Livemint: New Delhi: Thursday, September 14, 2017.
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| The Gauri Lankesh murder has reignited the debate on freedom of press and the freedom of speech in India, although the motives behind her killing are yet to be established. Photo: PTI |
The murder of
journalist Gauri Lankesh has reignited the debate on freedom of the press and
the freedom of speech in the country, although the motives behind her killing
are yet to be established.
According to
the not-for-profit organization, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ),
between 1992 and 2017, 28 journalists were murdered in a premeditated or
spontaneous act in direct relation to their work in India. Lankesh is the
latest addition to the list. These figures do not include those killed in
military crossfire or while covering deadly assignments such as violent
demonstrations. Among the major economies of the world belonging to the G-20
group, India has witnessed the fourth highest number of such killings related
to journalistic work, behind Mexico (38), Russia (38), and Brazil (37).
More
worryingly, India features in the list of 13 high-impunity countries where an
overwhelmingly large proportion of such murders have remained unsolved,
according to a 2016 CPJ report. Keeping India company in this list are
countries such as Somalia, Iraq, and Pakistan. Most journalists who have been
murdered for their work covered politics and corruption.
Another
community which has been targeted is that of Right to Information (RTI)
activists. An Indian Express article by the political scientists Christophe
Jaffrolete and Basim U. Nissa points out that 69 RTI activists have been killed
in India so far since the act was passed in 2005, and hundreds have faced
assault. The article notes that journalists are among some of the most
dedicated RTI activists and have faced the brunt of such attacks. Many of the
murders of RTI activists have also remained unsolved.
Death is the
ultimate price journalists, writers, and whistleblowers pay for challenging
powerful vested interests or for expressing dissent. And while such murders
represent the most extreme form of attack on journalists and writers, less
extreme forms of attacks such as death threats and abuses are common. The
advent of social media has only exacerbated the problem, with women journalists
facing the brunt of the attacks on social media.
When
journalists raise such issues, they are often told that the rise in such abuses
or attacks at least partly reflects the declining credibility of the Indian
media.
However, the
rising reach of Indian media over the past few decades has been accompanied by
greater trust in it, data from successive rounds of the World Values Survey
show. It is nobody’s case that Indian journalists are infallible, but the
long-term trends suggest that their credibility has been rising over time.
As the charts
illustrate, trust in the Indian media has risen sharply since the mid-1990s,
when state monopoly over the broadcast news medium was broken. Confidence in
the press was higher in India than in several other countries surveyed, the
data shows.
The so-called
paid-media narrative has only served to embolden the attackers of free speech.
The
conventional channel of criminal defamation charges also continues to be
deployed to silence or intimidate journalists. Commentators have lamented the
fact that the country’s highest court continues to endorse this draconian legal
recourse.
All political
parties are equally to blame. CPJ’s list of 28 journalists referred to above is
spread across states ruled by all shades of political parties. Twenty-seven of
them are listed under the ‘complete impunity’ category, implying that no
convictions have been obtained in these cases.
To stop the
assaults on journalists and writers, and to ensure justice when such assaults
do take place, the country requires legal and institutional reforms as well as
measures to plug weaknesses in policing. But above all, this requires greater
political commitment to protect free speech and the freedom of the press.
If Prime
Minister Narendra Modi really wants to build a “New India” free from
deprivation and injustices of the past, and the BJP wants to own the tag of the
“party with a difference”, they must walk the talk and show initiative on this.
They cannot seek cover in the past sins of earlier regimes, or those of other parties.
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