Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/india/page/6/)
Threats to NGOs and civil society actors have escalated in a number of countries across Asia and the Pacific, among them the arrests of activists opposing the referendum in Thailand and supporters of the West Papua freedom movement in the Pacific.
For eight years India has been a fixture on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual Impunity Index, which spotlights countries where journalists are slain and their killers go free. Perpetrators are seldom arrested and CPJ has not recorded a single conviction upheld in any of the cases of journalists murdered in India in direct relation to their work.
Investigative journalist Taha Siddiqui, who was forced to flee to France recently after a failed abduction attempt, talks about why he left Islamabad and his SAFE Newsrooms initiative which aims to highlight freedom of expression issues in newsrooms across South Asia.
The paper trail has changed — money now moves digitally and business registries are databases — and this lets journalists do more than ever before in tracking people and companies across borders. Here’s a useful list of which business databases to start looking into if you’re background companies in China, India, and the Philippines.
While legal notices can result in civil or criminal defamation cases, journalists in India say companies are using them as part of a tactic known as Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, in an effort to intimidate or censor them. Indian journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta spoke to Aayush Soni about the increasingly popular intimidation tactic.
How can media make sense of a country that has over 1.2 billion people (about 17 percent of the global population), close to 800 languages, an electorate of 814 million, and the largest urban agglomeration in the world? How does one plan for a country where, at the end of 2012, about 22 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line (with a daily spending of less than about US45 cents in rural India and US55 cents in urban India), but which also has 89 billionaires and features fifth in the Global Rich List?
In the run-up to the 2019 Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Hamburg this September 26 to 29, we’re featuring one Global Shining Light Award finalist per day. Check out “Operation 136,” by Cobrapost.