Last week police in India filed charges of sedition, among other crimes, against some of the nation’s most respected journalists, including Vinod Jose, editor of The Caravan, Indian’s foremost newsmagazine, and Rajdeep Sardesai, a well-known anchor on the India Today television channel. The journalists are being punished for reporting unwelcome news—the government’s response to an increasingly violent protest by farmers against the agricultural policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
It is no longer news that police authorities in states controlled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seek to jail India’s leading journalists. Last year Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, Indian’s most respected online news service, was accused of “spreading panic” for reporting, correctly, that the state’s Hindu fundamentalist chief minister had visited a religious event in violation of the national lockdown. (Varadarajan is also among those accused in the latest episode.) Modi has no more regard for press freedom than Donald Trump had, but enjoys more control than Trump ever did over key state governments and the judiciary.
