I was present at an astonishingly good but agonising Press Conference yesterday at the Press Club of India, New Delhi, where a Report on 32 cases of recent attacks on journalists in Delhi between 15 December 2020 and 25 February 2020, titled “Republic in Peril” was released by the Committee Against Assault on Journalists (CAAJ).

The Committe which wrote the Report consisted of Hartosh Bal, Jitendra Kumar, Anand Swarup Verma and Ms. T K Rajlakshmi.

( I wrote an about 1,000 words brief on this report and the Press Conference yesterday evening and was about to share it at about 8:00 PM when my story crashed and, unfortunately got deleted. I am not repeating the exercise but releasing this truncated write-up today early morning.)

I also took a few photos, of (1) the frontispiece of the report titled “Republic in Peril” and the members of the CAAJ team (2) release of the report by the team, consisting of ; (3) Hartosh Bal, (4) Jitendra Kumar (5 ) TK Rajlakshmi, (6) Anand Swaroop Verma and two of the notable speakers (7) Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and (8) Abhishek Srivastava.

The report notes the paradigm shift of the communal transformation of the recent attacks on the journalists in Delhi : “the nature of assault was also unprecedented. A journalist was directly shot at, one was forced to drop pants and another was forced to chant religious hymns. Religious identification was the bottom-line during third phase of assault.”

The report concludes that with the fall in all the four pillars of the Indian democracy, the Republic itself is in grave peril.

Aurobindo Ghose