EDITORIAL: There appears to be no end to India’s slide into a majoritarian abyss where freedom of expression and tolerance of dissent have become increasingly rare commodities. Narendra Modi’s ascent to power in 2014 had elicited concerns from various quarters regarding the fate of the country’s democratic and secular credentials. Over the last decade those fears have come to fruition.
The latest example of the BJP government’s egregious disregard for basic democratic norms was exposed by a joint investigation carried out by The Washington Post and Amnesty International, the results of which were published on December 27.
The investigative report reveals that the Indian government had in recent months targeted eminent journalists, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire and Anand Mangnale of The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project by infecting their iPhones with Pegasus spyware – a software created by the Israeli company NSO Group – which has the ability to access a phone’s messages and emails, peruse pictures, eavesdrop on calls, track locations and film the owner of the phone through its camera.
As very rightly put by the head of Amnesty International’s Security Lab, this just goes to show that “journalists in India face the threat of unlawful surveillance simply for doing their jobs, alongside other tools of repression including imprisonment under draconian laws, smear campaigns, harassment, and intimidation”.
This is not the first time the Indian government has been found involved in singling out independent media voices as it had faced similar accusations in 2021 over the use of Pegasus to spy on journalists, human rights activists and opposition politicians.
The last decade has seen a distinct ideological transformation of India, away from its secular roots and towards a highly aggressive brand of Hindu nationalism that has been marked by violence and discriminatory legislation targeting the country’s Muslim, Christian and Dalit communities, as well as progressive, liberal voices. Any attempt by independent media outlets to highlight these blatant acts of prejudice has been followed by hounding of journalists, media houses and human rights activists, who have felt the full wrath of the Indian state.
Police raids aimed at critical voices have become the norm as was seen in October when the offices and homes of journalists working for the digital news outlet NewsClick were ransacked by the Delhi police under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.
Moreover, increasingly restrictive laws have been passed that have made the work of an independent media even more difficult. A case in point is the recent passage of the Press and Registration of Periodicals Act, whose provisions the Editors Guild of India has described as “draconian” as they widen “the powers of the state to have more intrusive and arbitrary checks into the functioning of newspapers and magazines”. It is no wonder then that Reporters Sans Borders ranked the country 161 out of 180 on the 2023 World Press Freedom Index, a drop of 11 points within one year.
What has been most disappointing is the complicity of the country’s judiciary in turning it on this totalitarian path. The failure of Indian courts to curb the state’s unbridled powers and its trampling of basic rights shows that the system of checks and balances in the country is in complete disarray.
India’s trajectory since 2014 reflects a complex interplay of political, social and cultural factors that have contributed to the rise of what Sweden’s V-DEM Institute (Varieties of Democracy) has described as an “electoral autocracy”. The country’s attempts at pushing the fiction of being a secular democracy where a free media flourishes, therefore, have long ceased to deceive. One can only wonder – without much hope – whether India would be able to break the authoritarian shackles it has been encircled by in recent years.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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