Kashmiri journalist Safina Nabi was going to be honoured by the Maharashtra Institute of Technology-World Peace University for a story captioned “The half widows of Kashmir,” The story had won her the award after being adjudged as the best story by a 7-member jury. The University invited her to attend the award ceremony in Pune on October 18. A day before she was about to travel, she was informed by University officials that she need not to come as they had “cancelled” her award, allegedly due to political pressure. When the members of the jury that had decided on the winners heard this they too refused to attend the event in protest. Nabi is an independent journalist who writes on gender, health and human rights. She never applied for the award but was chosen by a well constituted jury of seven eminent persons. Basically, these seven members of a jury chosen by the University individually take up pieces they have liked in the year and select the winners in three categories.
Nabi received an email on October 10 from the MIT University informing that she was chosen as the winner of the award and arrangements for her travel etc., were made. But on October 16, she was informed that the University was cancelling her award as there is a lot of political pressure and it might not be safe for her to travel to Pune. The Director of the University’s media department, Dhiraj Singh told her that there are people who have different ideas about Article 370 and because she is Kashmiri the University was concerned about her security. That was a lame excuse for cancelling an award. Interestingly, the media department of the University called Safina again to tell her that she would be invited to speak at the University’s youth parliament. Needless to say, Safina refused outright knowing this to be a poor attempt at pacifying her.
The above is the state of the media in India today. No one can write anything that is even slightly critical of the state. The Modi Government takes affront at anything that shows it in a bad light. Recently, the director of the Indian Institute for Population Studies (IIPS) was first suspended and pushed to the corner to submit his resignation, all because the figures did not make the government look good. Sadly, the institutions of this country too are giving in one by one instead of fighting back and reclaiming the fundamental right of freedom of speech and expression around which media freedom revolves. The Safina Nabi incident is one among many where media freedom is sought to be curtailed.
