Voices Under Siege: The Vanishing Space for Truth in Bihar

Three days after he went missing, villagers near Benipatti in Bihar’s Madhubani district stumbled upon a charred body by the roadside — later identified as that of 22-year-old RTI activist and journalist Buddhinath (Avinash) Jha. He had been working with a local Hindi news portal, BNN News Benipatti. According to local news reports, Jha had exposed illegal medical clinics in the village, wrote reports about them for the news outlet, and also filed complaints against them. On the night of November 9, 2021, he was reportedly last seen at his own clinic and never returned.

In a separate incident in the same year, the body of journalist Manish Kumar Singh was found in East Champaran district with both eyes gouged out. He was the son of Sanjay Kumar Singh, editor of a leading Hindi newspaper, Areraj Darshan, and himself worked with a private news channel.

As Bihar once again leads national headlines, incidents like these are deliberately pushed to the fringes of collective memory. The five years from 2020 to 2025 have witnessed numerous instances of the “deletion of independent journalism,” marked by assaults and killings of journalists, according to a report published by the Free Speech Collective, an organisation that monitors violations of free expression in India. The report flags 28 instances of free speech violations during this period, including reports of six killings and eleven attacks. The social and political climate of the state has practically turned journalism into an act of grave danger to life itself, or, at the very least, a path fraught with legal action.

According to the report, the journalists who were killed wrote mostly on local stories covering corruption, crime, the liquor mafia, medical negligence, etc. The latest in the string of killings included that of Shivshankar Jha, a journalist who worked with several Hindi news outlets. He was fatally stabbed in June 2024 in northwest Bihar. The family claimed that the local liquor mafia — an organised crime outfit involved in distributing illicit alcohol — was responsible for Jha’s murder. Other journalists who lost their lives to Bihar’s hostile environment include Navin Nischal and his colleague Vijay Singh, both working for Dainik Bhaskar, who were killed in 2018; Vimal Kumar Yadav of Dainik Jagran in 2023; Gokul Kumar, affiliated with Prabhat Khabar, in 2022; and Subhash Kumar Mahto, a reporter with the cable station City News, also killed in 2022. Most of them were killed after being subjected to gruesome torture.

The report also points to eleven instances of brutal attacks on journalists. There were instances of mob attacks and attempted shootings. One case involved an attack by a group of policemen and another by a doctor.

While the Indian Constitution and the country’s legal framework are meant to guarantee safeguards in such instances, the law has often been used as the biggest weapon by those in power to silence dissent. The report lists eight cases of legal action against journalists during the given period. Section 356 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) — the defamation law — is cited as the most potent tool used by the state, although other charges, such as obstructing the duty of police officers, are also invoked. In 2022, Hamza, a journalist working with a YouTube news channel called The Activist, was arrested for covering the Agnipath protests in Patna. He still remains in detention, according to the Free Speech Collective. Incidents of threats and arrests were also reported in addition.

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR), an exercise by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to revise Bihar’s electoral rolls for 78 million people within just three months, created chaos and confusion in the state, leaving voters struggling to organise the documents required for registration. Amid this, an FIR was lodged against independent journalist Ajit Anjum, who, in a video posted on his YouTube channel, had claimed to have found irregularities in the revision of the state’s electoral rolls. Amid the elections and growing concerns over the alleged mass disenfranchisement in relation to the SIR, the report highlights the depth of the crisis and situates it within a broader pattern of similar incidents observed over the years.

As the report puts it, “Press freedom has been tenuous throughout the rule of the Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar.” Both print and electronic media in Bihar have remained vulnerable to the state’s advertisement policy introduced in 2008. The Press Council of India (PCI) had adopted a critical report in 2013 by a three-member panel, appointed by the then chairman of PCI, Markandey Katju, alleging that the Nitish Kumar government had been exerting undue influence and curbing press freedom in Bihar. But the committee’s recommendations for an independent body to oversee the disbursal of advertisements were ignored. In May 2019, an RTI response accessed by The Wire revealed that the Nitish Kumar government had spent a staggering ₹498 crore on advertisements over the previous five years.

Bihar has long struggled with low socio-economic indicators. In a place where lakhs of vulnerable people survive on meagre incomes, the silencing of platforms that could offer them the spaces they need rings an alarm. As we wake up to reports from across the world, where journalists in Gaza are being killed every day, a chilling recurrence of such patterns appears to be unfolding in our own milieu. This demands urgent and unwavering attention.