Tavleen Singh: History shows, raiding newspapers never works

Whipping the Indian media into obedience has been an important project of Narendra Modi’s government. Inconvenient journalists have lost jobs, been threatened by tax inspectors, charged with ‘anti-national’ activities and silenced in all sorts of other ways. But, the Income Tax raids on the offices of Dainik Bhaskar last week sets a scary new bar. If one of India’s two most powerful Hindi newspapers can have this happen to it, what chance is there for lesser publications and digital platforms to speak the truth?

Speaking the truth is all that Dainik Bhaskar tried to do during Covid’s devastating second wave. It published on its front page stories of the terrible suffering of ordinary people. Its journalists risked their own lives to bring to the world images of those pyres burning day and night in our crematoriums and those bodies buried in shallow graves on the banks of the Ganga. It printed stories of the unforgivable shortages of oxygen in hospitals and of the people who died because of these shortages. In a truly free country this newspaper would have been given an award for its courage to tell the truth. Instead, it has been punished….

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/raiding-newspapers-never-works-7420804/

Pratap Bhanu Mehta: What the Pegasus scandal means for Indian democracy / Shoaib Daniyal: Spyware attack threatens pillars of India’s electoral democracy

Samar Halarnkar: The lights begin to wink out in India’s democracy

The Judiciary is the Defence of the Innocent. Or so we thought…

WANTED: Immediate Justice in the Bhima-Koregaon Conspiracy. By Cedric Prakash

Govt wants to cage women who speak against it, say Narwal & Kalita as they and Asif Tanha walk free / Delhi HC criticises ‘wanton, frivolous use of UAPA by the State’ / P.B. Mehta: Has the blackbox of UAPA finally been opened?

Father Stan Swamy: I’d rather suffer, possibly die if things go on as it is

Pinjra Tod activist Natasha Narwal’s father dies of Covid day before her bail hearing // That Monday will not come, Judge Sahib

Gujarati Poet Parul Khakkar Blames ‘Naked King’ for Corpses Floating in the Ganga

Avay Shukla: LEST WE FORGET

A Call for National Mourning and a Proposal for a National Government. By Anil Nauriya

Society of the Spectacle / ‘इमेज‘ – ‘Image’: A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid