For a credible journalist, it was a story that had all the ingredients of a great investigation involving an issue of ultimate significance for any democracy: the conduct of free and fair elections. Rahul Gandhi’s press conference on August 7 revealed institutional corruption at the highest level, supported by credible data that was clearly presented. It was established in the course of that interaction that over one lakh votes from just one assembly constituency in Karnataka – Mahadevapur – was procured through fraudulent means and probably made it to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s kitty. The figure was large enough to have stirred the news hounds. The intriguing questions it raised should have whetted their appetites for more. If this is indeed taking place in one small corner of the country, imagine the impact if such stratagems are replicated on a national scale. At the end of that interaction, the newshounds stood up, yawned, but instead of sniffing the air for leads, rushed to their feeding bowls. Soon they were happily regurgitating for their viewers what had been fed to them. If you want to know why we have a Potemkin Media today, just follow what happened after that consequential news conference. I use the term advisedly. It recalls the fake Potemkin villages to hide a sordid reality that Grigori Potemkin, a military leader of imperial Russia reportedly built along the royal route to impress Catherine the Great. Today it appears we have a vast network of news channels and newspapers bearing the outward façade of a functioning media with lively chat shows and passionate anchors, curated front pages and well-qualified analysts, which may be as fake as any of the props that old Grigori had set up.So how did our newshounds go about their job in the aftermath of the press conference? First, they relied on sources curated for them by agencies long embedded in the Potemkin Media system: The so-called news agency, ANI, for instance, or the BJP’s IT Cell. Within a short span of time, we had quotable quotes from notables within the BJP system, including of course from usual suspects like a Ravi Shankar Prasad or a Sambit Patra, trying to pour scorn on what was revealed. Their arguments made it into the subsequent chat shows and newspaper reportage: “the public voted us in, that’s all that matters in a democracy”; “The Congress is sabotaging the system, they don’t win and are frustrated”, “People love Modi”; “People love us”; “The ECI has been calling them, but they prefer to disrupt parliament”, “irresponsible and anti-national”. A stream of insults also emerged: “he is a liar, lying is a tradition with the Congress”. What was conspicuous in these responses was the complete disinclination to engage with the sticky issues raised at the press conference.Second, the amplification of misinformation. Aaj Tak’s “fact check” claiming that a “voter search” in the ECI website did not match the accusations made by Rahul Gandhi, immediately went viral. The BJP’s IT Cell possibly expedited it and certainly amplified it across social media platforms – until it was fact-checked out of the frame by professional fact checkers.Third was the focus on key “talking points”: The ECI CEO of Karnataka promptly demanded that Gandhi furnish a declaration/oath so that “necessary proceedings can be initiated”. This was not an effort to be transparent but a veiled threat by authorities (who are not even the competent ones to demand such an oath). It also demonstrated the ECI’s bad faith in adopting a combative stance when it should have instead assured the country that the crucial issues raised by the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha would be addressed. But it worked as the main talking point for the prime time debates that followed, cited constantly as “evidence” of Gandhi dodging proper procedures. The headlines, invariably skewed in the ECI’s favour, said it all. One went: ‘Sign Oath or Retract’.Fourth, there was a curious circularity in the discussion on television with each channel looking over its shoulder to suss out what rivals were saying: Nowhere was this more evident than in the headlines calculated to undermine the charges made in the press conference: If Times Now carried the headline, ‘Vote Chori Raga Boomerangs’; India Today came up with ‘Atom Bomb’ or ‘Smoke Bomb?’ and ‘Bomb or Bombast?’ Fifth, newspapers, apart from some notable exceptions, completely underplayed the press conference. Interestingly, many social media watchers have wisened up to such tactics. One ace shooter, Tarun Gautam (@TARUNspeakss) put out on X a thread on the front pages on the morning after, pointing out how ‘godi’ newspapers like Dainik Jagran and Amar Ujala didn’t even bother to carry the story on their front pages.What came through in this entire period was that while the ECI could have behaved like the constitutional authority it is supposed to be, open in its responses to public and political grievances, adopted the stance of a “political party”, as one commentator perceptively pointed out. Meanwhile, the Potemkin Media carried on with its campaign of deriding Gandhi and refusing to recognise the ECI meltdown taking place in plain sight. The surprise was the reporters of Mirror Now (the yin of the Times Now yang) and India Today: actually visited the modest room in Bengaluru that, according to EC rolls, had 80 voters listed. They confirmed that this was indeed the case. Did they do it on their own initiative or were they following the spunky Newlaundry/The News Minute’s team?