Deeksha Sharma was scared and baffled at the same time when she received a death threat on her WhatsApp messaging account on Sept 16.
The young journalist with The Quint, a digital news platform, was greeted at 3.30am by an image carrying a threat message in Hindi. Ominously, it referred to the recent high-profile slaying of Gauri Lankesh, editor of Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a weekly tabloid in Bengaluru. It warned that anyone writing critically of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu nationalist parent group, Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), would not be spared.
Lankesh was shot dead outside her residence by unknown assailants on Sept 5. She had been a frequent critic in her writing of Sangh Parivaar, the family of rightist, Hindu nationalist organisations started by RSS members. At the same time, she was believed to have angered ultra-leftists by being instrumental in the surrender of certain Naxalites, as local Maoist insurgents are known.
Police in Bengaluru have pursued several different leads but have yet to solve the murder, which galvanised journalists and the public into protests across the country.
Deeksha Sharma received the same threatening message on her mobile phone from two different numbers in India. She tried to call one of the numbers and also checked the locations on the Truecaller application but her quest hit a wall. She has no idea why she was singled out, unless her number was included in a group message of some kind.
"It was scary at first. I was also baffled. I don't write on politics. I write on pop music. Why should anyone threaten me?" she told Asia Focus.
The most provocative thing she remembered having done in recently was to campaign against a sexist rapper over a vulgar song titled Bol Na Aunty Aau Kya (tell me aunty shall I come?). After her criticism, YouTube took down the video.
Sharma lodged a complaint at a police station in Noida, a city adjoining Delhi where The Quint has its office, but police have made no headway so far.
Around the time Sharma received her threat, half a dozen other journalists in Delhi were also threatened with death. They included Sonal Mehrotra Kapoor and Ravish Kumar of New Delhi Television (NDTV), the prominent correspondent Mohammad Ali of The Hindu newspaper, Abhay Kumar of Asian News International, and Debobrat Ghose of the news website First Post. Others received threats but did not publicise them. Delhi Police are looking into three of the cases.
Ali of The Hindu said he received the threat message twice -- first on Sept 20 and then a day later. Kumar, meanwhile, addressed an open letter to Modi to complain that he was constantly being added to WhatsApp groups that hurled abuse at him. He told Asia Focus the police had not yet made any progress in his case. The sender of the message he received, he said, had expressed regret that Kumar was still alive.
Last month four journalists were killed in India. Besides Lankesh, the victims included Pankaj Mishra of Rashtriya Sahara, a Hindi daily in Bihar; and Shantanu Bhowmick of Din Raat, a Bangla news channel in Tripura. As well, KJ Singh, a senior journalist, was found murdered along with his mother at his residence near Chandigarh, the state capital of Haryana and Punjab. Sanjeev Gopalan, a journalist in Kerala, was stripped and assaulted in front of his wife and adolescent daughter by local police.
Five other journalists -- Hari Prakash of Jharkhand, Brijesh Kumar Singh of Bihar, Shyam Sharan and Kamlesh Jain of Madhya Pradesh, and Surender Singh Rana of Haryana -- were killed between January and August this year in four different states, making the current year one of the most violent on record for the profession.
More than 60 journalists were killed in India between 1992 and 2016, including 11 in 2013, the worst year to date. According to National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data, 142 attacks have been registered against journalists since 2015. As well, a host of women journalists have lodged complaints against trolling and abuses on social media.
Reporters Sans Frontieres, an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) that promotes media freedom, ranks India 136th out of 180 countries in its World Freedom Index 2017, three steps down from 2016.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an NGO based in New York, not a single journalist's murder has been solved in India in the last decade.
The attacks have been widely condemned by other bodies including the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), Amnesty International India, the India Newspaper Society (INS), Editors' Guild of India, Broadcast Editors' Association and Federation of Press Clubs.
Many journalists' groups have attributed the attacks to an increase in intolerance under the Modi government, although Bengaluru (in Karnataka), Tripura and Kerala states are ruled by opposition party governments.
Senior journalist Pranjoy Guha Thakurta had to resign as the editor of Mainstream magazine recently after the publication of an article critical of the Ahmedabad-based Adani conglomerate, which is considered close to the ruling party. He regrets the government's seeming lack of concern.
"Silence on the part of the ruling [authorities] has emboldened fringe elements to take the law into their hands. Space for dissenting voices has shrunk," Thakurta told Asia Focus.
He identified trolling, legal threats and physical violence among the tactics adopted to silence the media. "In my opinion the atmosphere of intolerance has grown since 2014. Over 50 journalists and right to information activists have died unnatural deaths," he claimed. Thakurta said it was particularly regrettable that the prime minister had not condemned the killing of Lankesh.
Pawan Duggal, an advocate specialising in cyber laws, said it would not be easy for the police to obtain the identities of those sending threats because WhatsApp was based in the United States and not under any obligation to share information with Indian law enforcement agencies.
Duggal told Asia Focus that India's Information Technology Act 2000 was too soft on intermediaries such as WhatsApp and silent on trolling, which is a growing social problem worldwide.
According to a World Values Survey done in 2012, the press in India was among the most trusted in the world with 34% of respondents saying they trusted it "a great deal" and 31% answering "quite a lot".
The International Press Institute's Death Watch placed India second last year based on the killings of 36 journalists there in the previous 10 years. Iraq had the dubious distinction of being on top.
