July 26, 2026

When the Press Becomes the Enemy

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-07-26 02:15:47

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Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack

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Any movement that demands accountability from the state must be willing to accept accountability itself. That is the plain principle at stake in what happened to journalists covering the Cockroach Janta Party protest, and it deserves to be stated without qualification. Attacking a reporter for doing their job is indefensible. It does not become defensible because the reporter works for a channel the protesters dislike, and it does not become defensible because the protesters believe their cause is just.

The clearest documented case is Dev Kotak's. The Times Now reporter had covered the Jantar Mantar sit-in for 23 days without incident. On July 20, as tensions rose between protesters and police, a crowd surrounded him chanting "Godi media" and, by his account, punched and kicked him from multiple directions while tearing his clothes. Journalists from Times Now, ABP News and several other organisations separately alleged that they too were assaulted, intimidated or harassed while reporting from the same site that day. This was not a single overzealous individual losing control in a chaotic moment. Multiple journalists from multiple organisations described the same pattern of hostility on the same afternoon.

What followed matters and should be recorded fairly. CJP spokesperson Saurav Das condemned the assault on Kotak publicly and by name, calling the violence unacceptable regardless of provocation from police. That response deserves credit. A movement's leadership disowning violence committed in its name is not nothing, and it is more than many protest movements manage. But a condemnation issued after the fact does not undo the assault, and it does not answer the more basic question of why journalists were treated as combatants in the first place at a protest ostensibly about examination fairness.

Four days later, on July 24, Kolkata saw a solidarity demonstration that also turned against the press. Journalists and media personnel covering the march were attacked during the event. By then, the pattern could no longer be dismissed as an isolated incident. It had now appeared in another city during another protest organised in solidarity with the same cause. On the same day, the Federation of Press Clubs formally condemned attacks on journalists during the student protests and called for an impartial judicial probe into the incidents. A national press body does not issue that kind of statement lightly.

Some of the resentment behind these attacks has a real grievance underneath it, and it should be named rather than dismissed. Protesters have complained that mainstream television has under-covered or misrepresented their movement, and media criticism of this kind is a legitimate part of any protest's relationship with the press. Distrust of a channel's coverage is not, however, a license to assault the person sent to report it. The two are entirely different acts, and a movement built on the claim that institutions have failed to hold power accountable cannot then defend violence against the institution whose job is to hold power, including the movement itself, accountable to the public.

Reporters who show up to cover a protest are not the state the protesters are angry at. They are not the minister, not the agency, not the police behind the barricades. They are often the reason the protest's grievances reached a national audience at all. A movement that attacks the people documenting its struggle does not strengthen its moral authority. It diminishes it. And when journalists become targets instead of witnesses, it is not only press freedom that suffers. The movement's own credibility suffers with it.