§Did journalistic documentation help in the telling of the worst crime against humanity: the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki?“On August 6 there wasn’t a cloud in the sky above Hiroshima, and mild, hardly perceptible wind blew from the south. Visibility was almost perfect for ten or twelve miles. ‘At nine minutes past seven in the morning an air-raid warning sounded and four American B-29 planes appeared….At 7.31 the all-clear was given. Feeling themselves in safety people came out of their shelters and went about their affairs and the work of the day began. Suddenly a glaring whitish pinkish light appeared in the sky accompanied by an unnatural tremor which was followed almost immediately by a wave of suffocating heat and a wind which swept away everything in its path. Within a few seconds the thousands of people in the streets and the gardens in the centre of the town were scorched by a wave of searing heat. Many were killed instantly, others lay writhing on the ground screaming in agony from the intolerable pain…”This is one of the earliest accounts that appeared in English of a moment that still reverberates in our consciousness as one of unbounded terror. Marcel Junod, a Swiss doctor, was not there when the bombs dropped on the two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But as the first foreign doctor to visit the ruins of Hiroshima after the atomic explosion, he put down on paper what he could glean from the accounts of the affected people in the immediate aftermath of those bombings. That act of documentation – the pith of all good journalism – is what breathed life into two events that are recognised as history’s worst crime against humanity.Meanwhile, it was intrepid journalists who broke the control the US government and military had maintained over the story. Until they knew better, the American public cheered the bombs on the two Japanese cities but they believed they had been dropped on military targets; that it was a way to avenge the bombing of Pearl Harbor; and that the Japanese surrendered because of these bombings, otherwise the war would have carried on and claimed many more lives. Each of these claims was a lie and exposed as such through careful reportage and analyses. John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’, carried in the New Yorker the following year (1946), and for which its editors had dropped every other story from the magazine to accommodate, followed the hellish lives of six survivors. In an 80th anniversary piece for the New Yorker, Jane Meyer, a student of Hersey, quoted from an interview she did with military historian Stephanie Hinnershitz, who pointed out that his report “didn’t just change the public debate about nuclear weapons—it created the debate.” Until then, she explained, President Harry Truman had celebrated the attack as a strategic masterstroke, “without addressing the human cost…Hersey broke that censorship.” But it was not just journalists and historians that kept the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki alive for the people of the world, but the survivors of those bombing known as the hibakushas. Many among them took to painting murals, drawing sketches, and putting out their personal testimonies to the public. I myself was privileged to have interviewed two of them: Matsunaga Shizuko and Ishikawa Ritsuko. They were part of a delegation of ten hibakushas on board the Peace Boat (which is in itself an amazing institution designed to propagandise internationally against nuclear weapons and for global peace). After the explosion happened, Shizuko san recalled, she had blanked out. By the time she regained consciousness, her world had been reduced to ashes, “Everything seemed grey and there were no sounds of birds singing,” as she put it. She also felt a burning sensation on the side of her face that had faced the sky and smelt the distinct odour of her burnt hair. As the petrified 13-year-old staggered to her feet and tried to find her way back, a big mushroom cloud had formed over the city, its central column bloating and changing shape, “it looked like it would swoop down on me,” she said. There was debris around her and fires raged at every corner. Some adults who recognised her tried to calm her, but every one of those who was alive were in a state of shock themselves. As she made her way home, she saw many men and women screaming for help, desperate for water. Ritsuko san, unlike Shizuko san, had no direct memories of that morning being only a baby. But Hiroshima also marked her out in terrible ways. Her father and aunt went missing soon after the bomb was dropped and her mother fell ill and died seven years later. So, as Hiroshima orphans, she and her two sisters were raised by their grandmother in difficult circumstances. She revealed a little known side of the Hiroshima story: The discrimination meted out to A-bomb survivors, which in turn impacted their future. Ritsuko, who never married, remembered that at the time when she was looking to settle down in life, potential bridegrooms would inquire if she was a hibakusha and then stay away. The discrimination was subtle but always present.The importance of these stories was to remind the world of the unique and terrifying consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. Eighty years later, this telling has become even more urgent. We continue to live in the aftershock of Hiroshima as reflected in the genocide in Gaza, and military confrontations around the world, including at our borders, which may at any moment take on a nuclear dimension.An interesting