Exploring Non-Traditional Ways of Journalist Safety in Authoritarian Regimes: A Working Paper for Consultation
Over years of practice, deliberations and encounters in the area of Media Freedom, Journalist Safety and Community Journalism in India, CAAJ has experienced that traditional ways of securing the Right to Freedom of Expression and Speech have increasingly become ineffective in the face of authoritarian regimes. Is an alternative and non-traditional mechanism possible? This working paper on the subject is for wider consultation.
Framing the Problem
Journalism in India has undergone a major transformation over
the last two decades owing to a gradual change in the character of the federal
regime from democratic and inclusive to authoritarian and exclusionary. This
has exacerbated attacks on professional journalists and, in general, all sorts
of media practitioners. From police cases to gig orders, intimidations, physical
assaults, and murders, India has witnessed an increasing number of violations
of the right to freedom of expression and speech, even as platforms for
expressing free opinion and information have greatly flourished.
Since the freedom of expression and speech is directly
affected due to a change in the regime, the resulting political climate of
polarisation has ended up in co-opting those institutions that were
constitutionally obliged to preserve democratic ethos by acting as a bulwark
against authoritarian tendencies. Hence, traditional ways of securing media
freedom and journalist safety have increasingly failed or have become
ineffective.
This could be gauged from the interventions of various human
rights and media freedom agencies working on the issue of the Right to Freedom
of Expression and Speech. On the one hand, these agencies are labelled
‘foreign’ by the state agencies at the outset, their bank accounts and grant
mechanisms like FCRA having been frozen or challenged in courts. Secondly,
their petitions and calls for ensuring the safety of HRD’s have been
deliberately ignored by state institutions.
Since the issue of the safety of human rights defenders
bears a traditional and standard working mechanism in all democracies by
quintessentially engaging democratic institutions, liaising with authorities
and a reconciliation with various gatekeepers, any rightward turn of the state
power at any moment blocks spaces for negotiation and redressal.
Evidence: Media Scenario in India
This backsliding of democracy was felt overtly in India
around 2017 when free and dissident media voices like Gauri Lankesh and Shujaat
Bukhari (2018) were killed in broad daylight. Not to count a dozen murders,
hundreds of physical assault cases, digital surveillance and detentions in
small towns since then (especially during the COVID-19 lockdown), India has now
become a nightmare for Journalism, with 151 rank in the World Press Freedom
Index 2025. All existing mechanisms for ensuring the safety of HRDs have proven
a failure in the face of anti-constitutional governance.
Just after the results of the
General Elections 2024 were announced on June 4 in India, a series of
intimidating and harassing steps were taken against media practitioners and
professional journalists. In a case related to the Delhi riots of 2020, when
three journalists of The Caravan were mob-attacked, the Delhi police opened up
a retaliatory investigation against them instead of prosecuting the attackers
on the basis of an unnamed complaint that the police had considered as a
counter FIR.
In the same month, within two
days of the election results, Cable operators in Andhra Pradesh state blocked
the telecast of four news channels, i.e. Sakshi TV, TV9, NTV, and 10TV. They
were blocked since June 6 in connection with their critical reporting of the
Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which defeated the incumbent Yuvajana Sramika Rythu
(YSR) Congress Party in state-level elections. According to a letter written by
a parliamentarian, S. Niranjan Reddy, to the chairperson of the Telecom
Regulatory Authority of India, such an action violates the Telecommunication
(Broadcasting and Cable) Services Interconnection (Addressable Systems)
Regulations, which ensure fair and non-discriminatory interconnection arrangements
among service providers, apart from press freedom and the public’s right to
information.
Sebastian Farcis, a New
Delhi-based South Asia correspondent for multiple French and Belgian news
organisations, including Radio France International, Radio France, and
Libération, left India on June 17, after 13 years of reporting, following the
government’s refusal to renew a journalism permit to work in the country. He
shared his statement on X. Farcis said the permit denial has effectively
prevented him from practising his profession and cut off his income. Multiple
requests to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), which issues the journalism
permits, went unanswered, and attempts to appeal the decision were unsuccessful,
he said.
On July 1, 2024, new criminal
laws came into effect in India. The initial cases against journalists under new
laws included a couple of freelance journalists from Uttar Pradesh for inciting
religious enmity through “malicious” posts on social media. A police
investigation was opened on a FIR by a police personnel in Shamli district
against a total of five people, including journalists Zakir Ali Tyagi and Wasim
Akram Tyagi.
Press bodies across the
country passed a resolution against proposed laws that were meant to silence
the press on June 14, 2024. Such interventions by press bodies and civil
society have been a regular feature for at least a decade in India due to the
tightening noose over Freedom of Expression. Figures speak for themselves.
