The Tripura Police and the administration have displayed a lack of professionalism and integrity in dealing with the communal conflict and with those reporting on the issue, the Editors Guild of India (EGI) has said.
The EGI on Wednesday released a report of its fact-finding mission on “attacks on media freedom in Tripura”.
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The report said that the state police and the Biplab Deb-led BJP government were complicit in the “growth of muscular majoritarianism that subverts democratic institutions”.
The fact-finding committee said, “a wedge” was sought to be driven between local and outside journalists on how these communal incidents were being reported, and tension was stoked.
“The picture that the state government officials painted was of an ‘outsider’ media given to outrage and a local state-based media that was sober and moderate on the matters of communalism,” it said.
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“It seemed that the media from outside Tripura was in a better position to report independently and in an unbiased manner than its local counterpart,” the report added.
The EGI said another way the BJP-led government had tried to make sure the media toed its line was by “denying or tightening the tap on government advertisements to a media platform”, which is crucial for the survival of media houses.
While the EGI team, comprised independent journalist Bharat Bhushan, Guild general secretary Sanjay Kapoor, and Editor of Imphal Review of Arts and Politics Pradip Phanjoubam.