Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
In 2006, Sabrina Buckwalter wrote a long investigation for the Times of India about a brutal multiple rape and murder in a village near the city of Nagpur. The story drew national media attention. Six months later, police appeared at her office to serve her with an order to leave India.
Buckwalter had dropped out of Georgia State University to pursue a career in journalism in India after falling “in love” with the country during a stint abroad there. Since her ejection in 2007, her visa applications have been denied at least four times, most recently in 2014. A brief visit in 2011 was disrupted when she was detained by police.
“It was a very long ordeal that I fought very hard, but when the police come to your office to serve you paperwork to leave, you have to leave,” says Buckwalter. “In the course of the reporting for the story, someone was upset with me and made a phone call to various people inside the government to make sure that I wasn’t allowed to continue reporting.”
By her own account, her forced exit from India could have been worse. As disruptive as it was, she was not arrested, nor was she technically deported. Her continued ban, however, underscores the intricate means used by Indian authorities to constrain reporting on sensitive issues of religion, caste, and state. Foreign journalists face access and visa woes, while Indian journalists face legal trouble, professional consequences, and even violence if they cross any number of lines that conscribe the freedom of expression guaranteed in the Indian constitution.
“There are certain things that you can’t report on, or you’ll face difficulty reporting,” says Buckwalter. “When you deal with issues that may overall tarnish the reputation of India. India very tightly guards what sort of critiques are made. If you’re viewed as overstepping those lines, you face some type of consequence.”
Pressure is also mounting on journalists to restrict critical reporting under the current Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was elected last year. Influential journalists have been fired after reporting critically on Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. Even before Modi was elected, prominent editors and journalists were fired, forced to resigned, or threatened with violence over their coverage of Modi, and those measures have continued since his election.
“From vicious trolling to the crackdown on criticism of Modi and of Hindu extremism more broadly is consistently met with threats and repression,” says Priyamvada Gopal, a member of the faculty of English at Cambridge University.
Modi’s more zealous supporters are notorious for hectoring and harassing his critics, but as Buckwalter’s case illustrates, the systematic problems facing journalists in India predate the new prime minister. India’s laws prohibit “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class,” creating an entire legal system that favors those who take offense. “The constitutional right to speak,” the commentator Salil Tripathi wrote this week, “is now subordinate to the non-existent right to be offended.”
The huge number of different institutions and actors involved makes it difficult to easily characterize a threat to freedom of expression in India.
“Pakistan is one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists. China is the world’s leading jailer of journalists. India, on the other hand, doesn’t neatly fit into any such narrative,” says Sumit Galhotra, Asia researcher at the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Journalists in the country face a range of threats from a range of actors,” he said, including the legal system, police and militants who abuse journalists, and media owners who interfere in editorial decisions. India ranks 13th on CPJ’s Impunity Index, with seven murders of journalists that have gone unprosecuted. Twenty-one journalists have been murdered in the country since 1992.*
Foreign journalists in India have not escaped the consequences of sensitive reporting. In 2011, American journalist David Barsamian was deported after travelling to India to report on Kashmir, another red-line issue for the Indian state. In addition, at least six foreign nationals, including two German journalists and an Australian filmmaker, have been denied entry to a village in Tamil Nadu that has been the center of protests against a planned nuclear power plant.
“We need to look at these instances as part of a larger pattern,” says Geeta Seshu, who writes for the media watchdog site The Hoot, based in Delhi. “These are not just aberrations as we used to think earlier, with procedural or diplomatic or ‘they didn’t apply through the right channels.’ Barring foreign journalists, academics and others from the country,” Seshu says, “just means that only one kind of sanitized version of India will be allowed to be transmitted outside India.”
For journalists, academics, and activists, it can be hard to predict when you’ve crossed a red line. India’s vast and lively media continues to operate, and numerous foreign news organizations publish reports every day that could be considered unflattering. But the harassment, lawsuits, and threats continue. “The common denominator,” says Buckwalter, “is that you’ve offended someone who has enough pull, or who can make enough phone calls, to deter you from reporting further on the issue that caused a stir.”
It was in this context that Penguin Books India withdrew its publication last year of The Hindus: An Alternative History, a book by Wendy Doniger, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago, after the publisher was sued by a conservative Hindu group. Doniger is far from alone. The exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin denounced what she called a “growing cancer” of censorship after pressure from Indian Muslim groups. After facing protests and harassment from critics, the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan announced last month that he was withdrawing all of his works from publication. “Author Perumal Murugan is dead,” he wrote on Facebook.
Advocates say that an increasingly restrictive climate could deter foreign reporters and experts from visiting. “If anyone who wishes to come and make an independent assessment of India, which they ought to do, from any part of the world, they’re not going to.” Says Seshu. “We’re supposed to be a democratic country.”
*The piece has been updated to reflect the fact that CPJ currently reports no jailed journalists there, not one as was previously written.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
