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Event Details:
The Center for South Asia is sponsoring an in-person talk with Palagummi Sainath, journalist and reporter who has covered rural India for over 30 years, on November 15, 2023.
About the Speaker : Palagummi Sainath is a journalist and reporter who has covered rural India for over 30 years. He has won over 60 national and international journalism awards. These include the Fukuoka Grand Prize 2021, Amnesty Internationalʼs Global Human Rights Reporting Prize, and the Ramnath Goenka Journalist of the Year award. He has been teaching journalism at the social communications media department of the Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai for over three decades, and at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, since 2000. He has also been a visiting professor at Princeton and UC Berkeley, among other places. In December 2014, he launched the Peopleʼs Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique independent multimedia digital reporting platform, whose mandate is to cover every region and section of rural people in India. In its first 7 years, PARI has won over 50 journalism awards. His new book, The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom, is about the last fighters in Indiaʼs struggle for Independence.
Lecture Topic Summary: India’s slipped to a historic low rank of 161 out of 180 nations in the World Press Freedom Index this year. The report of a committee set up by the government in 2020 (when that rank had fallen to a then record 142) simply vanished. This year, the chief minister of Manipur announced, “The state government has filed an FIR against the members of the Editors’ Guild for trying to create more clashes in the state of Manipur.” There is no precedent to such an action. This October 3, police raided nearly 70 locations, including the residences of dozens of journalists and contributors associated with the portal Newsclick. Universities at the forefront of academic freedom and excellence such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University and (Rabindranath Tagore’s) Santiniketan are in a shambles. And corporate media – whose billionaire owners whose wealth depends on government contracts to access public resources – seem to be marching in lockstep with the government. Is this crackdown and criminalization of dissent a new way of running the country?