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The shadow politics of death threats to Indian journalists

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On May 26th, an article was published in The Washington Post titled, ‘An Indian journalist has been trolled for years. Now U.N. experts say her life could be at risk.’ and the journalist in question here is Rana Ayyub. Anyone who has put in the effort to read this article will know what a hollow and pathetic attempt this article was at portraying this lady journalist as a perpetual victim. There was a huge furore over this as even the UN Human rights body has taken cognizance of these ‘Death threats’ to Rana Ayyub and has asked the Indian state to protect this journo, which like always, will be at the expense of the taxpayers.

Here is the funny thing about this UN Human rights ‘article’, the disclaimer on this article of this UN Human rights ‘Experts’ or ‘Special Rapporteurs’ is as below:

The Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent of any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

This particular group operates on individual capacity. Now, we all know how subjective this ‘United nation human rights’ article can be when individual experts with designations such as Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief and Special Rapporteur on violence against women are in charge of coming up with such an article.

A reference was also made in the WP article to the murder of Gauri Lankesh, whose killers are not yet arrested by the way, even when the state is being ruled by the INC, who enjoys the complete and undying patronage of journalists such as Rana Ayyub and historians like Ramchandra Guha.

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/ramchandra-guha-gets-legal-notice-for-linking-rss-with-gauri-lankesh-murder-4839054/

This is exactly how the left wins the perception battle.

The last few days in the Indian media have been abuzz with mysterious death threats to journalists in India, surprisingly all of them left-leaning and Anti-BJP journos.

https://twitter.com/Abhina_Prakash/status/1000286081961476096

Death threats to these journalists, if at all there are, unfortunately, is not something new. Here was one such incident a few months back.

As usual, there was not much outrage in the media. In this case, there were credible threats and violence followed. Nothing of this sort has happened in the case of Rana Ayyub or Ravish Kumar, yet they enjoy the sympathy of foreign journos and UN Human rights *experts* committee.

All these sudden ‘death threats’ conveniently coming up before the run-up to the 2019 elections is eerily suspicious. If the death threats are credible and if these journos have trust in the Indian law and judicial system, they should lodge a complaint with the Indian police and follow it up and inform the public about the outcomes. Instead what we see is a perpetual communal victim-hood portrayal in the online space by these ‘Journos’. In the greater interest of journalistic ethics, we urge these journos to take up these issues seriously with the concerned authorities so that credible incidents such as the death threats to Rohit Sardana can be avoided in future and the guilty punished.

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