Digital is a double-edged sword: How journalism is surviving under pressure in India’s poorest state

In early November, the party of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a decisive election victory in Bihar, India’s poorest state. The winning alliance includes Modi’s BJP along with Janata Dal (United) as the prominent partner. The two parties currently rule the state together. The JD(U) has been in power in the state for two decades now.

Right before more than 74 million people went to the polls, the Free Speech Collective, a press freedom group, released a report on Bihar’s free speech record from 2020 to 2025. 

“The last five years have been marked by assaults on journalists, with six killings and 11 instances of attacks,” the report said. “The general climate for free speech has also been affected by detention and arrest of journalists and threats to editors of prominent dailies, coupled with defamation and censorship of social media posts.”

While Bihar was once compared to the Wild West, instances of crime have been sharply brought down. But attacks on media freedoms in the state have not abated. A 2013 report said “that newspapers in Bihar were downplaying issues like corruption due to government pressure, favouring the establishment and ignoring the opposition in their news coverage.” Little has changed in recent years: journalism and politics are still inseparably intertwined in the state. 

The Election Commission of India revised voter lists in the state only a few months before the vote, in an action behind which opposition political parties saw an attempt to favour Modi’s party. The revision of the voter lists is a way to “institutionalise the stealing of votes,” said Rahul Gandhi, Indian opposition’s leader.

Few mainstream TV channels have raised questions on this revision. But newspapers have reported that many migrants, women and vulnerable people were finding it hard to comply with the process and therefore were likely disenfranchised.

Some observers suggested that what happened in Bihar would be replicated in the rest of the country, and they were right: in October, the Election Commission announced that such a revision would take place throughout the country.

Veteran news anchor Ravish Kumar, who was born in Bihar, criticised mainstream media’s obedience to authority while covering elections in the state in his YouTube show.

In order to better understand Bihar’s media ecosystem, I spoke with Kiran Shaheen, a 69-year-old journalist from the state. Shaheen has a long view of Bihar’s history. When she was 19, she was imprisoned for seeking democratic rights and a free press. Her five-decade-long journey as a feminist media practitioner is a study of how Bihar’s media has changed over the years. She is also the author of a recent essay titled “Wanted: a responsible media in Bihar”

Shaheen taught an ICFJ-backed course in Hindi journalism to grassroots activists in Delhi between 2010 and 2012. Today, she works on mental health issues with women in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh.

Q. You have seen journalism in Bihar evolve through the 1970s and 1980s. Can you give us a snapshot of what it was like in those decades?

A. In the 1970s and 1980s, Bihar’s capital Patna had only four major papers. They were owned by the Birla Group and the Maharaja of Darbhanga, Kameshwar Singh [Darbhanga is an important city in north Bihar today. Singh was the last to hold the title Maharaja as independent India abolished monarchy in 1952. However, he held on to his family estates].

Two of these papers were published in Hindi and two in English, and they informed people but did not do a good job of contextualising news. In other words, they told us what happened but not why it happened. They kept away from having crucial discussions and debates around tough political questions. Even the editorials were more like a sermon or a cry in the wilderness.

Important stories of social injustices or caste conflicts were covered mainly by the national newspapers [or those with wider circulation] based in Delhi. When their correspondents came to Bihar, they needed help taking them to rural areas and translating local dialects. I was an interpreter for some of these journalists. Sometimes they would pay me enough to cover college fees or hostel charges. 

Q. In such an environment, you decided to start your own printing press. How did that come about?

A. I was born in an orthodox Marwadi family as the youngest among seven children. [Marwadis are traditionally traders from the western state of Rajasthan]. Having gone through trauma as a child, rebellion came easily to me. I knew I was never going to be a ‘housewife’.

My brothers bought newspapers to see the wholesale prices of commodities and of the metal they used to trade in. By the time they returned home in the evening, the newspaper would be almost torn. But reading through those torn pages was liberating for me. Those newspapers became my only connection to the outside world.

When I graduated from high school, I was denied a college education. I was told to stay at home until my father and brothers found a suitable groom for me. That was the last straw.

One summer evening in 1975, I read about plans for a massive rally in Patna’s famous Gandhi Maidan. Indian democracy stood at a crossroads, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was accused of electoral malpractice, and a Gandhian leader named Jayaprakash Narayan was gathering forces to oppose and overthrow her authoritarian leadership. She later imposed a state of emergency, where parliamentary democracy was suspended all over the country.

I ran away from home one evening to join Narayan’s rally and never returned. I started a small printing press, where I would write and print pamphlets on women’s issues. In a sense, that was my first foray into publishing and journalism. The regular newsletter I published was called Apni Azadi ke Liye (For Our Freedom). Over the years, feminist stalwarts like Kamala Bhasin and Madhu Kishwar, editor of a feminist magazine Manushi, asked me to write for them or began writing about me in their journals. They even began writing about my publishing career in their journals.

