This lack of media interest in unpacking the full implications of SIR reveals by extension their indifference to the flourishing of democracy in the country.
What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow, or so goes a much cited adage. But really, it should be: “If Bihar sneezes, the whole country catches a cold”. What happens in Bihar impacts the entire country in direct and indirect ways. Even India’s demographic transition is crucially dependent on Bihar.
While most of the country has reached replacement levels in terms of population growth, it will take Bihar another decade to catch up. Yet the state remains one of our most intriguing, not just because two religions – Sikhism and Buddhism – have deep roots there, but also for its capacity to throw up endlessly intriguing curiosities.
How, for instance, does a state with the poorest literacy rates in the country enjoy such high levels of political awareness? This must have something to do with its vibrant media scene. While both newspaper readership and television viewership have been declining in the rest of the country, Bihar has bucked the trend.
The Audit Bureau of Circulation figures put newspaper circulation growth at an impressive 3% in the first six months of this year, which is perhaps why BJP swamped newspapers in Patna with their ads on November 6 when the first phase of polling began. This period, according to the model code of conduct of the Election Commission of India (ECI), is part of the 48 hours of pre-election silence, but does the ruling party care?
How does a state close to some of the largest swathes of Hindutva-soaked regions in the country remain true to the multiplicities of its social multitudes?
The fact that the BJP, with all its bottomless resources, has been forced to use an ailing Nitish Kumar as its political prop for more than three terms, a crutch which it has not been able to discard in all these years, try as it might, tells you a great deal about the peculiar DNA of this state.
It should not surprise us then that the ECI chose this state to introduce its special intensive revision (SIR). Bihar’s unusual recalcitrance to BJP’s charms over the years has certainly something to do with it. Could SIR then essentially be a surgery to neatly excise those elements that stand in the way of the party’s grabbing the third most populous state in the country for itself and thus, insert that frustrating missing bobble into its jigsaw map of the Hindi heartland?
Despite the indubitable importance of SIR, despite being the backdrop against which the present election was staged, it has remained a mere footnote, if even that, in mainstream media coverage thus far. This silence reflects disturbing media complicity with the stratagems of a discredited ECI.
As former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa observed in a piece for the India Forum: “It is hard to recall any other decision by the ECI that sparked as much controversy as its move to conduct the SIR in Bihar to check voter eligibility… announced in a press note on 24 June 2025.”
This lack of media interest in unpacking the full implications of SIR reveals by extension their indifference to the flourishing of democracy in the country. In any case, at least a third of what goes by the term “media” in India today is owned by oligarchs, so why should they?
Their response to the third press conference (November 5) that the Congress President Rahul Gandhi conducted on ‘vote chori’ or the ‘stolen vote’, slid off their screens like water off a duck’s back. The central issue here was that 25 lakh votes in Haryana could have been manipulated, ensuring that the BJP got to rule the state once again. The seriousness of this charge did not stir them. Instead a familiar template was set into motion.
It had three dimensions: one, the first responders were not so much the media or the ECI, but the BJP rushing to the defence of the latter. This was followed by a competitive drive among media houses to charge Gandhi with having lied. The BJP spokesperson’s line became their cue: “Rahul is cooking up excuses for the impending loss in Bihar”, which was then amplified ad nauseam in show after show; newspaper report after newspaper report.
The third element was all about diversion. The story now became about the “Brazilian model” whose face was used to create false electoral ids. It was her shocked reactions that filled a lot of air time and newsprint, and proved exceedingly useful in taking audience attention away from the serious charge that dummy candidates were being used for fake voting.
If the most important element of the Bihar election – the possible mass manipulation of the electoral rolls – did not create a resonance with the media, neither did actual realities playing out in the field. The coverage followed an old, worn-out formula: saturation coverage of the prime minister’s campaign. This cult building began early.
In July, joint posters of Narendra and Nitish appeared, with the former’s face in the foreground and inflated just that little bit. By September, a film on Modi’s early life, Chalo Jeete Hai, was shown in all 243 constituencies of the state. By early October, the election schedule was announced and attention was now on the October 24 rallies of Modi in Samastipur and Begusarai, with all his favoured tropes from “RJD’s jungle raj” to “NDA’s vikas”.
Every one of those herded into these campaign sites had heard them before, but the media had not lost their appetite for spinning the tale. By early November, the media’s Modi mania had reached fever pitch. To get a sense of this, India Today’s coverage of the November 2 road show in Patna should suffice. It combined hyper-excited commentary with hyperbolic headlines: ‘3-Km Long, Patna Modi’s Power Parade’.
