Media

In October, The Caravan’s staffer Ahan Penkar was detained and assaulted by the Delhi Police when he went to the Model Town police station in north Delhi to report on the alleged rape and murder of a Dalit girl, with the police refusing to file an FIR. Delhi Police snatched his phone, deleted the data and assaulted him, resulting in visible injuries. Earlier, On 11 August 2020, three journalists working with The Caravan—Shahid Tantray, Prabhjit Singh and a woman journalist—were beaten, subjected to communal slurs, and sexually harassed, while reporting in Subhash Mohalla, in northeast Delhi. Calling the attacks on The Caravan journalists "reprehensible" and a "dangerous trend", leading media bodies like the Editor's Guild of India, Network of Women in Media and the Committee To Protect Journalists, amongst others, condemned the assault and demanded that the police book the assailants in both cases.

In April, the UP Police drove 700-km from Ayodhya to Delhi to serve a notice to Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of The Wire, asking him to appear at an Ayodhya police station in four days. This, when the country was in a full lockdown. The FIR was filed after The Wire reported that UP CM had attended a religious event breaking the lockdown guidelines. A second case was also filed alleging the Editor has posted an “objectionable tweet...to spread rumours and hostility among the public”. Journalism bodies condemned the FIRs against The Wire’s editor and came out in support. The Editors Guild of India described the FIR as “intimidation”. The New York-based Committee for the Protection of Journalists, the South Asia Media Defenders Network and the Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ), demanded the immediate withdrawal of cases.

Six hours before Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed the countrywide lockdown, he met 20-editors of the print media and advised them to ‘publish inspiring and positive stories” about the government’s handling of the pandemic. The Caravan reported the story and raised a debate on the media’s role between telling truth to power and “telling positivity to power”. The analysis inferred that the prime minister’s exhortations implied co-opting of the media. This story was among the first to highlight the dangers of the state using the emergency induced by the pandemic to co-opt the media and make it unquestioningly toe the line. The story was selected by Reuters Institute, Oxford, for being among the ten best stories on Covid-19 from across the world.

Feminism in India (FII) highlights how gender-based violence (GBV) is reported in the media and points out that most of the reporting on GBV is restricted to urban settings, while similar cases in rural India go largely unreported. The article also highlights how media coverage reflects the power hierarchies in society by largely ignoring issues in the rural areas and the marginalised sections. The article was part of the #GBVinmedia (Gender-Based Violence) project put together by FII and was cited and amplified by other publications.