India’s media problem in 2 headlines: ‘Anti-women’ opposition, ‘mastermind’ Nida Khan

In the last two weeks, we have seen how easily Indian mainstream media echoes the “manufactured narrative” that the Modi government and its surrogates seek to amplify.

Let’s start with what the media has chosen to call the “Women’s Bill” when in fact what they are referring to is the 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill to introduce delimitation of parliamentary and assembly constituencies based on the 2011 census. 

The reason given by the government for formulating this law was that it would help push through one-third reservation of seats for women in parliament and legislative assemblies. The so-called “Women’s Bill” reserving one-third seats in all legislative assemblies had already been passed in 2023. It was not notified, and therefore not implemented.

Given these facts, the government did not explain why, when a law like this was already on the statute, and could have been implemented before the 2024 general elections, it remained in cold storage. Incidentally, that “Women’s Bill” got the support of most opposition parties.

The government also did not care to explain why it had to call an urgent three-day session of parliament in the middle of assembly elections in several states to push through this bill and why it could not wait until later.

These are the obvious questions the media needed to ask. It did not. All major media houses would also have known that the Women’s Reservation Bill of Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam had already been passed in 2023.  

Yet, when this rushed session of Parliament was convened, and a united opposition defeated the constitutional amendment which needed two-thirds of Parliament to vote in favour, every major newspaper, barring The Hindu, headlined the defeat as one relating to the “Women’s Bill”.  Inadvertently, or deliberately, these headlines played into the narrative that the Modi government had sought to amplify through this process: that they were committed to “Nari Shakti” but that the opposition was not, a useful trope to amplify in the elections to the Bengal and Tamil Nadu state assemblies.

One could argue that the front-page headline in a newspaper does not necessarily represent its editorial stance which is reflected in the editorial page. Yet, a front page is not made by junior sub-editors, especially the choice of the lead story. Senior editors check and approve it. And we also know, given diminished attention spans, that most people scan the headlines and perhaps read a couple of paragraphs. Rarely would the lay reader take the time to go into the details of this or any other issue.

Therefore, there is a reason that headlines matter, and that they should accurately represent events and developments and neither exaggerate, nor give the wrong and inaccurate information, as in this case.

This article in Alt News, especially the latter half, gives you illustrations of what appeared the day after the vote in Parliament. Readers can judge for themselves the difference between a headline in The Hindu that read: “United opposition defeats Delimitation Bill” and one in Indian Express that stated: “Opposition stands, women’s Bill falls.” As mentioned earlier, the “Women’s Bill” did not fall. It had already been passed in 2023. What should have been headline news on that day is that the government chose to notify the actual “Women’s Bill” on April 16, a day before the vote in Parliament on April 17. By then it was clear that the Constitutional Amendment would not pass.

The TCS case

The other equally troubling incident is the way in which media handled what has now come to be known as the TCS sexual harassment case.

The story began virtually unnoticed on April 9 when reports appeared around sexual harassment at a company in Nashik. Few details were known.

In the days to follow, as this article by senior journalist Sukumar Muralidharan outlines in OffBeatConcerns, the story was picked by several media portals close to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Within a couple of weeks, it had caught the attention of TV news channels. Terms like the usual “love jihad” and now “corporate jihad” began to be used as the office under the radar was run by the Tata Consulting Services (TCS).

This story by Prateek Goyal in Newslaundry sets out in detail how the case developed in Nashik.  When asked about media coverage around this case, a senior police officer told the reporter: “Media people have made so many stories. No one is interested in what we say but only in what they want to hear.” 

While the story is still unfolding, and the police have arrested several men and declared a woman named in one FIR as “absconding”, it is the way the media played up the role of this one woman that illustrates not just the crass insensitivity of some mainstream media houses but also, as in the case of the “Women’s Bill”, how readily they amplify a narrative that the BJP and its supporters have been plugging.

The woman in question is Nida Khan, an employee of TCS.  The media, especially television news, repeatedly used her photograph and claimed she was the head of Human Resources and the “mastermind” of a conspiracy to convert fellow workers to Islam. 

By the time TCS clarified that Nida Khan was not the head of HR but was an employee in another department, the damage had been done. A young woman, expecting her first child, who had recently transferred to Mumbai from Nashik, became the face of the alleged scandal at the TCS unit in Nashik. Her attempt to get anticipatory bail has failed. Worse still, TCS, which has gone to great lengths to assert that it had a system to deal with complaints from its employees, suspended this young woman without doing its own independent inquiry into the case. 

As of now, it is not clear what will happen to Nida Khan. It is clear, however, that the trial by the media has ruined her life. And it is highly unlikely that any of the newspapers or channels that used her photograph and repeated the falsehood will apologise. Meanwhile, the BJP and its supporters have no complaints.

This incident in the TCS office in Nashik, how it developed, the role of the Maharashtra police and the role of the media must also be viewed against the background of the developments in Maharashtra where a controversial anti-conversion law has been passed. As this article by Kunal Purohit in Article 14 points out, conspiracy theories about “love jihad” have been assiduously promoted by BJP supporters in the build-up to the enactment of the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, 2026. Under this law, even if there is no complaint, the police can initiate action if it suspects that there are attempts at religious conversion.  

Seen together, what we have witnessed is the ease with which the government and the party in power can ensure that their choice of manufactured narrative is deliberately or inadvertently amplified by mainstream media. 

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