In case you missed it…
Last year, we hosted Behrouz Boochani in person for the PEN Perth Annual Lecture 2023. He was joined in conversation with award-winning translator, Omid Tofighian and academic, Anne Surma. Together, they discussed defiance, resistance, displacement in relation to the act of writing freedom, asking what does it mean to bear journalistic witness? What is the power of poetics, collaboration and writing for freedom?
PEN Perth publication: An Indian student in Indonesia (by Krishna Sen)
In June 1975, just as I reached voting age, the then Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, suspended Parliament, cancelled scheduled elections, and jailed more than a hundred thousand people, all in the name of an ‘Emergency’. Like every other Third World dictator, she held out the promise that authoritarian suppression of the noisy, fractious press would help end poverty in India. When she did allow the postponed elections to go ahead in March 1977, she and the Congress Party were comprehensively defeated. Media around the world lauded the Indian electorate and rang out with excited headlines about the courage of the people and the victory of democracy.
(See the full article here: https://www.insideindonesia.org/editions/edition-154-oct-dec-2023/an-indian-student-in-indonesia)
While we watched (documentary)
While We Watched is a documentary about the Indian broadcast journalist Ravish Kumar, and it slotted into a body of her work – in film-making and in activism – that defended anyone who makes it harder for the powerful to lie. She was the first person I knew who recognised the danger of Slapp lawsuits, and started trying to build a fund for the journalist Carole Cadwalladr and others like her, who would, inevitably, be chased through the courts by people much richer than themselves. That asymmetry of wealth continues to have a devastating effect on investigative journalism.
The degradation of Indian politics, as told through the Kumar bio-doc, is chilling and chastening. Mainstream Indian current affairs TV has become a blunt and violent discourse in which coiffed young anchors yell at people for being “anti-nationalist”, and reduce all questions down to the simplest yet least enlightening: do you love the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and if so, do you love him enough?
Against that onslaught, Kumar insisted on carrying on with regular journalism – going places, finding things out – with the result that between 2019 and 2021 (the period covered in the film) he was subjected to endless death threats, and his channel, NDTV, was assailed by government action against its founders and impoverished by dwindling ad sales.
(full article in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/01/ravish-kumar-journalism-democracy-threat-lies)
You can watch the documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duMWwlpm6kc
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