Swamy and friends have it wrong — press freedom in India is a real problem
“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes politics.”
This deliberate misquote from the England-based anonymous graffiti artist and political activist Banksy captures the zeitgeist of our era —an era fuelled by false dichotomies, misinformation and vilification of those who dissent, if only by lending voice to the truth.
And one of the lies that is oft repeated is that in India, there is press freedom; that those claiming the opposite are liars. And the latest offender in this blatant flight of fancy is the incorrigible Rajya Sabha MP and veteran lawyer, Subramanian Swamy.
Swamy, for years, has been the loose cannon of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The pugnacious leader is an equal-opportunity offender, attacking not just the Opposition, but his colleagues from the BJP as well, more often than not saying things one would normally want to be censored by Pahlaj Nihalani, twice inside the head. But despite his history of verbal wickedness, it is often hard to shrug Swamy off as just another man on the internet, saying whatever he pleases. The man, after all, has a more than significant number of hardcore followers who take his word as gospel — he is an influential ideologue.
At 8.13am on June 29, Swamy tweeted: “Breaking News: US most dangerous place for journalists. Yesterday a gunman walked into the office of a Washington DC area newspaper and shot dead five. Lutyens [sic] please upload it on Reuter and IANS.”
What Swamy was referring to was an incident from June 28, when a shotgun-wielding man called Jarrod W Ramos made his way into the office of the Capital Gazette, and opened fire. Five were killed and two were gravely wounded. According to the New York Times, Ramos’s feud with the newspaper began with a column in 2011, which detailed his alleged harassment of a high school classmate.
There are two things worth noting here. One, the motive behind this attack is believed to be personal, even if it may have been affected by how Americans today view the press — fuelled largely by President Donald Trump vilifying the fourth estate on a tweet-ly basis. Two, the American press may be under attack, but the bigger problem in the nation, one that can be linked directly to this story, is the lack of gun-control.
Of course, Swamy chooses to ignore both and make a reckless statement like “US most dangerous place for journalists”, implying that what the liberal media has been complaining about for a long time — the dangers faced by journalists in India in this day and age — is a bogey created to forward some agenda; presumably against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He asks the "Lutyens Media", a term used to describe the influential and elite newsmen and women who run the major news networks and papers (who lounge at Khan Market bars, drinking wine and eating cheese), to report this on Reuters, perhaps taking a dig at a recent Thomson Reuters report that called India the most dangerous country for women.
What he further chooses to ignore is that India was recently ranked at 138 out of 180 countries — having fallen two places from 2017 — on the yearly “Press Freedom Index” maintained by the global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. That is 93 places behind the United States of America, which was ranked at 45.
For the sake of argument, let us ignore this report from “The West”, as Indians often feel the urge to do whenever something negative about India is reported by non-Indians.
Let us ignore what the "Lutyens Media" says this report means or what pressures it feels. Let us ignore the regular abuse received by prominent (or not so prominent) journalists on social media (some of which includes death threats, rape threats and doxxing). Let us ignore the fact that the ruling government has made it a point to not just paint the press in a negative light, but also made an active effort to cut it out of the loop.
Let us just focus, instead, on the 2017 murder of journalist, rationalist and social activist Gauri Lankesh, and the 2018 murder of Kashmiri journalist Syed Shujaat Bukhari. Let us focus on Sandeep Sharma, a journalist who was run over by a dumper in Madhya Pradesh's Bhind district; a journalist who had been reporting on illegal sand mining in the area and had, prior to his death, filed a complaint citing a threat to his life, after he conducted a “sting operation” against a police officer.
Let us focus on how the police beat up dozens of journalists in Kolkata for covering a protest. Let us focus on how defamation cases are filed against news organisations by powerful politicians to stifle unfavourable news about them. Let us focus on how Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, the editor-in-chief of the Economic and Political Weekly, a peer-reviewed academic journal of global repute, was pushed to resigning by the weekly journal’s board after a lawyer sent a legal notice asking for two reports to be taken down, claiming they were defamatory towards a business group.
Let us focus on the fact that according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, 142 attacks against journalists for “grievous hurt” were registered nationwide from 2015 to 2017.
Maybe, faulting the “Lutyens Media” makes sense, considering that it does exist within a cosy and secure bubble, seated rather away from the real danger.
But this lack of acknowledgement for the real danger that lurks behind the backs of many journalists in India is what is concerning. Many would like to pretend that Indian journalists cry wolf about an acute lack of press freedom in the country. Many more would like to believe the so-called liberal media victimises itself to give PM Modi a bad name. And Swamy, who cannot be ignored as a political force, with his more-than-seven-million followers on Twitter, only legitimises these beliefs.