Daily Times

Under Fascist regime, there is no freedom of press, Media is by the state and for the State. Amit shah know this mantra very well how to control and use Media to prapogate Hindoata’ ideology. India not only controlling main stream media but also curbing digital and social media, forcing journalists to follow BJP national narrative, any deviation in this regard will result in consequences for them and their careers.

Modhi government has no mercy against the difference of opinion.When a little-known YouTube channel posted a video on February 11 calling for some of India’s most prominent journalists to “be hanged”, it marked a new danger for India’s free press.

The video was shared by a host of right-wing figures despite its call to execute at least five senior journalists, all from India’s clutch of independent online news media. The call for executing journalists appeared to cross a rubicon in rising attacks against India’s independent journalists and media over the last five years, marked in 2020 by a surge of government raids and criminal cases. The police took no action against the man who called for the hangings. The attacks on media soared in 2019 and 2020, most of all in Kashmir, which appears to have served as a proving ground, as journalists in the conflict-ridden region faced rising intimidation and surveillance after Article 370 of the Indian Constitution was abrogated in August 2019.

The Kashmir playbook on controlling the media through criminal cases, including those related to sedition and terrorism, has arrived definitively in the rest of India. Of 154 Indian journalists arrested or facing government hostility for their professional work between 2010 and 2020, more than 40% were in 2020 alone, an analysis by the Free speech collective, an advocacy group, found. Dhanya Rajendran of The news minute’, a founding member of Digipub and one of those identified by the String video for public hanging, said attacks on independent journalism have sharpened in many ways.“It is not just state machinery, which can use agencies to clamp down on news organisations. We also have senior ministers’ [Twitter] handles going after journalists, they tell their ecosystem to target this journalist,”. This ecosystem now synchronises disinformation, even if it lacks any logic or evidence: YouTube channels, Twitter handles with droves of followers and editors of some right-wing, pro-government media play a part, she said.

“It is very coordinated, across platforms,” according to Rana Ayyub, who said while she had been subjected to threats and online harassment for years, attackers now appeared to work in tandem on various social-media platforms and are emboldened enough to accuse her of terrorism and to name and abuse her family.Criminal cases and arrests are increasingly common against journalists rejecting the official narrative.

As the Editors Guild Of India tweeted on February 3 has begun “on an ominous note” for India’s free press.In just the last week of January 2021, Sedition cases were filed against six journalists, including India Today consulting editor Rajdeep Sardesai, veteran journalist Mrinal Pande and Carvan executive editor Vinod K Jose, in five police stations in five states for tweeting that a farmer-protestor killed on January 26 had been hit by a bullet.The use of these executive powers has a ‘ chilling effect’ on overall reportage, journalists said. “I never imagined I would see a day when the chill would spread through the country, when I would fear for the safety of my colleagues going out to report in the national capital,” Supriya Sharma, executive editor of the Scroll, who covered Chhattisgarh’s conflict between Maoists and security forces. That it is the foreign media doing investigative journalism in and about India should raise some difficult questions, said Ayyub, the Washington Post columnist.

“Why have we not been able to do a single damning expose in Indian publications in the last five years?” she said. “This is the time to take a stand and take an aggressive stand. Journalism is not even in danger, they have managed to intimidate us into silence, that process has happened.”

Ayyub said the “centrism” that has taken hold of much of mainstream media’s approach to news coverage was “disappointing” and was evidence of editors playing a “both-sides game” to appear objective.With every line he writes or edits, Srinagar-based journalist Fahad Shah imagines he’s sitting in a courtroom, answering a judge asking if he can provide evidence for what he just wrote.

“We can be booked for anything,” said Shah, an independent journalist and news entrepreneur for 11 years. In April 2020, independent Kashmiri photojournalist Masrat Zahra was booked under the UAPA, for photos she had uploaded on Facebook.In August 2020, some publications were barred from receiving any government advertisements, some for alleged violations of the new media policy of the union territory. This policy granted the government the right to declare a report as being fake news and suspend government advertising to them. In October 2020, Zahara told BBC that she personally knew people who quit journalism because of a carefully engineered atmosphere of fear.This is just a beginning of Modhi’s second term and by the time his story end there would be more horrific episode of state persecution against minorities and Press.