As per figures from CPJ, the
number of journalists who have been put behind bars for practising their
profession reached a record high in 2022, including India, where seven
journalists were in jail at the end of 203, a record high for the second
consecutive year in the last three decades. According to a report by CAAJ, a
total of 138 cases of persecution of media persons were registered alone in the
state of Uttar Pradesh from 2017 to February 2022.
Two consecutive years of the COVID-19
pandemic had exacerbated the crisis of democratic spaces and freedom of
expression in India, resulting in increased attacks on all sorts of media
practitioners. The special crisis of India in this context owes to the fact
that the lethal application of the Epidemic Act and new IT Rules 2021 have
resulted in the sharp increase in press freedom violations since the outbreak
of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the onset of the Broadcasting
Services (Regulation) Bill, 2024, which is set to replace the Cable Television
Networks (Regulation) Act of 1995, the debate on censorship has become much
wider, and concerns about Freedom of Expression have become more acute. It is
more important to look at the Broadcast Bill in the context of the last few
years, when policies and laws such as the IT Rules, Data Protection Act,
Telecom Bill, New Press Act, and the new criminal laws have been introduced.
Exploring an Alternative for Journalist Safety
Sensing the urgency to chart out alternative ways to ensure freedom of expression and address victims of assault and torture, a Committee Against Assault on Journalists (CAAJ) was formed by pooling in various stakeholders like civil society groups, individuals. Journalists, media activists, human rights and civil liberties organisations, as well as representatives of existing press bodies/unions/associations at the national level.
This process kicked off in September 2018 by organising a
two-day National Convention against Assault on Journalists in New Delhi in
collaboration with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and in
association with the Press Club of India (PCI), Peoples Union for Civil Liberties
(PUCL) and around three dozen independent media platforms. This convention
concluded with the formation of CAAJ and its state committees within a year. CAAJ
has been working since then largely across North India, documenting cases of
assault, providing advocacy, trauma support, legal help and doing documentation
by involving media practitioners and civil society groups.
The underlying idea of the CAAJ as a process was to
bridge gaps that exist among human rights defenders due to a lack of
understanding of the definition of HRD as well as a sense of privilege that
creates ‘otherness’ in civil society on the question of its ‘own’ members versus
journalists. The same is the case with media practitioners too, where media
rights and advocacy groups, press unions, clubs, etc., usually hesitate to
stand for a non-journalist HRD.
This gap has greatly contributed to ignoring the voices
of those individuals who are journalists as well as civil society activists,
many of them languishing in jails on fabricated charges for years just because they
do not fulfil the criterion of international agencies for being labelled as
“Journalist” (for eg, Rupesh Kumar Singh and Gautam Navlakha). Looking at these
gaps and unviable standards, CAAJ adopted a mandate to build horizontal
linkages by bringing all sorts of HRDs under a single umbrella for a stronger
voice, collective resistance and a larger safety net for the victims of state
violence and human rights violations.
CAAJ’s mechanism stands theoretically on the global
understanding of Freedom of Expression, which is a fundamental human right laid
down in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United
Nations and covered under Article 19 of the Indian Constitution, that treats
citizens, journalists and other HRDs alike. Even the United Nations Human
Rights Council has adopted several resolutions focusing on the safety of
journalists, including the resolution on "The safety of journalists"
adopted on October 6, 2022, which is based on previous work and incorporates new
elements, and a 2025 resolution on human rights defenders that addresses
emerging threats like strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs)
and digital technologies.
These resolutions recognise journalists as human rights
defenders and call on states to prevent violence, threats, and
attacks against them, to protect their right to access information, and to end
impunity for crimes committed against them.
Acting upon this non-traditional safety mechanism
has produced positive results for CAAJ, especially in small cities, villages
and towns where a sense of collective action and cooperative living still
prevails. These are the sites where journalists, Right To Information (RTI) activists
and social activists have suffered mostly in the last few years. This pattern was
evident in the very first publication of CAAJ (2018) when it compiled a
database of assaults on Journalists in India from 2008-18. The defining feature
of these attacks was the profile of victims, most of them being independent newsmakers
devoid of an institutional framework or part-time/contractual journalists
lacking institutional support.
In larger parts of suburban and rural India, formal
newsrooms still do not exist, but the near-universal penetration of mobile
phones has virtually turned every educated and aspirational youth into a
news/opinion maker. Here, media practice is not the product of any formal
training, rather a call of the conscience/aspiration made easy by the New Media,
MoJo equipments, and with minimal technical skills.
