital. They remain alive to the class struggle’.

The Delhi Police investigators who took the material from the TRS office have each of these twelve dossiers in hand. I recommend that they print them and share them with the rest of the force, including with Police Commissioner Sanjay Arora. If the Delhi Police is interested, I would be happy to develop a seminar on our materials for them.

Study and struggle shaped the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi, for instance, read voraciously and even translated Plato’s The Apology into Gujarati, rooted in the belief that reading and study sharpened his sense not only of how to struggle but how to build a better world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

“The arrest of NewsClick editor Prabir Purkayastha and the raids on NewsClick and the homes of at least 12 of its former and current journalists are an act of sheer harassment and intimidation,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Frankfurt, Germany. “This is the latest attack on press freedom in India. We urge the Indian government to immediately cease these actions as journalists must be allowed to work without fear of intimidation or reprisal.”

On Tuesday, Delhi police arrested Purkayastha and NewsClick’s head of human resources, Amit Chakravarty, as part of an investigation into suspected foreign funding of the media outlet, a charge that NewsClick denies.

Earlier in the day, police searched the office of NewsClick and the homes of several of its staff and contributing journalists and seized several electronic devices, including laptops and phones.

The homes of the following journalists were searched; the six names marked with an asterisk were also questioned by the Delhi Police Special Cell, a unit of Delhi Police that investigates cases of terrorism and organized crime:

• Purkayastha*
• Subodh Varma, an editor
• Satyam Tiwari*, a reporter
• Paranjoy Guha Thakurta*, a contributor  
• Abhisar Sharma*, a contributor  
• Urmilesh*, a contributor  
• Aunindyo Chakraborty*, a contributor
• Bhasha Singh, a contributor
• Anuradha Raman, a contributor
• Aditi Nigam, an editor
• Sumedha Pal, a contributor
• Irfan K., a cartoonist

Independent non-profit news website The Wire reported that Delhi Police’s Special Cell initiated an investigation into NewsClick in August, alleging violations of five sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, including raising funds for terrorist acts and conspiracy, as well as two sections of the Indian Penal Code, including promoting enmity between different groups based on various factors.

In 2021, the Enforcement Directorate searched NewsClick premises and the residences of four members of senior management as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering linked to foreign funding.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Since August 8, the X account of independent journalist Ahmed Khabeer has been blocked in India, he told CPJ by phone. Khabeer published the email he received from X, which said it had “received a legal removal demand from the Government of India regarding your Twitter account, @AhmedKhabeer_, that claims the following content violates India’s Information Technology Act, 2000.”

The email did not provide any further details about the alleged illegal tweets.

Khabeer told CPJ that he believed he was targeted for his extensive coverage of violence against Muslims and the Dalit minority that was “completely ignored by the mainstream media.” In early August, he posted videos which he said showed an attack on a Muslim man by the Hindu supremacist group Bajrang Dal and authorities’ demolition of Muslim homes in northern Haryana state.

Separately, independent journalist Rohini Singh posted two critical comments on X about a video of a teacher ordering her students to slap a seven-year-old Muslim student, which went viral after being published on August 25. Singh received two emails from X, reviewed by CPJ, which said her tweets had been withheld in India in response to demands from the Indian government under the IT Act. X also blocked tweets on the issue by other users of the platform. 

“I believe my tweets were withheld because the government has an issue with the reporting of a crime rather than the crime itself,” Singh told CPJ via messaging app.

Religious tensions are on the rise in India under the ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which aims to transform secular India into a Hindu nation.

NDTV news anchor Gargi Rawat also posted a link on X to her outlet’s article about the teacher slapping the student in northern Uttar Pradesh state. It was also blocked, she told CPJ via messaging app.

The three journalists told CPJ that they had not received any explanation from the government as to how they had violated the IT Act, which empowers the government to block content on vague grounds including the “sovereignty and integrity of India.”

Digital rights experts say that India is not respecting its legal obligations under a 2015 Supreme Court order to provide a person or outlet that has allegedly produced offensive content with a copy of the blocking order and an opportunity to be heard by a government committee before it blocks their content.

On August 12, X also suspended the account of NewsClick after a BJP lawmaker said in parliament that the independent website received funding from China to create an “anti-India” atmosphere. NewsClick is known for publishing articles critical of the BJP government. Its account was restored the following day.

NewsClick’s editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha did not respond to CPJ’s messages requesting comment. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology also did not respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

[Editor’s note: The 11th paragraph has been updated to correct the date that NewClick’s account was restored.]

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Such surveys examine a group’s balance sheets to search for irregularities, those reports said, noting that authorities had not disclosed a reason for the action. On the same day, tax authorities also conducted surveys at the offices of the Center for Policy Research think tank and Oxfam India, a charity organization, according to those news reports.

The Digipub News India Foundation, a trade body of Indian digital media organizations, said in a statement that the tax survey was part of an inquiry into alleged violations of regulations concerning foreign financial contributions. That statement condemned the raid on the IPSMF as an “assault on independent journalism.”

IPSMF has provided grants to privately owned online news outlets, including Alt News, Article14, The Caravan, Swarajya, and The Wire, according to those news reports.

Since 2018, tax authorities have also raided news outlets including Newslaundry, The Quint, and Newsclick, as CPJ has documented.

CPJ emailed the Indian Income Tax Department for comment but did not immediately receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.