Dozens of journalists detained in India over two days, rights group says

One of those detained, Shoaib Daniyal, told the ABC he saw a police checkpoint at the end of his driveway and was hauled onto a bus after talking to an officer about the protest he was heading to cover. Indian laws permit warrantless detention in certain circumstances when police reasonably suspect someone has committed or will commit a crime, but Daniyal said no explanation was given. Journalists who spoke to the ABC said watching police push, pull and carry reporters onto buses was something they never expected to see in Delhi.

The detentions come as demonstrators hold rallies across the country demanding the resignation of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, alleging a national revision of voter rolls was being used to favour the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It is the second wave of major protests this year, after the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party ousted the education minister in July over exam paper leaks.

Manisha Pande, editor-in-chief of digital news company Newslaundry, said a government would not feel confident enough to act this way in the national capital, with its concentration of journalists, because of the outrage it would evoke. According to the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, India ranks 157th of 180 countries, down from 140th in 2019.

Sreenivasan Jain, an author and journalist who has reported in India for more than 30 years, said the media had never been entirely free but the past decade had brought “a complete collapse”, with swaths of television media “brought to heel” and turned into propagandists for the government. Pande compared prime-time broadcast news to having “multiple Fox News” channels: “Channel after channel that will have the same talking points praising the government, rarely ever questioning it, hammering at the opposition, going at people who protest, calling dissenters enemies of the country.” She said anchors who repeated government talking points were often rewarded with interviews with ministers or the prime minister. The dominance of pro-government television news has produced the term “Godi media”, meaning lapdog media; many television networks depend on government advertising and are owned by corporations with business interests tied to government contracts.

Jain spent three decades at NDTV, once widely considered one of the last traditional television networks openly critical of Modi. He left in 2022 after the Adani Group, owned by billionaire Gautam Adani, took over the network. He said it became clear within weeks what direction the new owners wanted, including pressure to broadcast an interview Adani gave to a rival network. “I didn't want, for a second, to be around [those] endorsing those sorts of editorial practices.”

Younger Indians are increasingly rejecting the television news their parents had consumed for years, Pande said: “You have a generation that is … revolted by the idea of what television news has [reported] over the last 12 years, which is not talking about issues that concern them [like] education, jobs [and] infrastructure.” That disillusionment has created an opening for independent digital news platforms and creators publishing on YouTube, Instagram and X. Among them is Ramit Verma, a 35-year-old satirist detained while covering the Delhi protests, who wants more Indians to document events: “Everyone is [a] journalist, especially in India right now, where the mainstream media is so sold out and so dangerous.”

Jain believed the detentions were the response of “a wounded regime”. “They wanted to stamp out the protests using extraordinary force, and I think silencing or trying to intimidate the media in these new ways is part of that response.” The Indian Express reported the government ordered close to 195,000 takedown orders on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube posts between March and July. Verma said he has lost count of his own censored posts, with removals happening “without any explanation, especially from Meta”.

Restrictions have also extended to foreign outlets. Major international broadcasters including the BBC and Al Jazeera have faced requirements to set up Indian entities and employ local staff, and foreign journalists face tighter geographical restrictions, with government permits required to enter certain regions such as Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Proposed privacy laws would force journalists to ask permission before naming anyone in a story; the Digital News Publishers Association, representing 21 news publishers, is arguing in the Supreme Court that the law must exempt journalists, with the laws labelled pre-censorship by the association.

Daniyal said the detentions are the latest sign of a changed environment. "For the last 12 years, the fear that journalists feel has really shot up," he said. "This idea that journalists are doing a critical job for democracy, the foundation of that has [been] shaken."