Do not dare to speak against Modi India’s PM, wherever you are, Modi’s social terrorism is getting severe.
Democracy in India is living in its worst condition in India nowadays, Anyone who tries to raise against Modi Govt. his/her voice is suppressed by the govt.
PM Modi holds a big fan following or in right words an online army of people who find outs the person and then threatens him (they may try on this post also)
● Most of Indian news media TV channels are supporting this. Those who go against or questions against Modi are threatened to be banned e.g. NDTV India news channel. ________________________________________
India has long had a vibrant media, with more than 407 million newspaper readers — more than the population of the United States — and millions more cable viewers voraciously consuming news in Hindi, English and dozens of regional languages.Freedom of expression is guaranteed by India’s constitution, and court cases over the years have supported press freedom. Those rights were profoundly shaken during the period known as the “Emergency” in the 1970s, when embattled Prime Minister Indira Gandhi locked up opposition leaders and censored newspapers to retain her power.
Prominent members of Modi’s government fought against the oppressive Emergency as activists, and some were jailed, Prasad noted.Over the years, politicians of all stripes — including many from India’s thriving regional parties — have arrested and threatened journalists and blocked their access to information, often falling back on India’s defamation or colonial-era sedition laws in an attempt to limit free speech, analysts say. Many of the top news channels and newspapers are owned by families or conglomerates with business interests such as mining and telecom that have long been reluctant to be critical of the government.
“If you go around today in 2018 arguing that media was unfettered and free and robust and vibrant in those years, and suddenly things have gone south, now that’s just nonsense,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a member of Parliament allied with Modi’s coalition and a principal investor in Republic TV, a conservative news channel. “There has been media that have been compromised and complicit and silent all through the history of media in India.”
But international observers say the situation has worsened under Modi, with media organizations self-censoring for fear of offending the government and losing valuable advertising. Even stories about the Reporters Without Borders ranking, which detailed “online smear campaigns” of journalists by “radical nationalists,” were taken off the websites of two newspapers, according to the Hoot, a media watchdog group.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) -
India has constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and by some measures the biggest and most diverse media industry in the world. But journalists here say they are increasingly facing intimidation aimed at stopping them from running stories critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his administration.At least three senior editors have left their jobs at various influential media outlets in the past six months after publishing reports that angered the government or supporters of Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), according to colleagues.Some reporters, as well as television anchors, have told Reuters they have been threatened with physical harm, abused on social media and ostracised by Modi's administration.In its annual World Press Freedom Index released on Wednesday, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said that India was now 138th-ranked in the world out of 180 countries measured, down two positions since 2017 and lower than countries like Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Myanmar. When the index was started in 2002, India was ranked 80th out of 139 countries surveyed.Reporters Without Borders said that "with Hindu nationalists trying to purge all manifestations of 'anti-national' thought from the national debate, self-censorship is growing in the mainstream media and journalists are increasingly the targets of online smear campaigns by the most radical nationalists, who vilify them and even threaten physical reprisals."The group said that "hate speech targeting journalists is shared and amplified on social networks, often by troll armies."Spokesmen for the government declined comment on the accusations by journalists. They did not immediately respond to the Reporters Without Borders report.However, not all Indian journalists believe there is a problem. Swapan Dasgupta, a member of parliament and a political columnist who supports Modi, said the press freedom ranking was "quite inexplicable"."I don’t believe there has been any shrinkage in the freedom of the media in the past few years," he said in an e-mail.G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, a spokesman for the ruling BJP, said allegations of media intimidation were far from the truth."On the contrary, the BJP has been a victim of the viciousness of large sections of the media that flourished under the patronage of the Congress, left and other opposition parties," he told Reuters in e-mailed comments. "The unabashed bias of these media against the BJP has not dented our party's political growth."Some journalists in India say they believe media freedoms are now under even more threat in the run-up to an election due next year. There have been some signs of increasing opposition to Modi's economic policies and to the BJP's muscular Hindu nationalism.
DEATH, RAPE THREATS :
"India is going through an aggressive variant of McCarthyism against the media," said Prannoy Roy, co-founder of NDTV, India's first private news channel.NDTV, which some BJP leaders have called the least friendly of India's television channels, is being investigated for fraud by the Central Bureau of Investigation. The company has called it a witch-hunt.
The government declined to respond to Roy's comments.Sagarika Ghose, a columnist with the Times of India newspaper, said she is viciously trolled for any criticism of the administration."The minute I write something, I get droves of hate mail," Ghose said. "I have had death threats and gang rape threats on social media and also through letters sent to my home. They know where I live."
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In Modi’s India, journalists face bullying, criminal cases and worse:
CHANDIGARH, India — Rachna Khaira was a little-known crime reporter in a gritty industrial town in northern India until the first week of January, when she wrote a story that exposed a major privacy breach in a nationwide database of more than 1 billion Indians.Officials were not amused by her sleuthing and filed a police complaint that accused Khaira, her newspaper and the alleged cybercriminals of forgery and other offenses punishable by 30 years in jail. The country’s editors guild condemned Khaira’s treatment, protesters marched in the
streets, and former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden sent a tweet supporting the new whistleblower, saying she deserved “an award, not an investigation.”
Times are tough for journalists in India, where many reporters and editors say it is becoming increasingly difficult to do
their jobs.
Loyalists to the country’s powerful Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, have bullied editors into taking down critical stories, hushed government bureaucrats and shifted from the common practice of filing defamation cases to lodging more-serious criminal complaints, which can mean jail time and take years in India’s overburdened court system.Modi, popular but thin-skinned, has effectively cut off
the mainstream media, forgoing news conferences to communicate directly with his vast electorate through Twitter, where he has 40 million followers. India fell three spots on the World Press Freedom Index to 136th in 2017, according to the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, below Afghanistan and Burma (also known as Myanmar), because of growing self-censorship and Hindu nationalists trying to purge “anti-nationalist” thought, the group said.Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s minister for electronics and information technology, said any suggestion that the government was hampering press freedom was “completely wrong.”
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