The job of a journalist, in any part of India, is to observe, investigate, verify and report. But if you do precisely that in Kashmir, you are in big trouble. That is what journalists associated with major English language newspapers – Indian Express, Hindustan Times and The Hindu – found out recently.

They have now experienced what journalists not attached to such prominent media houses have been through since August 2019 when the Modi government abrogated Article 370 and converted the state of Jammu and Kashmir into a union territory. With that change came control and coercion of the local press that included arrests, closing offices of publications like Kashmir Times, shutting the Press Club in Srinagar, and daily harassment of journalists and photographers.

You would think that now that this routine has touched mainstream print media, it would make for front page news. It did not.  

Bashaarat Masood, Assistant Editor with Indian Express who has been reporting for the paper since 2006 was first summoned on January 14 for this report that appeared on January 13.  The story was billed as an exclusive.  

Masood reported that the J&K police were conducting a survey of all mosques in Kashmir collecting information about the personnel in these mosques like imams and muezzins, members of their managing committee and their charitable wings. He followed this up with another report that quoted people who were concerned about these actions of the police, which they said had never happened before. Both stories are straight-forward reportage.  Yet, for reasons not made clear to Masood when he was summoned, they caught the attention of the police.

The response from his newspaper should have been immediate, the very next day. However, it took Indian Express a week before it ran a front-page story about what their own correspondent had been subjected to by the police, including being asked to sign a bond under Section 126 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023, to prevent “breach of peace” or anything that could disturb “public tranquillity”. A day before the belated Indian Express story, the Wire had already filed a report. 

Also, although the correspondent of Hindustan Times, Ashiq Hussain had also been summoned, his paper buried the report on an inside page on January 21. As if to compensate for this lapse, the paper published an editorial the next day saying the police had crossed a “red line”.  The editors of the paper should be aware that this line had been crossed a long time back.

Altogether four journalists, including Peerzada Ashiq from The Hindu, have been summoned for reporting on what in all respects is a routine story. 

Why should we be shocked or concerned that finally the daily harassment faced by so many Kashmiri journalists has now reached these well-known bylines?

Because, as I have argued in previous columns, what happens in Kashmir is a litmus test for what could happen anywhere in India. If a government does not respect the right of journalists in one part of the country to report without constantly watching their backs, what is to stop it from doing the same elsewhere?  

Furthermore, asking journalists to sign a bond under a provision of the law that anticipates that what you write might disturb “public tranquillity” is particularly dangerous and runs counter to any concept of freedom of expression. If such a precedent is set in Kashmir, it will give police the right anywhere in India to use this provision to stop journalists from doing their work.  

The message from these recent developments in Kashmir is that even what we in the media consider routine reporting can be unacceptable to the current dispensation. As a Kashmiri journalist told Scroll, “If there is no tolerance for even this kind of journalism, then what is the future of journalism here?”

Indeed, that is a question that all journalists and media houses, not just those based in Kashmir, should be asking.

Also, after these developments in Kashmir, will media houses ask their correspondents there, and elsewhere, to tread carefully, or will they encourage them to continue to report as journalists are supposed to do? 

While content even vaguely critical of the government is becoming scarce in most mainstream print media, although occasionally an in-depth report on an issue will pop up, this virtual flattening of the media undermines its credibility. Why should readers/viewers believe anything that is reported when most people with access to the internet have their own channels of information? Some of these peddle fake news but there are an equal number that provide coverage of issues that the mainstream ignores. 

As an illustration, here’s a story that the media in Maharashtra should have covered and used it to question the government when it insists that India is forging ahead as a growing economy. Hidden from view, because the media does not pay attention to the dark invisible corners of perpetually deprived areas in India, are stories like this one about the Melghat region in Maharashtra.

While reports on the region’s abundant wildlife in sanctuaries like the one in Tadoba make it to the news pages, the people who have lived in its forests do not. The Adivasi communities living in Melghat have suffered decades of neglect with patchy roads, poor health care facilities and abject poverty. 

Recently the Bombay High Court came down hard on the Maharashtra government in response to several writ petitions about the conditions in Melghat. It chastised the government for doing “too little” and said there should be “zero tolerance” of such neglect.

Those journalists who have covered Maharashtra since the 1980s are familiar with the Melghat story.  This has been a region of chronic developmental neglect that successive governments have addressed only when pushed.  The fact that in 2026 we are reading stories about Melghat that echo those reported four decades back is an indictment of India’s development story, as well as the indifference of its media.

According to this story in The Hindu, between April and October 2025, that is in six months, 97 children below six years died in the Melghat region either due to stillbirths or because the infants were low birth weight, born to severely malnourished women. In the same period, of the 4,437 pregnant women, 4,170 were anaemic. Let these facts sink in.  This is Maharashtra, one of the better off states in India.

Malnutrition and maternal deaths, in any part of India, rarely qualify as “breaking news”. But surely the detection of  “infiltrators” that the prime minister continues to mention at every opportunity, ought to find space in the news? It does not. 

By way of contrast, in the US, the actions of masked and fully armed ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents are top of the news. They are filmed pushing, shoving, chasing and even shooting down people presumed “illegal aliens” even before they have a chance to present their credentials. But in India, our equivalent of ICE, the police in a state like Assam have been literally pushing so-called “foreign nationals” into neighbouring Bangladesh and yet we read little about this in our newspapers.

Thanks to the consistent work of some independent journalists and platforms we get to read some stories about this. Stories like this worrying report by Rokibuz Zaman in Scroll about two men from Nagaon in Assam who were pushed into the no man’s land between India and Bangladesh not once but three times.

Hasan Ali, whose father was a “declared foreigner” and pushed out, told Scroll: “My country has declared my father a foreigner from Bangladesh. But Bangladesh has returned him twice. Taile amader desh kunda? Amader desh ase ki?” (Then, which is our country? Do we have any country at all?)

Who will answer Hasan Ali’s question? 

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