Editorial: Protect health of democracy too

The trio was working on stories concerning the mob violence perpetrated in Delhi in February. This isn’t an isolated incident. In Tamil Nadu, three journalists of a Kovai-based website were picked up by the police in April after their news portal reported challenges encountered by healthcare workers battling COVID as well as corruption at a PDS outlet. Another TN-based journalist was beaten to within an inch of his life in March for penning a politically sensitive piece in a regional publication.

As per reports, since the lockdown was imposed in March, as many as 24 journalists have been restrained from their duties – via police intervention, arrests, and even assault. In February, over 12 reporters were harassed or physically attacked while covering the Delhi riots. These developments turn the focus on the rising attacks mounted on the Fourth Estate, over the past few years. Stakeholders have deemed journalism in the country as a risky business. As per the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2019 Global Impunity Index, India is placed 13th among nations where reporters are murdered while their killers go scot-free. India has been on this list for the past 12 years. The numbers are harrowing when taken in the global context of crimes against women reporting from the field. As many as 145 threats and acts of intimidation against women journalists have been documented by a group called Coalition of Women in Journalism. India once again held the distinction of having the third-highest cases of intimidation against women reporters.

The irony is compounded when law and order, which should go hand in hand with responsible journalism, often fails the latter when it comes to politically sensitive reportage. Responding to India’s low ranking of 142 in the World Press Freedom Index 2020, released in April this year, I&B Minister Prakash Javadekar had tweeted that the nation’s media enjoys ‘absolute freedom’. But that is a moot point when one considers the spate of arrests that have been carried out in our own free land, with respect to journalists who had supposedly run afoul of the government.

The ramifications of curbing press freedom are all-too visible in how the world responded to the pandemic. When the WHO went on to announce COVID-19 as a pandemic in March this year, Beijing censored a long list of keywords pertaining to the virus on social media apps such as WeChat as well as news aggregation apps. As a result, people couldn’t openly speak about the biggest health emergency witnessed in recent times. According to the East Asia Bureau Chief of Reporters Without Borders, the fact that the regime did not do anything in the first month of the pandemic, other than attempting to conceal the scale of the contagion points to the hand-in-glove relationship shared between Beijing and censorship agents.

In a progressive move, a Central Index monitoring cell was recently constituted in India to help improve the country’s press freedom index. The cell envisions a framework that includes a mix of legislative changes as well as outreach programmes to better the nation’s standing in journalistic freedom. Apart from protecting the interests of journalists, what’s being considered is the creation of a body that can go through ‘misleading or incorrect’ reporting on media platforms and work out deliberations, as opposed to making a criminal or legal matter of it. In times such as the pandemic, it is more vital that the press is allowed to function smoothly and sans bottlenecks, coercion, and fear of retribution or assault of any kind. It is to be borne in mind that airing one’s dissent and even contrarian views are essential to the upkeep of a healthy democracy.