For over 11 years, we have had this blind, cult-building being passed off by the mainstream media as “election coverage”. If any serious reporting has taken place on these elections, it is because of the under-resourced, often targeted YouTuber, with mike and camera in hand. Some of the most striking soundbites from this election have come not from the noisy NOIDA channels but from real journalists like Ajit Anjum, whose brilliant and courageous exposure of how the electoral roll revision in Begusarai was being manipulated on the ground won him a FIR.
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Women journos under threat: on the streets and online
According to UNESCO, women journalists across the world are extremely vulnerable to online abuse. There are additional threats like gendered disinformation, surveillance, and targeted harassment, all perpetrated for the purpose to discredit or silence them.
What is particularly distressing about the new data is that such violence is not just confined to the digital media: “Researchers warn these digital attacks are increasingly spilling over into the physical world, with a recent study finding 14% of women journalists faced real-world violence linked to online threats.”
Sometimes these attacks are prompted by the subjects they choose to report on. According to statistics released earlier this year, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed at least 24 Palestinian women journalists who picked up their camera and pens to tell the story of Gaza and the Occupied Territories. How can we ever forget how, on May 11, 2022, Al Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh was felled while reporting on an Israeli raid on the Jeni refugee camp with a bullet from an IOF (Israel Occupation Forces) sniper aimed at her head?
But women are also vulnerable to violence given the nature of their work, including having to keep late hours. Earlier this month, there was the horrific incident of two stalkers chasing a woman journalist as she was driving past midnight from her office in Noida to her home in Delhi. They smashed the back windshield of her car and it must have been a really traumatic experience.
Fortunately, she escaped alive, unlike Soumya Vishwanathan in 2008, shot in the head by criminals in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj area, as she was driving home from work late at night.
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When the Cobra bites…
Many have wondered what caused the government to get the Enforcement Directorate to attach Anil Ambani’s assets worth over Rs 3,000 crore. Could the pressure created by the major Cobrapost investigation into Reliance ADAG, about how it raised money from public and private sector banks, initial public offerings (IPOs) and bonds, and then diverted these funds through shell companies and offshore entities to promoter group companies, have played a role?
Remember Cobrapost has conducted some amazing investigations in the past and has had to face a great deal of state repression in the process.
There is a list from its website:
“Cobrapost, which was founded in 2003 by Aniruddha Bahal, the co-founder of Tehelka, is a critically acclaimed Indian non-profit news website and television production house, predominantly known for investigative journalism.
“It has successfully covered several high profile breaks. One of its first major breaks was in 2005, when, along with Aaj Tak, Cobrapost conducted an investigation named Operation Duryodhana, which exposed eleven members (MPs) accepting money for putting forward questions in the Parliament. In the aftermath of this investigation, those eleven MPs were expelled from the Parliament, the largest expulsion of MPs in the country’s history.
“In March 2013, Operation Red Spider revealed that some major Indian banks were involved in money laundering, in Operation Blue Virus, Cobrapost unearthed that some IT firms were using fake identities on social media to help politicians to improve their popularity.
“On May 2013, we uncovered how banks raise money by soliciting deposits from the general public or using other instruments available to them and use this public money to fund various projects of the corporate or business entities after due diligence.
“Our investigation titled “Up in the air” revealed how politicians have been using chartered aircraft and some of them even flouting Election Commission norms. One even flew in an aircraft not registered with the DGCA. Several politicians have been flying with family members, government officials and corporate barons, sometimes doing several aerial trips in a single day. Cobrapost also discovered that most of the air charter companies are running into losses worth crores of rupees.
“On 3 April 2014, Cobrapost published the results of the investigation, Operation Janambhoomi, bringing into light the conspiracy behind the demolition of the Babri Masjid, in December 1992, rewriting the history of modern India on communal lines. Our latest investigation, Operation Juliet, busted the bogey of Love Jihad in India.
“Serious anomalies came to our notice in the case of three cooperative societies, one for judges and two for journalists and we found that the Madhya Pradesh government led by the Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had allotted land to the powerful and the high and mighty people, with the sole aim of gratifying them The total loss in revenue accrues to Rs 95 crores in land allotments. Interestingly, on the land allotted to the judges in 2007, a legal battle is on about its ownership in the MP High Court and a title suit is pending since 2002. Several laws were flouted by the MP government to give a four time discount on the actual land price which we put forward in our report “Law of the land: How Madhya Pradesh Government largesse benefitted Vyapam SIT chief, Judges and journalists.
