Journalist Shoaib Daniyal had barely stepped out his door when he saw the police checkpoint at the end of his driveway. It hadn’t been there the previous day.
So, the 40-year-old struck up a conversation with the officer about the protest he was heading to for work.
“He became suspicious, he became angry [and] said, ‘I’m going to detain you.’”
Indian laws allow police to detain people without a warrant in certain circumstances if they reasonably suspect someone has committed, or will commit, a crime.
But Daniyal said no explanation was provided before he was hauled onto a bus.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reported 43 reporters had been detained across the country over two days in October, most of them in the capital.
While India sits at 157 out of 180 countries in press freedom rankings, down from 140 in 2019, according to the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, journalists who spoke to the ABC said watching police push, pull and carry reporters onto buses was something they never anticipated seeing in Delhi.
“In the national capital, where you have such a concentration of journalists, you would not have a government that would feel confident enough to do this because of the outrage it would evoke,” said Manisha Pande, editor-in-chief of digital news company Newslaundry.
The detentions come as Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces one of the biggest challenges to his leadership since taking power in 2014.
This month, demonstrators held rallies across the country calling for the resignation of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, alleging a national revision of voter rolls was being used to favor the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
It was the second wave of major protests in India this year, after the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party successfully ousted India’s education minister in July over ongoing exam paper leaks.
But the pressure on journalists extends well beyond the recent demonstrations.
Some journalists say the government has steadily tightened its grip on the media since BJP came to power in 2014.
“The media in India has never been entirely free, it’s always come under extraordinary strain from government,” said Sreenivasan Jain, an author and journalist who has reported in India for more than 30 years.
“But what I’ve witnessed in the past decade or so is a complete collapse. Entire swaths of, particularly TV media, have been brought to heel, have turned into propagandists for the government.”
Pande compared India’s prime-time broadcast news landscape to having “multiple Fox News” channels.
“Channel after channel that will have the same talking points praising the government, rarely ever questioning it, hammering at the opposition, going at people who protest, calling dissenters enemies of the country,” she said.
She said anchors who repeated government talking points were often rewarded with coveted interviews with ministers or the prime minister.
The dominance of pro-government television news has given rise to the term “Godi media”, which means lapdog media.
Corporate ownership and government advertising have added another layer of pressure.
Many television networks depend on government advertising revenue and are owned by corporations with business interests tied to government contracts.
Jain spent 30 years as a reporter and anchor at NDTV, once widely considered one of the last traditional television networks openly critical of Mr Modi.
He left in 2022 after the network was taken over by the Adani Group, which is owned by billionaire Gautam Adani, who has a close relationship with Narendra Modi.
“In a matter of weeks, it was pretty clear what kind of direction they wanted to take the network,” he said.
Among the red flags, he said, was pressure to broadcast an interview Mr Adani had given to a rival network, despite objections from journalists.
“I didn’t want, for a second, to be around [those] endorsing those sorts of editorial practices,” he said.
Pande said young Indians were increasingly rejecting the television news their parents had consumed for years.
“You have a generation that is … revolted by the idea of what television news has [reported] over the last 12 years, which is not talking about issues that concern them [like] education, jobs [and] infrastructure,” she said.
That disillusionment has created an opening for independent digital news platforms and creators publishing on social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram and X.
Among them is 35-year-old political satirist Ramit Verma, who was recently detained while covering the protests in Delhi.
He wants more Indians to document events to help hold those in power accountable.
“Everyone is [a] journalist, especially in India right now, where the mainstream media is so sold out and so dangerous,” Verma said.
Jain believed the recent detentions of journalists were the response of “a wounded regime”.
“They wanted to stamp out the protests using extraordinary force, and I think silencing or trying to intimidate the media in these new ways is part of that response,” he said.
The ABC has contacted Delhi police and the Modi government for comment.
According to the Indian Express newspaper, the Modi government has also ordered close to 195,000 take down orders on posts shared on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube between March and July.
Verma said he had lost count of how many of his own posts had been censored.
“It happens so much that I don’t even remember the last post that got taken down,” he said.
“But it’s become the norm in India right now. It’s become a norm for your post to get taken down at any point. Without any explanation, especially from Meta.”
The restrictions have also extended to foreign media organizations trying to report on the government.
Major international broadcasters, including the BBC and Al Jazeera, have faced requirements to establish Indian entities and employ local staff to continue operating in the country.
Foreign journalists also face tighter geographical restrictions, with government permits required to enter certain regions, including Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.
The government is also trying to pass new privacy laws which would force journalists to ask permission before naming anyone in a story.
For Daniyal, the detention of reporters on the streets of the national capital is the latest sign of how much the environment has changed.
“For the last 12 years, the fear that journalists feel has really shot up,” he said.
“This idea that journalists are doing a critical job for democracy, the foundation of that has [been] shaken.”
