“In Delhi, Kejriwal keeps talking about ‘Godi media’. The reality is that press freedom is worse in Punjab than in Delhi. In Delhi, you have Godi media, here we have Keji media… If you speak up, you are choked,” Jass Grewal, a digital journalist in Bathinda told The Reporters’ Collective.
Grewal lost his Facebook page, with 1.4 million followers, after three AAP copyright claims. Nikhil Pahwa, digital rights activist and editor of MediaNama, told the Collective, “I have not come across any instance where a political party has used copyright strikes as a mechanism for censorship.”
Another chilling incident was reported by the Collective on 18 August. Police from six districts reached Bathinda-based journalist Rattandeep Singh Dhaliwal’s house over a video in which he claimed around 32 sitting AAP MLAs may not be fielded in the upcoming Punjab elections.
Several AAP MLAs filed pre-filled police complaints alleging that the video spread “false, fabricated and misleading” information likely to create “unrest and disturb the peace”. In short, anti-national.
In 2022, when Bhagwant Mann took oath as chief minister at Khatkar Kalan — Bhagat Singh’s village, a location chosen for maximum symbolism — the AAP sold Punjab a single, seductive word: badlaav (change). It was supposed to signal the end of elitist durbaari politics, the culture of fear and favours that had defined half a century of governments alternating between the Akalis and the Congress.
Four-and-a-half years into that badlaav, Punjab’s journalists — those digital foot-soldiers who carried AAP’s anti-establishment message to every Dhaani and Dera during the Kisan Andolan — are discovering that the durbar has simply changed its liveried guards.
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