Satan, like God, works round the clock. Thus it is that, of all days, on October 2, Gandhi Jayanti, a day that is meant to celebrate the ideals of truth and ahimsa, New India was plotting to carry out the biggest and most violent swoop modern India has known against journalists and journalism – and in effect against the right of free speech and free expression of the people.The Special Branch of the Delhi Police, which reports to New India’s top executives, delivered the goods the first thing the following morning.A knock on the doors of close to 50 journalists, commentators, artists and others – in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida and Ghaziabad – all in the National Capital Region, and also in faraway Mumbai, led to intense questioning and later removal for a deeper probe elsewhere by posses of police – and eventually to two arrests.The operation was menacing and blunt. Was it Gestapo-like – meaning executed in true fascist fashion – or are we not there yet but in a police state, India-style? The two need not be co-terminus. The matter is perhaps open to debate.On the face of it, the State was seeking to unearth and arrest Chinese moles and agents, no less, based on patterns of Chinese payments presumably received by them. Flagging China is clearly a ploy to generate sympathy for the government’s action when public opinion in the country is extremely negative on China after Beijing’s incursion into Eastern Ladakh.Invoking China here is breathtaking hypocrisy, of course. The PM says the Chinese forces never came into Indian territory! Chinese multinationals operate in India – and contribute to the PM CARES Fund of dubious provenance. India and China have a roaring trade and India is awash with Chinese investments. Then, why the fuss? Probably, they think that a spy and Chinese propaganda angle are easier excuses if the intent is to intimidate journalists and bring the dreaded anti-terrorism law UAPA against journalists.Scene at the Special Cell HQ of Delhi Police in Lodhi Colony. Photo: The WireA few years ago, a journalist called Rajeev Sharma was dramatically “captured” by the police in the car park of the Press Club of India in New Delhi. He faced hell for a long time until the courts gave him relief. He was supposed to be trading in military secrets. His name was besmirched in the mainstream media, since the police version was highlighted. In the end, a lot depends on the judiciary in defending citizens’ rights, more so when the State is on the rampage.The ruse of Chinese funds is a low trick that bears a closer look. The much-touted illegal money, which is being sedulously suggested, relies on a 2021 case of the Enforcement Directorate against the news portal NewsClick, whose journalists have been raided and arrested. The ongoing case appears to be a journey without end, such are the gifts of the regime. But in reality, the so-called Chinese funding is an investment by a listed US company in the form of a business venture that is legally permissible.The investment then is far from being Chinese, although the US partner in question is said to be sympathetic to China. Even so, there is nothing in the day-to-day news and views coverage of NewsClick to suggest an underlying pro-China sentiment over the years – not that this can be a crime.It is to be noted that the innuendo against this portal appears to rely wholly on a shoddy report in the New York Times in August, in which NewsClick is mentioned in passing as an entity that “sprinkles” Chinese “talking points”. Typical innuendo of the long-dead Cold War era.But where is the proof? Have Indian investigators run the NYT story through a check and vet process, or have they conveniently adopted it wholesale in order to strike at a stream of journalism in India that appears to embarrass the regime, which has of late come to encounter serious political opposition in the country?Any half-decent judicial authority will easily see through the State’s game. Given today’s political context, it would appear that other journalists who question and argue and refuse to kowtow, are now more likely to attract a greater degree of government ire than previously. Key state and national elections are approaching. The stakes are getting higher. The October 3 development is a pointer. Spreading communal mayhem, and largesse for big capital, is likely to prove less easy now as people are getting wiser. For the regime, giving it a bad name and then shooting the messenger is the easy way out.Several of those picked up for questioning are employees of the news portal in question or contribute to it while being independent writers or video producers, and as such are unlikely to be acquainted with the company’s financial dealings. So, why pick on them if not to spread anxiety in the media? Crucially, one of them, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, is a leading international expositor of the