Sahyog, Takedowns and Laws: The Machinery of Media Control

Freedom of press is a contentious idea in India. Unlike the United States, where it is explicitly protected by the First Amendment, India offers no standalone guarantee of press freedom. The right is inferred from the Constitution’s broader protection of free speech. In effect, a free press in India is a policy choice, not a structural restraint on state power.

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This distinction is critical. It has meant that journalists, regardless of the government of the day – led by Congress Party, Janata Party, BJP or any coalition – have had to work carefully around power.  The condition of the press has rarely been as precarious as it is today.

Official statistics are often deployed to suggest the opposite. According to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, as of 2024-2025 India has 1.55 lakh registered publications under the Press and Registration of Books Act. In addition, there are 393 private television news channels, and nearly 3,700 digital news publishers registered with the government as of 2024. With such numbers, the argument goes, how can press freedom be under threat?

The argument collapses when one asks a more basic question: what is the role of a journalist? The classical definition is not to protect authority, manage perception or maintain order – the function now routinely performed by what is widely described as “Godi media”. The journalist’s task is to tell the truth, as fully and fairly as possible, so that citizens can decide for themselves.

It is precisely here that the conflict lies. Since 2014, journalists have been routinely branded with a bouquet of epithets – “presstitutes”, “propagandists”, “habitual offenders”, “liars”, “biased”, “anti-national”, “anti-India”, “anti-Hindu”. Many of these labels echo the vocabulary of the former colonial rule.

The British believed a free press in India would breed insubordination and anarchy; they dismissed the Indian press as inherently “malcontent” and treated speech as perpetually suspect – “disloyal” or “seditious” by default. Indians were cast as irrational and hot-headed, incapable of handling liberty. The irony is stark, given today’s repeated exhortations to decolonise the Indian mind and reclaim national pride.

Among these labels, “anti-Hindu” is the most corrosive, carrying with it a colonial inheritance. Its roots lie in British jurisprudence, particularly in the work of Thomas Babington Macaulay, who introduced into the Indian Penal Code the idea that Indian religious feelings were uniquely fragile and therefore required special legal protection from “abusive” speech. This criminalised verbal insult even when it fell short of defamation, marking a decisive break with earlier traditions of religious contestation.

The prohibition on intentionally “wounding the religious feelings of any person” rested on a paternalistic assumption: that Indians were thin-skinned, and that Hindus in and Muslims were predisposed to zealotry. This was imposed on a society that, prior to British rule, had a longer and more robust history of religious liberty than England itself. The effect was perverse. The law rewarded public displays of religious outrage, encouraged the internalisation of grievance, and hardened communal identities. It sharpened the Hindu–Muslim divide while flattening older and often violent fault lines within communities such as between Sunnis and Shias and Vaishnavites and Shaivites, by subsuming them under a simplified binary.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself gestured toward this legacy in his recent speech at the Sixth Ramnath Goenka Lecture, where he invoked the “Macaulay mindset”, arguing that “Macaulay shattered our self-confidence. He infused a sense of inferiority within us. With one stroke, Macaulay threw thousands of years of our knowledge and science, our art and culture and our entire way of life into the dustbin.” The diagnosis is not entirely misplaced. But it was framed narrowly, in the context of language and education. Any serious reckoning with Macaulay’s “mentality of slavery” must also confront the legal architecture he left behind. Including one that institutionalised the idea of the easily hurt Indian, and continues to be weaponised to police speech today.

Other terms, like “presstitute”, have a more recent lineage. The word is commonly attributed to American commentator Gerald Celente, who popularised it in the early 2000s to describe journalists he saw as stenographers to power rather than its watchdogs. In India, however, the term has been repurposed. It is no longer used to challenge authority but to shield it – deployed as a slur in a political culture war to discredit investigative journalism and reframe dissent as paid propaganda. Online trolls use it as a tool of discipline.

This impulse – to discipline the press – is central to the character of the present government, and in this it resembles the colonial state. The methods, however, are different. Rather than overt, across-the-board censorship policy of the kind seen during the colonial rule and Emergency under Indira Gandhi, control is now exerted through a dense web of restraining orders, tax raids, legal action, intimidation and, in some cases, surveillance technologies.

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Crucially, this disciplining function is no longer exercised by the state alone. It is outsourced to non-state actors: party media cells, loyalists who fund or acquire media entities, and freelance enforcers or individuals eager for visibility and favour from the establishment. The result is a climate of constant pressure without the visibility of formal bans.

Three recent reports strip away any remaining illusions about what this has produced. Taken together, they document a steady, systemic erosion of press freedom over the past two years, marked by staggering levels of intimidation and increasingly overt management of the media ecosystem, sometimes through private corporate power, sometimes directly by the state.

