[1] “MAJOR RUCKUS IN THE VILLAGE RIGHT NOW,” Tanushree Pandey, a correspondent with India Today TV, tweeted at 1.44 am on 30 September 2020. “UP cops & officials forcing kin to cremate body overnight. Family begging that let us at least take the girl home one last time.”
Pandey was in the village of Boolgarhi, in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district. There, two weeks earlier, a young Dalit woman had been raped by four men of the dominant Thakur caste. She was left paralysed and with a severed tongue. Uttar Pradesh authorities tried to ignore the atrocity, but as details emerged and public outrage mounted they arrested the accused. The victim died from her injuries at a Delhi hospital on 29 September. Her body had just been brought back home.
At around 3 am, Pandey tweeted, “ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE. Right behind me is the body of #HathrasCase victim burning. Police barricaded the family inside their home and burnt the body without letting anybody know.” An accompanying video showed a solitary pyre aflame in the darkness, with the police keeping a few onlookers at bay.
Pandey’s tweets went viral, adding fuel to an already raging crisis for the Uttar Pradesh government under the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Ajay Singh Bisht. Many lauded her for exposing an attempted cover-up. The BJP, meanwhile, was hard at work to diminish the gravity of the crime. Amit Malviya, the head of the party’s information-technology department, posted an earlier video of the victim describing the attack to suggest she had suffered strangulation but no sexual assault. (Malviya seemed not to care that, by exposing the rape victim’s identity, the video violated Indian law.) The Uttar Pradesh police cited a forensic report to also claim the victim had not been raped.
Pro-government trolls and media outlets attacked Pandey’s character and credibility. OpIndia accused her of coaching the victim’s family to say they were under pressure from the Uttar Pradesh administration. It based this on a clip from a leaked phone call between the journalist and the victim’s brother that, it soon became clear, had been taken out of context and misconstrued.
Pandey’s employers publicly jumped to her defence. “India Today first asks why was the telephone of our reporter, who was covering the Hathras murder, being tapped?” the organisation said in a statement. If it was the brother’s phone that was compromised, “then the government needs to answer why are the phones of the grieving victim’s family under surveillance.” The statement continued, “Persuading a victim’s family to speak out in the face of government intimidation and threats is very much a part of what a tenacious journalist must do.”
But a different story was playing out within the organisation. A former employee of the India Today Group told me that Pandey, before she posted about the forced cremation on Twitter, had tried to alert her editors about events in Hathras using a shared WhatsApp group. “But nobody replied,” the former employee said, until the story blew up. The channel had to take notice especially after Rahul Gandhi, of the opposition Congress party, shared Pandey’s video of the cremation.
Rahul Kanwal, the news director for India Today TV and its Hindi sister channel, Aaj Tak, pulled Pandey up for posting the tweets without waiting until morning for instructions on how to handle the story. Pandey was accused of throwing away an opportunity to reap higher ratings for India Today’s channels by breaking the news on air. “She was blasted by the organisation,” the former employee said. “Something as grave as the forceful cremation of a gangrape victim is happening, and they expected her to wait till morning for the team to put the channel’s logo on the footage.”
“It was clear to everyone at Lallantop that Amit Shah and Narendra Modi should never be named in a headline,” Shyam said. “An editor said in my presence that they receive calls from the PMO”—the prime minister’s office.
Pandey was soon called back to Delhi and taken off air. This was presented to her as a much-needed break after the harrowing events she witnessed. In Pandey’s place, the former employee said, India Today sent in several popular anchors from Aaj Tak, including Sweta Singh, to present the “other side” of the story. Sweta went on to interview dominant-caste villagers who raised doubts about the victim’s family’s account and alleged that the incident had been cooked up by the Bhim Army, a Dalit-rights organisation opposed to the BJP.
India Today’s statement in support of Pandey after the leaked phone conversation was a PR tactic, the former employee said. “The general sentiment was in favour of Tanushree,” so “they had to take a stand to make a good impression. Otherwise, they would have thrown her out.” There was also the risk of making a martyr of Pandey, giving her even more public sympathy and attention.
India Today proudly endorsed Pandey when, in the spring of 2021, she won awards for her work in Hathras. Around that time, she was sent to cover the state election in Assam, which the channel’s editors thought would draw little attention. But she went after another big story, reporting on an affidavit that showed that a vehicle caught with stolen voting machines belonged to a BJP candidate. “Again, the BJP got pissed,” the former employee said. “The BJP got pissed and so Kalli Purie got pissed.” Kalli is the vice chairperson of India Today Group.
Pandey was pulled from the Assam coverage. She was transferred to The Lallantop, a Hindi digital portal. This was a demotion for a journalist who had been doing investigative stories for news television. She soon left India Today Group.
SHYAM MEERA SINGH, a reporter for the Aaj Tak website between 2019 and 2021, recalled that Pandey’s revelations from Hathras created panic in the newsroom. “Aaj Tak was forced to run the story,” he said. “They thought that this is a mess, the story has gone against Yogi-ji”—Bisht, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, who styles himself “Yogi Adityanath.” The channel responded by sending its people to Hathras, Shyam said, “to show the Thakurs’ side of the story.”
“There is a battle for justice being fought here as well,” Sweta Singh said on air, standing among supporters of the accused men. “This battle is being fought to ask if the accused boys are really guilty.” As the scandal grew, the Uttar Pradesh government under Bisht—a Thakur himself, with massive support from his community—had forcibly kept opposition figures from visiting the victim’s family. Sweta, channelling what she said were the sentiments of the villagers she spoke to, declared, “The politics over this must stop now. Political leaders should not come here. They should not come so that the villagers can move ahead with their lives together.”
Shyam interned at The Lallantop before coming to Aaj Tak. “It was clear to everyone at Lallantop that Amit Shah and Narendra Modi should never be named in a headline,” he said. Shah, the present home minister, is Modi’s closest and longest-serving lieutenant. “An editor said in my presence that they receive calls from the PMO”—the prime minister’s office.
He found that Aaj Tak was little different in its approach to the BJP’s favoured sons. “If you want to write on Yogi-ji, you would feel as if your hands are cut off,” Shyam said. He described how he once uploaded an article about Uttar Pradesh government employees protesting delayed salaries. He had included a photo of Bisht, he said, but was told to remove it, “with the argument that Yogi has nothing to do with this issue.”
In July 2021, Shyam posted on Twitter, “I will not step back from writing that Modi is a shameless Prime Minister.” The next day, India Today Group fired him for what it described as “continued social media violations, despite previous warnings.” The group pointed to a code of conduct that advised employees to use social media only to share news put out by India Today.
In 2019, India Today Group staff received an email from Kalli advising against expressing their personal opinions on social media. “I appreciate that we all feel strongly about most things,” Kalli wrote. “But, please do remember in our jobs, we have to be storytellers. We cannot be part of the story.” Kalli insisted that India Today should present all sides of a story and not favour one over any other. “That is not who we are.”
[2] AT THE CLOSE OF 1976, published a special issue looking at the year in review. Indira