You have to understand that journalism back then was not about “objectivity”; we believed in questioning authority, speaking truth to power and backing the underdog.

Q. How tough was it to be a journalist in those decades? Presumably, there were not many women in the newsroom.

A. In 1982, I started a job as a proofreader with the Hindi newspaper Aryavart on a freelance basis. Women were not encouraged in newsrooms, so I was made to sit next to the teleprinter room on a stool and a table. My job was to correct typos from copies that came from the news agencies. I was famously called “proofreader girl”. I earned between 12 and 15 rupees a day, depending on how many printouts I could proofread. I had no other benefits. 

I also had to close down my printing press because I quickly ran out of money. 

Still in my twenties, I was trying to figure out my prospects in the news media. That was the time when those four big newspapers (Aryavart, Indian Nation, Pradeep and The Searchlight) were almost on the verge of closure as they did not keep up with emerging print technology. 

Around that time, when the Indian economy was opening up slowly to the world markets, one of the largest newspaper companies decided to enter Bihar. The Bennet Coleman Group launched the Navbharat Times, and I joined as a journalist in 1986.

By the time my twenties were coming to an end, I got two promotions, much to the ire of my male counterparts. I still remember that many of them didn’t talk to me for years, and some refused to work with me at the same desk.

As was the norm in those days, the woman was put in charge of the local section. [The Times of India brought the concept of city-based pages to different Indian cities. Since India was opening its markets, wealth flowed into its urban centres, and The Times of India began attracting local advertising in cities.] 

My first assignment was to collect and compile Patna-based news that had “urban flavour”. We got very popular with the audience, and subscriptions increased manifold, under the leadership of a woman journalist no less.

No matter where I worked, I felt like a misfit. I realised very soon that people don’t like women who raise questions and have an independent voice. 

I moved to Delhi in 1991. The disdain the English media had for Hindi journalists soon became evident there. There was a hierarchy, and Hindi was way below English. But in Bihar, this is different: Hindi-language media still holds a lot of sway in the state. Today, Hindi outlets such as Amar Ujala, Dainik Bhaskar and Dainik Jagran are among the most circulated newspapers there.

At that time, journalists were not ‘trained’ in a formal sense. We learnt what we learnt on the job. What was needed back then was a hold over the language and good writing skills.

Q. How do you categorise press freedom in Bihar in the 1970s and 1980s?

A. After the eventful 1970s [when press freedoms were suspended throughout the country], journalism was shaken and forced to look within if it wanted to survive. A good number of reporters, mostly from the upper caste, were getting exposure to the new truths of the society about caste inequalities and oppression and such.

The emergence of a far-left guerrilla movement among landless agricultural labourers was one of the biggest factors that forced reporters to open their eyes to the agricultural crises, farm debt and landless labourers. Many began giving more space to issues around social and economic injustice.

Q. How do you look at press freedom in Bihar today? What are the major issues journalists face in the state?

A. Mainstream media, newspapers and television channels alike, along with plenty of mushrooming social media channels, have become proactive against the opposition parties’ and working class voices. This is unheard of. Why would you seek accountability from the opposition? You need to ask questions to the government. But, increasingly, you see the opposition parties being questioned. 

The panel discussions on the TV channels are argumentative and inconclusive. 

There was always a hidden pressure for journalists to comply. Back in the day, local strongmen and landlords used to threaten and beat ‘stringers’ in the rural areas, and they were seldom protected by the owners of the newspapers to toe the line. This remains the case; in many ways, the ‘stringers’ are still vulnerable to local pressure and fear losing their jobs all the time. Today, I can argue that they are even more vulnerable since large corporations own most of the media. 

While large news organisations have mostly lost credibility, I would still say it is a mixed bag. During the pandemic, both the Bihar government and Modi’s government cracked down on journalists who were critical of their handling of the emergency. Many angry journalists protested the fact that legal cases were slapped on them without much basis. 

Another reason I say it is a mixed bag is that digital media and social media are helping both those who are doing excellent reporting on the ground and those who are only covering the powerful. There are people-centric stories, and there are power-centric stories.

Bihar’s population has always been credited for being politically aware. But in the digital space, it is tough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Corporate media, with lots of funding, can afford to balance what it wants to feed a very aware public. And with the rise of AI, things might be taking a very different shape very soon.

In 1975, when civil rights were suspended in an internal emergency, L K Advani, who was then one of the opposition leaders, said: ‘When the media was asked to bend, it crawled.’ I would say it is the same today.