Press Freedom in India: Unofficial State of Emergency, Says RSF

On March 25, 2025, Dilwar Hussain Mozumdar, a senior reporter for the digital news platform CrossCurrent, was covering a protest outside Assam Co-operative Bank. The protestors had alleged corruption within the ranks of the organisation. The Assam police arrested Mozumdar, despite him showing them his press card. He was charged under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and held for 12 hours at Panbazar Police Station without being arrested. The police didn’t file formal charges against the scribe till March 26.

Four days later, on March 30, the Hyderabad police detained Sumit Jha, a reporter for South First. He was filming a student protest at the University of Hyderabad against a government plan to clear 400 acres of campus forest. Jha had also shown the cops his press card, but still spent hours being driven around in a police van before being released.

All this unfolded against the background of the murder of investigative journalist Raghvendra Bajpai who was shot dead in Uttar Pradesh on March 8. Bajpai had only just released an expose on a local land scam.

India has long been declining on the press freedom index, but 2025 has, so far, proven to be a fatal year for the fourth estate. 2025 began with the shocking news of freelance reporter Mukesh Chandrakar's death. He was found murdered—his body dumped in a septic tank in Chhattisgarh. He was working on a story about corruption in road-construction projects. Chandrakar라이브 바카라 murder has become symbolic of the grave dangers independent journalists face in the country.

Decline Across All Free Press Indices

As of 2025, India is ranked 151 out of 180 countries on the Press Freedom Index. This is a slight improvement from its 2024 rank of 159. However, Reporters Sans Frontières has said in its report that the “Indian media has been in an unofficial state of emergency since 2014.”

A decade ago, India ranked 140^th and has been sliding in the index since, which means that India falls in the “very serious” category on Press Freedom. Other countries in this category include Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Palestine and Syria. The decline of press freedom in India has been constant for the past ten years—in 2014, India was in the 140th position.

Freedom House라이브 바카라 “Freedom in the World 2024” report also shows that India라이브 바카라 fourth estate is in trouble. The report has termed the subcontinent라이브 바카라 media as only “partly free,” with two out of four for media independence. Other countries on the "partly free" list include Bosnia, Bangladesh and Guatemala. According to the report, while the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech under Article 19(1)(a), on ground, the situation is different. Sedition prosecutions, SLAPP suits, and arrests under the UAPA pose a serious threat to press freedom in India.

Even foreign correspondents working for foreign news media in India have faced harassment. US-based Reuters reporter Raphael Satter, who holds an Overseas Citizen of India card, saw it revoked in March this year for “harming India라이브 바카라 reputation”. Human Rights Watch said this amounted to “repression” of independent voices in the Indian media landscape.

Weaponisation of Colonial-Era Laws: Sedition, the UAPA, and IT Rules

While the Indian Penal Code (IPC) has been replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), section 124A IPC (sedition) lives on in 152 and 153 BNS, which penalise any acts that “endanger the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of India, including inciting secession, armed rebellion, or subversive activities, or encouraging separatist feelings,” and “the offense of waging war against the Government of any foreign State at peace with the Government of India.”

Ironically, the British had brought sedition on the books in 1870 to muzzle dissent to colonisation. Now it is used against reporters, satirists, and most recently, against online creators asking questions of the government as seen in the instance of Bhojpuri singer Neha Singh Rathore.

According to a database by the digital news platform Article 14, between 2010 and 2021, Indian police charged 13,000 people with sedition. Interestingly, the conviction rate for these cases is as low as 0.1 per cent, which also underscores their SLAPP nature. Meanwhile, most of the people charged with sedition spend on average 50 days in prison before the courts grant bail, turning the legal process itself into a punishment.

India라이브 바카라 anti-terrorism law, the UAPA, has been used against many journalists and activists. Since 2014, at least 36 media professionals faced UAPA charges. Activists like Umar Khalid continue to languish in jail, while journalist Siddique Kappan was arrested in 2020 and only got bail in 2023. 

Another law being used against journalists is the 2021 Information Technology Rules, which allow the government to make social media sites take down content. Over the last decade, the Indian government has directed Google to take down 1.155 lakh content from its platforms, including YouTube and web browser. India is the top third country to send requests to Google for content removal, says a Surfshark study.

Courts and Cell Blocks: The Process as Punishment

The UP police bound journalist Siddique Kappan, placed a hood on him and hauled him to Mathura Jail on October 5, 2020. Kappan was on his way to Hathras to cover a Dalit girl라이브 바카라 rape and murder case. He was detained under the UAPA, and spent 28 months in jail before the court granted him bail in February 2023.

Mandeep Punia was arrested while covering the farmers' protest at the Singhu border on January 30, 2021 on accusations of obstructing police. In 2022, Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of Alt News, was slapped with several FIRs after he fact-checked the works of a right-wing preacher. The Allahabad High Court stayed the arrest in December 2024;  Zubair continues to fight the cases.

A new survey of public attitudes toward free speech says that Indians generally support free speech in principle, but when it comes to whether the government should allow people to express specific, controversial, or offensive statements, support wanes. 

Eighty-nine per cent of India supports the right to express themselves without government censorship and 88 per cent, the media라이브 바카라 right to report the news freely. It라이브 바카라 this disconnect between theory and practice that ranks India 24th out of 33 countries surveyed by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank at Vanderbilt University.