Press Release
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) has expressed deep concern at the sharp decline in India’s press freedom ranking in the 2023 report of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), one of the world’s leading press freedom watchdogs.
“For the sake of democracy, the United States must use its diplomatic power to compel India to end its persecution of journalists,” IAMC executive director Rasheed Ahmed said in a statement issued here on Wednesday.
IAMC is a US-based non-profit body dedicated to peace, pluralism and social justice.
The RSF report released in Paris on Wednesday placed India at 161st place among 180 countries, placing it 11 positions below its last year’s rank. This is the fourth consecutive year in which India has fallen sharply in RSF’s rankings. Four years ago, India was placed 140th.
Press freedom in India ranks a mere 19 spots above the dictatorship of North Korea, the lowest ranked in the report. RSF directly attributed India’s drastic decline to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascension to power in 2014.
Ahmed said the rapid decline of India’s free press is of grave concern to Indian Americans, adding, “Democracy dies in darkness, and the loss of India’s free press will bring dark days. As the report makes it clear, this attempt to strangle free press is a political strategy pursued by Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. They want to eliminate critical voices and make India a Hindu supremacist state.”
According to the RSF report, “The Indian press used to be seen as fairly progressive but things changed radically in the mid-2010s, when Narendra Modi became prime minister and engineered a spectacular rapprochement between his party, the BJP, and the big families dominating the media.”
The report describes how Modi’s politically-engineered media monopoly — which has included the buyout of national TV network NDTV by industrialist and Modi’s friend Gautam Adani — has created a climate in which critical reporting on the BJP and other ruling factions has become perilous, and in some cases impossible.
The propagation of Hindutva ideology also bears central responsibility for the decline in India’s press freedom, concluded the report.
“Supporters of Hindutva, the ideology that spawned the Hindu far-right, wage all-out online attacks on any views that conflict with their thinking. Terrified coordinated campaigns of hatred and calls for murder are conducted on social media, campaigns that are often even more violent when they target women journalists, whose personal data may be posted online as an additional incitement to violence,” the RSF report noted.
The report also notes how the Hindu, upper-caste, male-dominated Indian media landscape has excluded women and countless minorities from media representation while permitting the propagation of dangerous Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
“RSF’s latest report should be a wake-up call for the US and global leaders who continue to maintain the illusion that the free press thrives in India,” said Ahmed.
The report also notes how “Kashmiri reporters are often harassed by police and paramilitaries, with some being subjected to so-called “provisional detention for several years. Kashmir and Punjab continue to be routinely subjected to sweeping internet blackouts that impede millions from accessing media, as well as other critical information services.
On the issue of the security of journalists, India fared even worse, being placed at 163 out of 180 countries.
“With an average of three or four journalists killed in connection with their work every year, India is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for the media,” the report said. “Journalists are exposed to all kinds of physical violence including police violence, ambushes by political activists, and deadly reprisals by criminal groups or corrupt local officials.”
