Until the deadly stampede that claimed 30 lives at the Mahakumbh last week, one of the Earth’s greatest gatherings of humanity had been used to convey Narendra Modi’s oft-repeated message of oneness – reducing the sometimes-incomprehensible plurality of 1.4 billion people and their myriad tongues and cultures to the singular.
Easy to comprehend and easier to market, Modi’s oneness is couched in terms of national unity but what it really calls for is Hindu unity. The message of the Maha Kumbh, in the words of the government of Uttar Pradesh, was “Unity in Diversity, Strength in Togetherness”.
This was a smoothened and gentrified version of Chief Minister Adityanath’s crude “Batenge toh katenga” (if you are divided you will be cut down) – meant to scare his Hindu voters – and Modi’s milder “Ek hai to safe hai” (if you are one, you are safe).
Reducing billions to “one” is an ongoing project encompassing many expressly stated purposes, however clumsy. One nation. One civil code. One election. One market. One exam. One language. One subscription (if you haven’t heard of the last, it’s meant for scientific journals for research laboratories).
Various elements of this project make a lot of Indians nervous, including Modi’s allies. A key ruling coalition member, the Janata Dal (United) has called for wider consultations on the One Nation, One Election Bill, introduced in Parliament last month.
One of the project’s major components is not expressly stated but made clear nevertheless: one voice – especially meant for the formerly combative, energetic media of a republic known once for its dissent and diversity. The one-voice project has witnessed considerable progress since Modi came to power, and that is why his government plowed ahead with a business-as-usual attitude after the deadly stampede.
Helicopters showered petals on pilgrims the same day as their compatriots were trampled to death. Modi continued his party’s election campaign. The mainstream media carefully avoided blaming the union and state governments, both quick to claim credit for success but zealously ensuring they take no blame for failures.
It was left to the independent media to investigate the government’s failures at the Maha Kumbh. 4 PM News Network, a You Tube channel reported that a local mortuary contained 58 bodies of those who died in the stampede, not 30, the official figure. Another channel, The Lallantop, reported there were two stampedes, not one.
India’s government has mostly succeeded in stifling public discussion of its failures because the mainstream media are in its pocket, owned either by Adani, Ambani or other submissive oligarchs. Social media have followed suit. With Donald Trump now breathing down the necks of the companies that run them, there is no question of defying Modi.
That leaves the independent media, who have survived on a wing and a prayer, doing their best to hold the government to account and keep the cacophony of journalism alive. Arrests, raids, and criminal cases have not yet shut them down, but their position is tenuous, and they must frequently watch over their shoulder.
For instance, a criminal case was filed last week against the journalist Rana Ayyub, already besieged by various government agencies. She found herself accused of – in the words of the complainant, a lawyer affiliated with the Hindu right – “insults to Hindu deities, spreading of anti-India sentiment and incitement of religious disharmony” through tweets issued nearly a decade ago. It did not matter that no “disharmony” or violence ever occurred or that as far back as 1950, the Supreme Court held, “Free expression is… unique among liberties.”
Choking free expression
The choking of free expression is hard for many Indians to discern because the chokehold is applied slowly. The Modi government plays a long, deliberate game in stifling dissent. Latest evidence came last week when one of India’s finest and fiercely independent media outlets, The Reporters Collective, received an income-tax department notice about revoking their nonprofit status, which means they and their donors must pay tax.
To remind you, the Collective, despite being cash-strapped, has produced investigative stories that have repeatedly revealed government duplicity and called out false claims on a variety of issues, including the opaque electoral bonds that allowed dubious corporate funding of elections; a dubious government solar-power auction that sparked the Adani bribery scandal; and their latest – a concerted government effort to discredit various global indices, voices the Bharatiya Janata Party cannot control, where India’s rankings have plunged.
Even before last week’s notice, the Collective had a message on its website: “We are out of funds. We don’t have money to pay our journalists.” It is unlikely the Collective can survive in its current form. The government is aware of the precarious nature of India’s independent media. Similar notices have been issued to other nonprofit journalism websites, with the tax exemption status of at least one revoked.