Since the media ecosystem in sub-urban and rural India consists
mostly of unskilled and untrained practitioners who operate mostly in the
digital space, a shift that became critical post-COVID, hence they do not
easily fulfil the standard support criterion of national and international media
safety organisations. For example, many support organisations emphasise upon
attacks that happened “in the line of duty”. This single clause filters out
more than 90 per cent of cases because small-town and rural journalism is not
an exclusive profession as in the metros, rather a part of the regular communitarian
life where a journalist has to strike a subtle balance with multiple
stakeholders like local police, authorities, community members, lawyers, as
well as notorious non-state actors. A slight imbalance in this ecosystem
creates discord, and the messenger is shot.
Recent murders of some journalists in India, most talked of
being Raghvendra Bajpeyi (Sitapur) and Mukesh Chandrakar (Bastar), are evidence
of this dynamic. Most police cases against journalists in Uttar Pradesh and
Madhya Pradesh post-COVID were of the same nature, reflecting vindictiveness on
the part of local authorities and strongmen, suggesting a deal gone wrong.
Proposing a Community Safety Mechanism for HRDs
This pattern vindicates the formative understanding and existing
support mechanism of CAAJ, which has, over time, built upon evidence to reach
at the conclusion that the safety of HRDs in an authoritarian regime could
not be ensured without active community engagement and collective action. A
recent case from Jharkhand may prove the point.
Sunita Munda (featured photo in this post, courtesy Facebook), a tribal journalist, was arrested with her
Editor, Akash, from their media office in Ranchi. They were accused of running
a false story related to the encounter of a tribal person on their news portal.
Within hours, this information became viral, and with the collective
intervention of tribal community leaders, they walked out free. No case could
be built by the police due to heavy pressure from the community. This case may
work as a blueprint to look at such examples from the past and propose an
alternative non-traditional safety mechanism for HRDs (Journalists) in India.
Earlier, India has witnessed in
some cases related to the murder of journalists when the community rose to
resist, and a strong movement was built in support of the slain scribe. A
famous case from the 1980s was cited by senior journalist Anand Swaroop Verma when
a journalist was killed in Banda, UP. To demand justice for the victim, a
Patrakar Jan Andolan Samiti was formed in Lucknow and the local community was
agitated. Likewise, active community intervention and civil society agitation were
witnessed in the infamous Umesh Dobhal murder case of Uttarakhand. There have
been a few cases like these where not only the journalist fraternity but local
communities, civil society members and other stakeholders rose to resist and
demand justice for the victim.
CAAJ is currently compiling
such cases from India and third-world countries where the journalists’ safety
question has been explored under the communitarian paradigm in the face of
authoritarian regimes. In the future, CAAJ proposes to strengthen and empower victims of attack
and torture in the media fraternity with the help of communitarian tools and
linkages. This requires bringing together journalists, communities and other
stakeholders in a communitarian ethos by providing community media and capacity
building trainings, legal help, as well as psycho-social support to victims of
assault while harnessing technological and community-based solutions.
Since the idea of community is heterogeneous, uneven and
loosely defined in a diverse country like India, CAAJ initially proposes to
work with young journalists in those states where local communities are
comparatively intact and local governance institutions like Gram Sabha are
still functional.
Major contents for realising this idea consist of:
- Developing the CAAJ website into a full-fledged learning and support portal on community safety mechanisms for HRDs, specifically journalists.
- Introducing young journalists to non-traditional ways of ensuring the Right to Freedom of Expression and Speech.
- Empowering victim journalists through testimonies and psycho-social and legal support.
- Bridging the gap between local communities and their journalists by reconciliation and reintegration programmes.
- Bringing civil society and journalists closer under the UN Framework on HRDs.
- Research, Communications and Dissemination of knowledge and findings.
- The victim must be engaged in the dissemination of information/opinion through any medium to be termed as an HRD;
- The link between the reason for HR violation should be fairly established with the information disseminated by the victim.
Inviting opinions
CAAJ is still in the nascent stage of exploring methods
to implement a communitarian model of Journalist safety. The lack of resources has
always been a problem. Additionally, existing literature on the subject is
meagre, although we could find some insights in the writings of scholars who
have worked on the idea of communitarian politics and philosophy.
This working paper may be read as an emergent foundational
basis for mutual debates and sharing on the subject. CAAJ invites stakeholders
to share their views on alternative ways of ensuring HRD safety, especially
journalists, in the precarious socio-political environment we live in, where
all existing democratic mechanisms of safety are on the verge of collapse.
Suggestions may be sent to the following email:
committeeagainstassault@gmail.com
Abhishek Srivastava
CAAJ
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