“Cobrapost on 2016 turned it eye towards the water packaging industry across India and found that barring two dozen companies all are exploiting groundwater to the hilt for profit but were failing in discharging their obligation: recharging the aquifers. As a result wherever these industries operated, they left the local community bereft of their share of water as the water table recedes deeper and deeper. These findings were published in “Digging deeper for profit, leaving poorer the earth, the common man”
“From politics to corporate corruption, social issues to banking scams, Cobrapost has covered myriads of arenas with their groundbreaking strategies and sophisticated news sense to bring its audience the truth. Although it is steeped in investigative journalism, Cobrapost also covers news from all over India, current headlines and hot topics, latest news on business, sports, international events and entertainment. Our North India office is based out of the NCR and we have launched a revamped website to include mainstream news into our oeuvre. Cobrapost relentlessly works towards social causes, courageous journalism and freedom of expression, encouraging young talents in the industry and provides a platform for dissenting voices to emerge out of the clamour of the mainstream media circus.”
What’s interesting to note here is that mainstream entities that had partnered its investigations in the past – like Aak Tak in 2005 when the TV channel’s founder S.P. Singh was still around – have since fallen off the investigation grid. In fact, investigation as part of journalism in India today is more or less defunct.
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Readers write in:
Making sense of the Constituent Assembly
We received a detailed and deliberative mail from Michael Pereira on the Wire’s conversation with Dr. Rohit De and Dr. Ornit Shani about their recently published book. ‘Assembling India’s Constitution’ (October 27).
“The authors’ assertion that the public was deeply involved in shaping India’s constitution only prompts me to wish the next-level questions probing whether and how they parsed the complexities inherent and limitations of their view.
“The book highlights public participation. Could they have discussed instances where public or community demands were not incorporated in the Constitution, deliberately ignored, or actively pushed back against by the Constituent Assembly? How did the Assembly navigate the sheer scale of demands within the time frame? Were some voices prioritised and privileged over others?
“The book mentions contributions by women, Dalits, and tribal communities. To what extent were their demands and influence truly transformative? What do their experience with the process reveal about the limitations of “democratic” participation at the time?
“What were the most significant competing constitutional views that emerged from the grassroots? How did they contrast with the more Western-influenced parliamentary model that was adopted? Were there proposals for more radically decentralised forms of governance that were ultimately dismissed?
“The take the role of elites: While your book de-centers the Constituent Assembly, critics have long argued that the constitution was an elites-driven project, dominated by Congress party’ lawyers and politicians. How do you reconcile your findings with this critique?
“The Constitutional Assembly’s legitimacy has been questioned because its members were not directly elected via a universal adult franchise. Given your focus on public involvement: How do you reconcile and address this fundamental flaw in the Assembly’s representative character?
“The public’s engagement, as you describe it, focused on making demands and suggestions. How different is this from having the ultimate power to approve or ratify the final document? What are the implications of the public’s role ending at the “assembling” stage without a final referendum of the draft?
“The authors argue that public ownership is key to the constitution’s ‘endurance’. How does this view help us understand the profound present-day political challenges and attempts to redefine or undermine the constitution’s core principles?
“Does the “assembling” process offer clues to how constitutional values could be refreshed or renewed today?
“The book describes how diverse communities and individuals used the constitution as a tool to engage the state. Could this be interpreted as resulting in an unintended consequence of enshrining state authority? Does such an engagement process, ultimately, reinforce rather than challenge the power and legitimacy of the central state?
“How did you find the archives documenting “parallel constitution-making processes” outside of Delhi? What does their existence, and your use of them, tell us about the broader practice and bias inherent in state record-keeping and the quality of historical research in India?
“Your book frames the Indian experience as a “model for thinking through the process of constitution-making in plural societies.” How does the process you describe compare to constitution-making in other post-colonial and diverse societies, e.g., South Africa, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan? What can India’s experience teach us, both positively and negatively?”
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Commending Wire
Gen Zer and Wire reader, Keerthivasan Tarun mailed us a very sweet note, which we value greatly:
“I am a second year college student and the Wire has helped me a lot in my ideological shaping and serves as a moral conscience to the nation, especially in such polarized times. I just write this as a note reflecting my humble gratitude for you work and service!”
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in
This article went live on November eighth, two thousand twenty five, at twenty-nine minutes past three in the afternoon.
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