games that the magnate Gautam Adani has played in his controversial financial and stock market activities.It is by now well understood that Adani enjoys a relationship of great mutual trust and warmth with the prime minister. Guha Thakurta would have been given a piece of hell by Modi’s police on account of the Adani factor, rather than anything else. Nobody can believe he is a propagandist for China or any other foreign power.Journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who was questioned by the Delhi police, speaks at the Press Club of India, October 4, 2023. Photo: Yaqut Ali/The WireThen there is the curious case of some non-journalists. Sanjay Rajoura, D. Raghunandan, and Sohail Hashmi. Rajoura is a famous stand-up comic who is known to take the mickey out of the regime The second named is a scientist and science propagator, and Hashmi is an amateur historian and cultural activist with a broad left-wing inclination. Why were they questioned and their laptops and mobile phones seized? On the whole, it appears that those picked up for questioning, or later arrested, have one common trait: they do not take the regime’s words, actions, and policies at face value – and question and propagate alternative narratives.In broad-brush terms, these may be narratives of the wider non-party Left in India concerned with the lives of ordinary people, the virtues of rationality and the methods of science, and the outright rejection of communalism or majoritarian thought in any form. In political terms, this section of opinion has grown in recent times as Modi and his government have reneged on promise upon promise and converted the country’s territory into a religious battlefield.Before Modi too, India was hardly the pristine, ideal, democracy in the poverty-stricken, sub-tropical regions of the world, as its makers, through the freedom movement, may have desired – especially Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, on whom fell the burden to first lead the country.Individual journalists were attacked by the State from time to time. In the Emergency years, journalists were jailed. Subsequently too, journalists were picked up on false charges, including in the Modi years. But the events of October 3 are in a class of their own on account of the widespread extent of the single-day attack, which we cannot say for sure has ended. Renewed questioning or more arrests can hardly be ruled out. The message of intimidation continues to ring loudly.Some of what happened in the name of day-long interrogation has been recorded, in the public interest, by two prominent and outstanding journalists – Abhisar Sharma and Guha Thakurta, after they emerged from an ordeal that would have left anyone shaken. But these two remain steady, confident and unrepentant, ready to get on with their professional lives.Prabir Purkayastha, the founder-editor of NewsClick, a relatively small news and current affairs portal in the national capital but one with growing influence on account of its fact-based coverage that the regime does not like, and a senior manager of the portal, Amit Chakravarty, are believed to have been apprehended under the dreaded UAPA.Also Read: ‘Modi Govt May Say Mother of Democracy, But Is Turning India Into a Graveyard of Democracy’UAPA is rightly condemned as an unlawful law by political activists and legal luminaries alike because, as the provision now stands, the government can simply declare any individual of being a terrorist without furnishing evidence and going through even the motions of due process, put them in jail, and throw away the keys.In the years 2016-20, some 24,000 individuals were booked under UAPA, according to official figures. The conviction rate is a mere 2%, suggesting that the cases are mostly bogus, if not downright fictitious. Thus, nearly all those taken in under UAPA are languishing in jail in miserable conditions, awaiting trial.Is this the fate that awaits a prominent founder-editor whose organisation did some of the more meaningful reporting of the year-long movement against the egregious NRC-CAA, which sought to re-define the notion of India’s citizenship on a straightforward communal basis by a biased regime; and again the year-long movement of farmers against the now discredited farm laws being sought to be pushed by the regime to propitiate Big Capital?It is sobering to recall that a Jesuit, the 80-year-old Father Stan Swamy, a UAPA prisoner highly regarded for his selfless work amongst the poor tribal people of Jharkhand and for his ascetic way of life, died in custody, denied any worthwhile medical assistance. Almost all those arrested along with Fr Swamy – among them scholars, intellectuals and academics, a revolutionary poet and bard, besides a journalist-activist, Gautam Navlakha – in the infamous Elgar Parishad case of 2018, are still facing the serious charge of terrorism.Especially in the case of Stan Swamy, the Bombay high court made the right noises but can hardly be said to have covered itself with glory. In sensitive matters, when in a bind, the lower judiciary seems to be driven by anxiety and the higher judiciary by technicality – giving the meat of the matter a wide berth. This, at any rate, is the popular perception.A polished, high-order, representation and appeal was made to the Chief Justice of India by the media fraternity on October 4, following the brazen, broad daylight repression of the media and after a powerful protest meeting of journalists, writers and prominent citizens at the Press Club of India in New Delhi. This could well be a weathervane moment.Malicious and mindless misuse of the UAPA? Journalists as terrorists? These are the points of consideration. In a democracy, must the privileges, rights, privacy, and juridical persona of citizens be made automatically and naturally subservient to the whims, prejudices and malafide actions of the State?Illustration: The Wire.If some sections of the UAPA are appealed against before an appropriate court, will leaders of the judiciary stand by the citizen against the state, and strike down the more dangerous provisions of the UAPA or direct their modification so that ordinary citizens are not placed on the same footing as terrorists? Parliament makes laws, but the Supreme Court interprets them, and interpretations constitute a part of the body of laws. We will know if the top court is ready to step up to the plate.After a succession of communal onslaughts against the country’s principal religious minorities and the Untouchables of the Chaturvarnashram or the four-tier rigid caste hierarchy of traditional, un-reformed, Hindu social order, that have occurred on a regular basis in the past ten years, the attack on the very idea of journalism in a democracy, and its slow subversion and cooption, does appear to be the most defining and egregious feature of the New India being propagated and presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his acolytes.When Modi arrived on the scene in 2014, he made ritualistic noises about treating all citizens equally and was, oddly enough, believed by many. Truly, there was innocence abroad. Subsequently, the PM gave the call for a Congress-mukt Bharat – calling upon Indians to throw out the Congress party, believing that the country was in love with him and had ejected his opponents from its affections and its consciousness. Other than that, a full-throttle attack on the opposition parties was still in the future. But an attack on the media was not.Right from 2014, the regime, its beneficiaries, its ideological subsidiaries and its dependents, have moved heaven and earth to “capture” the Indian media, using a variety of techniques, the carrot and the stick – even a buyout, as the case of NDTV shows. The express purpose of this extensive and expensive exercise lasting nearly 10 years was to rub the very idea of objective journalism, the testing of government and ruling party claims, out of the default mode in mainstream journalism in the country.The simultaneous objective was to acquire a long string of clapper boys through the media system who would sing the government’s praise – and taunt its opponents – from morning to night (although now, this makes people sick). This hasn’t quite worked as planned, and alternatives have mushroomed in the form of strong news portals and YouTube channels.For a regime seeking to perpetuate itself, marrying a majoritarian communal ideological agenda and its accompanying politics with Big Capital was crucial, but without full control over the media space, the enterprise would never be secure. After gaining control of mainline media, the newly sprung foci of rebellion too needed to be conquered.This is what transpired on October 3. The propaganda cry of catching terrorists and Chinese agents is for the gullible. The real game is to bring opponents of any stripe, persuasion, or profession, to heel. So far, the trick has not worked. There has been resistance.The regime’s aim and plan may be to alter the basic character of the democratic state – no matter how flawed – that we have inherited, but this is likely to be hard to bring about on the strength of electoral politics alone. Resistance is scattered through the country in the shape of pockets and islands, but no less importantly in the shape of arguments, languages, and belief systems of the people. Karnataka the past May was an example.In a vast and varied land with multiple histories and geographies, people seek mutual engagement, stability and harmony – and not sameness and uniformity. The Third Reich is unlikely to follow the German route here and come on the back of elections, even rigged ones. More dire means would need to be devised. One way or another, there is much to do for a media that wishes to keep encroachers at bay.Anand K. Sahay is a political commentator in New Delhi.
