In the controversial Indian news media, women fight to be heard

Not many outsiders come to Belarhi, a remote farming village in northern India. Yet New York Times journalists were always shown great hospitality during reporting trips for the recently published series India’s Daughters.

On our first trip to the village in March 2022, my colleague Shalini Venugopal Bhagat and I arrived to find Arti Kumari, one of the main characters of our series, and her family completely together. Her mother, Meena, had taken the day off to greet us. Arti and her sister, Shanti, sent away the primary school-aged children they usually tutored in math and Hindi. Their father, Anil, a farmer, left the fields early. The walls of their house were freshly painted. Rangoli – decorative chalk drawings – adorned the swept floors. A delicious feast was stewed on the open stove.

My colleagues and I started India’s Daughters with a question: why were Indian women leaving the workforce?

Our first hurdle to reporting was access. Not all women in India can talk freely to journalists, as I discovered in my four years there. If I went somewhere with a male photographer or reporter, his mere presence could make an interview impossible.

Women I tried to talk to were often swamped by family members, elders, or concerned bystanders, who insisted on accompanying them, interpreting, or even speaking for them. In this environment it was impossible to allow women to speak openly. Men in the communities we visited did not allow this.

In addition, foreigners are viewed with suspicion in some areas, an attitude that has become more common under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Many in his party have a “conspiratorial mentality”, as political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta has put it, who views criticism from outside the country as an attempt to hinder India’s rise on the world stage.

It proved useful to have an all-female reporting team. In the villages and urban enclaves where our reporting took us, it would have been considered highly inappropriate and even dangerous for a male stranger to speak alone to a woman. But we were given rare access to the private lives of the subjects of our stories, without male supervision.

We asked a lot of the women we interviewed: to be vulnerable and honest when they talked about their dreams and ambitions and the pressure from family and their community to get married. And we felt that they spoke freely, without shame or fear.

Under Mr. Modi, journalism has grown increasingly come under fire. Local reporters have been put in prisonthe foreign press has been derided as anti-India, and female journalists have faced misogynistic trolls and harassment.

The Fourth Estate had flourished in India, the world’s largest democracy, along with the cheap, widespread internet, but has increasingly clashed with the political ideology of Hindu nationalism. Mr. Modi is an incredibly popular politician, and many of his supporters regard him as an all-knowing father figure who is above reproach – and any criticism of him as a kind of blasphemy.

The government has used anti-terror laws to silence journalists. Recently, police in New Delhi raided the homes and offices of journalists working for a left-leaning news portal known for its criticism of the Modi government. Rules issued in 2021 gave the government the power to remove or change online content if it led to a barrage of complaints — never mind that pro-government trolls were often behind the barrage.

While many journalists continue to report on topics that make them targets, a culture of fear and self-censorship has taken root.

This has been especially true for female journalists focused for harassment, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“This political dispensation believes in an ideology that is extremely rooted in patriarchy and undermines women’s intelligence at every level,” says Neha Dixit, an award-winning investigative journalist in Delhi. “They find it even more insulting when a woman is critical,” she added.

Mrs. Dixit fought for seven years lawsuits has filed a report against her accusing RSS – a militant organization dedicated to turning India into a Hindu state and the source of Modi’s party, the BJP – of trafficking indigenous children from Assam to Punjab and Gujarat for political and religious purposes . indoctrination. Members of the BJP denied the allegations in a lawsuit against Ms. Dixit and the magazine that published her reporting.

After her report in 2016, Ms Dixit received threatening calls from hundreds of phone numbers, with men threatening to rape her or throw acid in her face. A group of men tried to break into her home in 2021, she says.

Many of the women who entered journalism over the past decade had to first overcome resistance from their own families, Ms. Dixit said.

“It’s not seen as something ‘good’ that women do,” she said. “In many places, women are fighting to be in that public space, to openly ask questions, criticize or tell the world what they think. That is not appreciated in a patriarchal society like India.”

As a correspondent for The Times, I enjoyed a lot of protection that Indian journalists did not enjoy. But being a foreign woman made me a target in other ways.

In the later stages of our reporting, an incident threatened to jeopardize the trust we had built in our subjects and the series itself.

In May 2022, a pro-Modi commentator with a large following falsely claimed in an online video that I was anti-Hindu, causing a furore so loud that it reached Arti in remote Belarhi.

On social media, I was flooded with messages demanding that I leave India.

“This woman has no right to speak about our culture and religion,” one viewer wrote on YouTube. ‘Does she have the guts to open her big mouth in any other country? What is she even doing here, besides trying to make us see her in bad light?

A conservative anchor on a right-wing cable television news show focused an entire segment on the claims.

Arti began to doubt our motives at a critical time in her life and in our reporting – the run-up to her wedding. She expressed her concerns to Shalini, who was able to reassure her that the video was false and that I was not anti-Hindu.

My colleague Amanda Taub and three other women on our reporting team traveled to Belarhi as planned to cover Arti’s wedding. We were able to continue to experience the lives of these women up close.

Other journalists in India, embroiled in lawsuits or silenced by real or threatened retaliation, would not be so fortunate.