Sound Of Silence

Gag orders in 2019 on journalists, film-makers, activists and artists enforced a culture of self-censorship

Bandita Borah is a computer science teacher at Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya in Titabor (Jorhat district, Assam). Last week, several Assamese newspapers (and, later, newspapers across the rest of the country) reported that Borah had been sacked by the school authorities.

She claimed that her support of student protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act had been the immediate trigger — she had objected when a colleague had called the protesting students “illiterate”.

Eventually, the local unit of the All Assam Students Union (AASU) pressed the school authorities and Borah was reinstated.

But signs of similar clampdowns are evident elsewhere too. In West Bengal, chief minister Mamata Banerjee has forbidden government college teachers from speaking to the media. Teachers in Madhya Pradesh cannot air their grievances on public forums.

Meanwhile, prominent Kashmiri politicians such as Omar Abdullah have not been heard from in months, following a communication shutdown in the Valley after its special status was revoked on August 5, 2019.

Not just politicians or government employees, even the field of culture echoed with charges of censorship in the year gone by.