experimentI put out the following post on X on July 2: “Citizens of India, are you okay with 65 lakh people being disappeared from Bihar’s electoral rolls in an opaque and dodgy manner? Because if you don’t get involved in demanding more accountability from the ECI on revisions to electoral rolls, it could be your turn next.”The responses I received were very educative and point to a substantial shift in the attitude of the average Indian X user. Of course there were many who tweeted that they found the SIR absolutely unacceptable. Others trolled me for daring to put out such a sacrilegious post, resorting to their usual slurs and diatribes against my Christian background. But the group that most interested me were those who believed that the ECI was doing the right thing. The reasons they cited were varied. One lot, with whom I have no quarrel, pointed out that removing those who are dead is surely a good and necessary thing to do. Absolutely right. But many others argued that only “true Indians” (this term needs patenting) should have the right to vote. What’s more, they expressed the moral certitude that they, as “true Indians”, had nothing to fear from such an exercise and in fact welcomed it. Here’s a sampling of the responses:*True Indians need not worry*How do you know that everything about revisioning electoral roll is opaque and dodgy. All guspetiyas should be excluded.* Yes we are fine* Yes, if it improves our electoral college and also removes any and all ghuspetiyas* ECI should carry such activity in all the states to conduct square and fair elections.* “It could be your turn next”. Nope. Nobody from my family came from Bangladesh illegally, and we have every single ID proof of being an Indian. So, no. We won’t be next. And I am happy with the system of illegal migrants deciding our leaders be stopped.* Yes indeed. Any doubt?* Bangaldeshis, Rohingyas, ISI backed handlers out! This is a win for us!Hoping for it to happen nationwide* I’m in the list whereas illegals are not, that’s the end of the discussion*Yes. If you disagree, please shift to Pakistan*I would give my vote for a lifetime to the party who eradicates illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya from my motherland.Snapshot of the ‘New Indian’? Perhaps. As someone who wrote in put it: “As long as you are a Sanghi, you are guaranteed a vote. For the rest, bhagwan bharose.”Meanwhile, the names on Bihar’s electoral rolls range from the droll to the bizarre. We know that ‘Trump’ emerges as a multiple father of several citizens (in one instance Donald is replaced by ‘Frederick Christ’. There are also those who have fathers called ‘Father Father’. The many fictions that emerge from these rolls have provided some much needed comic relief in dire times.§Readers write in…Error in the nuns’ storyWell-known journalist and film critic Anna Vetticad, wrote in about a major mistake made in the Wire’s coverage of the arrest of the two nuns in Chhattisgarh recently… “There’s a very damaging, factually incorrect sentence in The Wire‘s Instagram and Facebook posts about the nuns arrested in Chhattisgarh. The first sentence went: ‘…one of the women who they attempted to convert to Christianity and thereafter traffic, has told The Indian Express…’ (A screen shot of the sentence was included).“I assume that what was intended was: ‘…one of the women who THE BAJRANG DAL ACCUSED OF ATTEMPTING to convert to Christianity and thereafter traffic, has told The Indian Express…’“I understand that the Wire must be constantly dealing with staff shortages due to which such an error might have crept in, but I do hope it will be corrected. More than one person has pointed this out in the comments section on both Facebook and Instagram, I myself wrote to the Wire‘s account on Instagram, but nearly a day has passed and it has not been corrected. Knowing the present political environment, there’s no telling how such a sentence – in a media outlet known to be Left liberal – could be used against the nuns who are already in a terrible situation. My response: That was indeed a grievous error and apologies for that. The desk was informed and the offending sentence was corrected (‘Kerala Nuns’ Arrest: Chhattisgarh Woman Now Says ‘Was Coerced to Give Adverse Statement’, July 31). The nuns have been subsequently released but the treatment they underwent was totally condemnable. This IRCTC data breach needs investigationNikhil urges the Wire to investigate the following story:“A serious data breach at IRCTC is putting lakhs (or maybe even crores) of Aadhaar-linked user accounts at risk. Since Aadhaar became mandatory for Tatkal bookings from July 1, 2025, thousands of accounts are being hacked: emails and phone numbers have been changed, locking out genuine users.“You can verify this by visiting IRCTC’s official Twitter (X) handle and checking the replies section. You’ll see tons of users reporting the same issue. Many are complaining in different formats, but all of them furnish proof of account compromise. Even worse, Aadhaar numbers of people who never linked them are already linked to other accounts, making new account creation impossible. “These hacked IRCTC IDs are being sold on Telegram. One such seller is here: https://t.me/tsfgroupofficially/80The portal Lallantop has also covered this in a YouTube exposé. They have shown the seller even built a website for it. I personally lost 3 accounts (mine and family’s). No help from IRCTC or cybercrime. Please investigate this urgently. Citizens need protection.”Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in