But he adds that his legal challenge is not about him. “This is bigger than any profession. It will affect everyone,” he says.
He points to major discrepancies between the official account of Covid’s impact on the country and the assessment of international bodies. “The WHO has said that the number of deaths from Covid in India was about 10 times higher than the official number. Anyone even referring to that could be labeled a fake news peddler, and it should be removed.
In April 2021, India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, was ravaged by a second wave of Covid-19 and a severe shortage of oxygen in hospitals. The state government denied there was a problem. In the midst of this unfolding crisis, a man tweeted an SOS call for oxygen to save his dying grandfather. Authorities in the state accused him of spreading rumors and causing panic.
Experts believe that the changes to India’s IT rules would allow for more of this kind of repression, under a government that has already expanded its powers over the internet, forcing social media platforms to delete critical voices and using emergency powers to launch a BBC to censor a documentary criticizing Modi.
Prateek Waghre, policy director at the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital freedoms organization, says the social media team of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has itself freely spread misinformation about political opponents and critics, while “reporters coming to the ground and getting the inconvenient truth out has had consequences.
Waghre says the lack of clarity about what constitutes fake news makes things even worse. “Looking at the same dataset, it’s possible that two people could come to different conclusions,” he adds. “The fact that your interpretation of that dataset is different from that of the government does not make it fake news. If the government puts itself in a position to control information about itself, the first likely misuse of it is against information that the government does not like.”
This is not a hypothetical scenario. In September 2019, a journalist was booked by police for allegedly trying to discredit the government after recording schoolchildren who were supposed to receive full meals from the state and ate only salt and salt. Roti.
In November 2021, two journalists, Samriddhi Sakunia and Swarna Jha, were arrested for reporting anti-Muslim violence that had broken out in the northeastern state of Tripura. They were charged with reporting ‘fake news’.
Non-binding, state-sponsored fact-checking is already taking place through the government’s Press Information Office, despite that organization’s poor record of objectivity.
Mediawatch website newslaundry.com collected a number of PIB’s “fact-checks” and found that the Bureau simply labeled inconvenient reports as “false” or “unfounded” without providing any concrete evidence.
In June 2022, Tapasya, a reporter for investigative journalism organization The Reporters’ Collective, wrote that the Indian government required children aged six and under to be issued with an Aadhar biometric identification card to access food in government-run centers – despite a Judgment of the Indian Supreme Court.
The PIB Fact Check quickly labeled the story as fake. When Tapasya inquired about the process behind the labeling under the Right To Information Act, PIB simply added a tweet from the Ministry of Women and Child Development claiming the story was fake – with other words, the PIB fact Check had not conducted an independent investigation.
“Chasing the government’s line is not fact-checking,” Tapasya says. “The government could have gotten my story on the internet if the new IT rules came into effect in June 2022.”
Social media companies have sometimes resisted the Indian government’s attempts to impose controls on what can be published online. But the IFF’s Waghre don’t expect to put up much of a fight this time around. “No one wants lawsuits, no one wants to risk their safe haven,” he says, referring to the “safe harbor” rules that protect platforms from liability for content posted by their users. “There is likely to be mechanical compliance and possibly even proactive censorship of views that they know are likely to be flagged.”
Kamra declined to comment on his prospects of challenging the new rules. But he says the health of a democracy is at stake when governments want to control information sources. “That’s not what democracy looks like,” he says. “There are several problems with social media. It has been harmful in the past. But more government control is not the solution.”
