Hello,
Last month, I visited a village in Punjab to meet a family that had lost their son. Midway through our conversation, a man walked up to me. He introduced himself as a journalist, though he turned out to be an aide of an AAP leader and state minister. I could be held responsible, he told me, for vitiating the village’s atmosphere.
I took it in and left. For a Delhi-based journalist, the threat was only a mild version of what local journalists face. Maninderjeet Singh Sidhu, the digital journalist I’d come to report on, hasn’t had it as easy.
I was in Khudian Gulab Singh village in Muktsar, home to Punjab’s agriculture minister Gurmeet Singh Khuddian, to find out how Sidhu had been booked in an abetment to suicide case.
Sidhu had reported that drugs were as easy to get in the village as toffees. Soon after, a man named in his video report as an alleged supplier was found dead. Sidhu and five others he had interviewed were booked.
The man was cremated within hours of his death. No post-mortem was conducted. Police could not even file an on-the-spot report. The cause of death remains unknown.
The AAP government in Punjab has promised, four times now, to rid the state of drugs. Instead, it has now turned on the citizens and journalists who point out the state’s failure.
Read the full report here: Muzzle the Messenger, Kill the Message: Punjab Govt’s Mission Against Drugs
You can also read our earlier report on the AAP government’s illegal use of intellectual property laws to silence journalists. Sidhu was one of those journalists. Read here: The Two Faces of AAP: In Delhi, It Cries Against Censorship. In Punjab, It Suppresses Media
This story took weeks of field reporting across Muktsar, Faridkot and Bhatinda. And to make these stories happen, The Reporters’ Collective relies on your contributions. If you value this work, please consider donating.
Warm regards,
Shivnarayan Rajpurohit
Reporter
The Reporters’ Collective