In 30 Seconds
This series opened its account of the war on Punjab’s press with the 1981 assassination of Lala Jagat Narain, the proprietor whose murder announced that the militancy would kill its critics. This article completes that account, because the campaign against journalism did not end with one proprietor or even one family; it became a permanent condition of the trade, enforced from two directions at once, and the story of how Punjab was reported, and misreported, and sometimes not reported at all, is part of the era’s truth in its own right.
The Militants’ Editorial Policy
From the mid 1980s the militant organisations moved from killing individual critics to regulating the press as such. Panthic Committee and group communiques issued codes to newspapers: prescribed vocabularies in which slain militants were martyrs and police dead were mercenaries, mandatory carriage of statements and threats, bans on government advertising, and, in the codes’ more ambitious phases, instructions reaching into language policy and page design. Compliance was enforced with the era’s standard instrument. The Hind Samachar group’s toll mounted through the decade, and vendors and agents distributing its papers were murdered for the act of distribution; editors and stringers of Punjabi and Hindi papers across the districts were assassinated for defiance, among them named cases that press freedom organisations recorded year on year as Punjab ranked with the most dangerous places in the world for the trade. Some papers submitted, printing the communiques verbatim; readers of the period learned to decode a front page for what its wording revealed about who was holding the gun to it that week.
The State’s Quieter Pressures
The other direction applied different instruments to the same end. The Blue Star blackout of June 1984, when the press was expelled from the state wholesale, set the precedent, and the counterinsurgency years refined it: accreditation and access as leverage, government advertising, the financial spine of the regional press, granted and withdrawn with intent, TADA’s broad definitions available against reporting construed as interviewing or harbouring, and correspondents who documented encounters and disappearances subjected to surveillance, detention, and worse. Reporters covering the Khalra material and the cremation grounds story in the mid 1990s worked under explicit threat, and the era’s most consequential journalism, the human rights reportage that fed the litigation this batch has described, was produced by a stubborn handful whose names Punjab’s press community still recites, some from national papers whose distance gave partial shelter, some local men with none.
Reporting Between the Guns
What did the double pressure do to the record? Contemporary coverage of Punjab, read today, shows the marks: casualty accounts sourced solely to police briefings because the countryside was unreachable; massacres attributed and reattributed as factions and agencies traded claims; the disappearances almost absent from the mainstream record until Khalra’s photocopies forced them in. The fog this series has repeatedly noted around the era’s numbers, the contested tolls of Blue Star, the unaudited encounter figures, is in part this story: the fog was manufactured, from both directions, by making accurate counting lethal. Yet the era also produced reporting of lasting worth, the district correspondents who filed the bus massacres at real risk, the investigations that mapped the extortion economy, the photographers whose images of Black Thunder’s surrenders punctured the movement’s mystique, and it is on that surviving record, checked against later testimony and litigation, that this series itself is built.
The Debt
Punjab’s dark years are knowable at all because several dozen underpaid men and women kept filing while both sides promised them graves. This journal exists in the tradition they defended, and the debt is properly acknowledged in the only currency journalism accepts: by getting the era right. Their names belong beside the era’s other honour rolls, and their lesson beside its other lessons, that the first casualty of a dirty war is the count, and the count is the beginning of every reckoning this series has described.
