Afia Ambreen
On September 5, Gauri Lankesh, a well-known critic of growing violence by Hindu fundamentalists, was shot dead outside her home in Bangalore in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She had been receiving threats from extremist groups since the election of a right wing government in 2014 led by Narenda Modi. In big cities and small towns across India thousands of people are protesting at the murder of a gutsy woman who fought for the marginalized, who called Dalit victims her sons, and who protested against injustice and venal politics in the face of death threats. Lankesh was the recipient of endless hate mail from Hindu extremists. She was vilified on two fronts. She dared to take on the powerful Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), currently ruling most of India. She criticised them and their cohorts for attacking minorities and creating a culture that enabled lynching, mob violence and hate crimes. She also defended Dalit rights, provoking the ire of many dominant-caste Indians across the political spectrum.
However, the killing of Lankesh has not only highlighted the shrinking space for free speech but also the increasing threats that journalists in India face today. The pressure from state and non-state actors, the fear of litigation and the risk of physical attacks often dictate what makes the news. Gauri Lankesh was seen by many as intrepid and a sympathizer of marginalized communities, a trait that Indian media reported she inherited from her father, P Lankesh, a fearless editor and founder of the independent Kannada language newspaper Lankesh Patrike. Hours before being killed, she had posted a message on her Facebook page condemning the planned deportation of Rohingya refugees by the Indian government. Ganesh Devy, a prominent linguist and a novelist, said “There have been attacks on writers and thinkers in the recent past, particularly since the ascendancy of Mr [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi. There has been murder of rationalist [Narendra] Dabholkar in Pune, [Govind] Pansare, a left party worker in south Maharashtra [state], Dr Kalburgi in Karnataka’s Dharwad, where I currently live.”
Unfortunately, journalists are increasingly under fire in India for their reporting. They are killed, attacked, threatened. In the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, India sank three places to position 136 (“least free”). The 2017 India Freedom Report, published in May by media watchdog The Hoot, spoke of an overall sense of shrinking liberty not experienced in recent years. It counted 54 reported attacks on journalists, at least three cases of television news channels being banned, 45 internet shutdowns and 45 sedition cases against individuals and groups between January 2016 and April 2017. Chhattisgarh has been one of several major flashpoints. Arrests, death threats and even torture of journalists, human rights activists and lawyers by agencies of the central Indian state created what a 2016 Amnesty International report called a near total information blackout. The state is the epicenter of a decades-old Naxalite-Maoist insurgency and its security forces have a reputation for violent excess. Under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, they also have broader powers of arrest than their counterparts in many other parts of India. Moreover, last year saw 29 internet shutdowns, compared to 15 in 2015. Many of these were instituted in Indian Occupied Kashmir, where mobile internet services were suspended from July 9 after Burhan Wani was martyred by Indian security forces. For many users, access was only restored in late January 2017. In October 2016, the Kashmir Reader, a prominent English-language newspaper, was asked to stop publication; it returned to newsstands in December.
Ironically, as popular as the BJP is, its religiously inflected brand of nationalism has raised concerns about government-backed sectarianism and low tolerance for dissent. Since 2014, Modi’s BJP, a right-wing political party rooted in Hindutva, a term often translated as “Hindu nationalism” and which contains Hindu supremacist elements, has held power. Currently, the BJP is the most popular party in the country, ruling in 14 of India’s 29 states. Moreover, India encodes freedom of expression as a constitutional right under Article 19, though it is a heavily qualified prerogative. Laws classified in the constitution as “reasonable restrictions” to freedom of expression are numerous, broad in scope, and, according to a 2016 Human Rights Watch report, “prone to misuse”.