Each report illuminates a different facet of this reality. One, provides documentation of organised and premeditated targeting of largely web-based journalists and media organisations. Another compiles nationwide evidence of arrests, killings and harassment of independent reporters, particularly in rural areas and small towns, alongside regulatory overreach. The third exposes the government’s direct role in silencing critical voices, especially on the microblogging platform X.

An investigative report by Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) names OpIndia and the Adani Group as “Press Freedom Predators 2025”, holding them responsible for a combined total of 314 attacks on journalists and media organisations between 2023 and 2025. It records that between January and September 2025 alone, OpIndia published 91 articles targeting journalists and media outlets. Forty-three of these targeted just five journalists, and 35 were followed by immediate online harassment (See Box 1-3). Adani Group is mentioned as an entity that subjects journalists to judicial harassment (See Box 4).

OpIndia has rejected the RSF findings, accusing the organisation of passing judgment without substantiation. It has claimed that its inclusion on the list is primarily due to a recent “dossier” it published on the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). The document itself – styled like a PowerPoint presentation (yet, titled “paper” as if it was an academic monograph) is heavy on insinuation and innuendo against scholars associated with CSDS, rather than evidence. Far from rebutting RSF’s charge, it inadvertently illustrates it. In an ecosystem shaped by whataboutery and limited vocabulary, such a defence has become routine.

A second report by the Free Speech Collective (FSC) presents an even grimmer account. It documents 14,875 violations of free speech in 2025 alone – ranging from killings and arrests to internet shutdowns, corporate pressure and regulatory retaliation, including the revocation of The Reporter’s Collective’s tax exemption.

The report records attacks on 33 journalists for reporting on local corruption, illegal mining, liquor mafias and administrative failures. It notes the filing of sedition FIRs by Assam Police against the leadership and columnists of The Wire, including editor Siddharth Varadarajan and consultant editor Karan Thapar. Following the Pahalgam attack, it documents the withholding of accounts belonging to journalists, news organisations and international media outlets – among them The Wire, Maktoob Media and Reuters – without public disclosure of reasons. It also flags the Karnataka High Court’s decision upholding the Sahyog portal, effectively legitimising large-scale, opaque censorship of online speech.

Sahyog is fast emerging as the institutional backbone of this new regime. It enables decentralised censorship by allowing the state agencies, district officials and local police to issue takedown notices directly to platforms, bypassing fair warning, transparency and accountability.

The third and most revealing disclosure comes from the state itself. In a recent submission before a High Court, the Ministry of Home Affairs acknowledged issuing 91 takedown orders in 2024 and 2025 through the Sahyog portal, flagging over 1,100 URLs for removal.

The grounds cited ranged from “disturbing public order” and “defamation” to “manipulation of images”, “spreading misinformation to influence political processes” and even undermining “the global standing of India”. Many of the targeted URLs featured opposition politicians such as the Congress Party’s Jairam Ramesh and Supriya Shrinate and AAP’s official Uttar Pradesh handle. Those featured in take down orders include the Prime Minister Narendra Modi including allegedly digitally manipulated images of him and Gautam Adani, the Home Minister Amit Shah, the Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman and chairman of ICC and the “son of Union Minister Amit Shah”.

If the Sahyog portal is the instrument through which the state engages with the social media platforms such as X and Meta directly, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 supplies the legal scaffolding for restraining journalism itself. The Act’s rules, notified in mid-November 2025 by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology for phased implementation, impose new and far-reaching constraints on journalistic practice.

Journalist bodies, including the Editors’ Guild of India and the Press Club of India, have warned that the DPDP Act will have a chilling effect on investigative reporting. Journalism necessarily involves collecting, storing, verifying and publishing “personal data” about politicians, public officials, corporate actors, criminals and other public figures. Under the Act, such activity is rendered legally precarious because “personal data” is defined expansively and consent is treated as the default requirement. Exemptions for journalists are vague, conditional and discretionary—an architecture that actively encourages self-censorship, especially in cases involving corruption, abuse of power or wrongdoing.

The risks are not hypothetical. When whistle-blowers share personal data without consent, journalists may be accused of unlawful data processing, directly undermining source protection—the cornerstone of investigative journalism. The DPDP Act further empowers powerful individuals to approach a government-appointed Data Protection Board and seek punitive financial penalties. In practice, journalists are left without statutory protection and forced to rely on executive discretion. A fatal arrangement for press freedom.

Compounding this asymmetry, the DPDP Act allows the state to exempt itself from its own obligations, while journalists and media organisations enjoy no comparable shield. The result is a legal regime that entrenches state immunity and press vulnerability, hollowing out the very idea of the free press as the fourth pillar of democracy.

Overall, the picture that emerges is not one of a noisy and free media landscape but of a crowded, tightly managed one – where numbers mask coercion, labels replace argument, and freedom of press gasps for breath not as a right, but at the discretion of power.