Journalists decry escalating state attacks on press freedom in India
Original article by Abdul Rahman republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
The ultra-right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments in various provinces in India have used sedition charges against journalists for their critical reporting on policies and actions.
Members of the Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ) and the Kerala Union of Working Journalists (KUWJ) held a protest in India’s capital, New Delhi, on Wednesday, August 27, denouncing the rising cases of state-sponsored attacks on journalists in the country.
The protesters also demanded the immediate withdrawal of all the false charges against senior journalists Siddharth Varadarajan, Karan Thapar, and Abhisar Sharma, calling them blatant attacks on media and press freedom in the country.
The DUJ and KUWJ warned that if their cases are not withdrawn and such attacks on press freedom continue in the future, journalists in the country will take larger public action and flood the streets in protest.
Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor-in-chief of the independent newsportal The Wire, Karan Thapar, senior editor with The Wire, and another senior journalist, Abhisar Sharma, were booked by the police in India’s north-eastern state of Assam and charged with sedition and other criminal activities.
The case against Abhisar is related to his reporting on his YouTube channel on the charges of corruption against the chief minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma. Abhisar also talks about the chief minister’s openly sectarian policies and provocative language against Muslim minorities in his video.
Varadarajan and Thapar were booked first in July and then again in August by the Assam police for their critical reporting on Operation Sindoor, India’s military operation against Pakistan in May which created a war-like situation between the two nuclear-powered neighbors.
Varadarajan and Thapar went to the court demanding the dismissal of the cases against them. While the matter was still under consideration by the court, the Assam police filed fresh charges against them. The Supreme Court of India (SCI) provided the journalists temporary protection from any action.
Abhisar Sharma also received interim relief from the SCI on Thursday. However, in both cases the SCI failed to quash the First Information Reports (FIRs), the official document in India that initiates criminal proceedings.
BJP’s attempts to silence critical voices
What the DUJ calls “attempts to browbeat and harass the media into submission”, has been a policy of the BJP government to silence critical voices in the country.
Assam is ruled by the same BJP which runs the union government in Delhi.
Several other journalists have faced false charges in the state in the last few years. In March of this year, Assam witnessed large-scale protests against the arrest of senior journalist Dilwar Hussain Mazumdar, who was arrested after he tried to expose corruption in a cooperative bank.
The union government has also used its agencies to raid and shut down independent newsportals, such as Newsclick, and has threatened others, including the Wire, to try to silence them.
Reflecting on the state of media in India earlier this year, Reporters without Borders (RSF) demanded that the state must “end media raids and arrests of journalists, often carried out under the guise of anti-terrorism laws or tax regulations.”
RSF had noted that “this judicial harassment has reached a critical level for independent news media”, with authorities repeatedly misusing the legal provisions.
Misuse of sedition
Apart from anti-terrorism laws and allegations of financial irregularities, the BJP government has also used sedition, a colonial era offense which remained a part of India’s legal codes even decades after independence. It has been frequently invoked against journalists questioning government policies.
Following massive public outcry and court interventions, the BJP government promised to scrap it in 2023, underlining its “colonial origin”. However, within months, the same government brought it back with a new name under the new set of legal codes called Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), promulgated in 2024.
The Wire has filed a fresh petition in the court to remove the sedition charges from the new code (section 156 of the BNS).
The DUJ hopes that the section “will be struck down so it can no longer be used to arrest, imprison, browbeat and harass those who dare to speak truth to power.”