The tax-and-stifle modus operandi first emerged in 2022 when the income tax department raided the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Trust, the only Indian trust that supports independent journalism (Article 14, a for-profit company that already pays tax, has a content-commissioning contract with the IPSMF).
The Trust was told what The Reporters Collective and some IPSMF grantees are being told: what you do serves a political purpose, not a public purpose. This is an illegal interpretation, and it is not likely to be upheld by a constitutional court. But by the time a court makes that decision, it is likely to be too late, which is the intention – process, punishment and all that.
In 2024, recognising the role that independent YouTubers played in challenging the harmony of oneness by busting many claims and costing the BJP a simple majority during general elections that year, Modi’s government introduced a Broadcasting Bill that would require such influencers to register with the government, a precursor to control.
That Modi’s obsession with controlling the narrative extends to education, history, geography, culture, and many facets of Indian life is widely reported. Muslim heritage and culture, for instance, are being written out of education, history, and geography, and films, television shows, and news broadcasts echo the angry, puritanical,and paranoid ideology of Hindutva.
The BJP and its affiliates would like everyone to hew to their vision of a nation marching in lockstep, prioritising Hindu concerns, Hindi, duties – the emphasis on rights has weakened India, Modi believes – and unquestioning obedience.
On Republic Day, armed forces and state floats echoed Modi’s messages and slogans, such as Viksit (or developed) Bharat. At the Beating the Retreat ceremony, from which Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite hymn was banished in 2022, the Indian Air Force band even showcased a tune called Atmanirbhar Bharat (Self-sufficient India).
Modi is a master of the oneness message, which he delivers as a series of great, unceasing waves, engulfing the citizenry. A crosswind or a ripple of dissent cannot be tolerated, democracy is a handy slogan as long as it is not practiced, and a voice perceived to be out of sync is a threat.
“Some forces in and outside India are trying to destabilise the country and spread anarchy to create a negative image of the nation in the world,” Modi said as 2024 drifted to a close, expressing anger at those who criticised the ek-hai-to-safe-hai slogan. “Today urban Naxals target even those who say that you will remain safe if you remain united. We have to identify urban Naxals and unmask them.”
This is a backward-looking, paranoic observation, unworthy of a prime minister who runs a country he says is the inspiration for democracies nationwide. Now consider this observation made in March 1949 by the Communist Party of China, which went on to run a totalitarian state: “After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will still be enemies without guns; they are bound to struggle desperately against us, and we must never regard these enemies lightly.”
A free press and a healthy diversity of voices go a long way in combatting democratic backsliding. A story we published on Monday described both the importance of the one-nation-one-voice project to the BJP and the importance of independent media in revealing how it works: surreptitiously, with slow determination, and in opposition to India’s founding ideals.
Film writer Anna M M Vetticad spent 11 months speaking to more than 50 producers, directors, and others to reveal how a right-wing, pro-government, Islamophobic wave has washed over India’s films after 2014, especially from the Hindi film industry. Vetticad’s investigation provides a good insight into what the independent media can do: give a long view of what’s happening and provide context to seemingly unrelated events that are easy to otherwise dismiss as a bunch of Indian aberrations.
Although Tamil and Malayalam film industries often defy the trend, self-censorship and extra-judicial pressure to conform to unwritten restrictions are now routine, as writers, directors, producers, and streaming platforms fall into line with the demands of Hindutva, the ruling party and the state, all increasingly indistinguishable. The few who resist face attacks by virtual mobs or must submit to censor cuts or indefinite delays. A formerly swift appeals procedure has been dismantled, and judicial recourse is uncertain.
Yet, hope is far from lost.
The biggest problem with Modi’s one-India-one-voice project is, as history teaches us, the argumentative nature of India’s republic. Defiance of authority is inherent to the Indian psyche and the Constitution, and diversity is a lived reality.
Currently, it may not seem like they might, but things change. History is cyclical. Any effort to force a billion people to board a single train of thought is likely to – eventually – derail. Jeo Baby, a Malayalam film director told Vetticad that, beyond a point in the timeline of censorship, new movements and alternatives would always emerge. “Ee kaalaththe samara,” he called it. The battle of our times.
This is a modified version of an editorial note first published in Article 14.
