I was just doing my job in India. Modi’s government didn’t like it

It was supposed to be an innocuous catch-up with representatives from Narendra Modi’s party, the BJP, to touch base about the ABC’s coverage plans for the Indian election.

More than 600 million people were about to start voting across the country.

But when my colleague from our Delhi bureau, Meghna Bali, got in a room with a party spokesman, things became terse.

“We said, ‘We’re from the ABC,’ and … [he] looked at us in the face and said, ‘You are the most hostile foreign organisation in India right now,'” she told me.

“You are after us and you have the most biased reporting.”

At this point, in April, I’d been the ABC’s South Asia correspondent for two and a half years and there’d been a litany of setbacks put on me by the Indian government.

The week before, I’d got a call to say I wouldn’t be issued with the visa extension needed to continue reporting in India, and the press pass I required to film outside polling booths during election voting still hadn’t come through.

It also followed a block on one of my stories which meant it couldn’t be watched on some social media platforms in India.

I would soon pack up my life ahead of the biggest election in history — something I’d been preparing for months to cover — and return to Australia.

Writing this piece makes me uncomfortable. As a journalist, it’s strange to become the story, but I’m not alone in what I’ve experienced.

The evidence shows there’s been an unprecedented crackdown on the media in India in the 10 years since Modi came to power.

• French journalist Vanessa Dougnac — believed to be India’s longest-serving foreign correspondent — had to leave this year because her permanent residency was revoked
• Al Jazeera said its correspondent was not given a pass to cover the election
• The BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai were raided by Indian authorities last year after it aired a documentary critical of Modi’s treatment of the country’s Muslim minority

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that Modi – and his government – can be openly resistant to accountability.

Many of my fellow foreign correspondents have been pushed out of the country and can’t share their experiences because they have family there they have to protect.

Without those connections to India, I’m in a rare position to speak openly about what happened.

Video ban

Summer was just rolling into Delhi in March. It was that sweet spot before the debilitating heat and after the polluted, bone-chilling winter, where the city is at its peak of green, ancient glory.

I’d just put out a story for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program investigating accusations that Modi’s Hindu nationalist government had killed a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver — allegations the government continues to deny.

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead in the car park of a Sikh temple.

I’d travelled to Punjab and met with members in Nijjar’s movement calling for the state to break away and become a separate nation. I’d also uncovered that Indian authorities had gone to Nijjar’s home village in the months before he was killed.

While this was a new revelation, the story was being broadly covered all over the world — allegations that the Modi administration’s spies were plotting to kill dissidents overseas shocked everyone.

A couple of days after our story went up online, the Indian government ordered YouTube and Facebook to block it.

Now when you try to access the video on YouTube in India a message says:

“This content is currently unavailable in this country because of an order from the government related to national security or public order.” 

I thought the ban was the end of it and that I could move on to planning for the fast-approaching election, but the next day I got a call that really shook me.

An Indian government official said my story had “crossed a line” and was “beyond extreme” because I had visited the home of Nijjar and spoke to sympathisers of his cause.

My colleague Meghna was in the room with me and heard the whole thing play out. I took contemporaneous notes as soon as I got off the phone.

Three Indian nationals have since been charged with Nijjar’s murder, and investigations into whether they had ties to the Indian government are ongoing.

I honestly didn’t think this would happen; Australia-India relations had appeared better than ever. I’d recently covered Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to India, where he delighted in being taken around a cricket stadium on a chariot.

A few months later, Albanese would call Modi “the boss” when he visited Sydney.

The ABC is the only Australian media organisation with a base in South Asia and I’d made an effort in my reporting to highlight the huge place India had carved out for itself on the world stage, as well as the strides it’s making in development. It’s not just a poverty-stricken nation as many assume; it’s an emerging superpower.

And, in my podcast series, “Looking For Modi”, while I raised questions about the prime minister’s political image and sometimes divisive leadership, I also documented his popularity and spoke to his supporters, friends and superfans.

But things were about to get worse.

Visa block

As a foreign journalist in India, I was eligible to extend my media visa for one year at a time and had applied for a renewal in January, around the time I was shooting in Punjab.

Around the start of March, I realised others who had applied at a similar time had their visas renewed, but mine still hadn’t come through.

A government official called me a few days after my story was published and said my visa was not going to come through so I should make plans to leave the country in two weeks.

A million things went through my head; I was simultaneously worried about leaving and staying and faced the daunting task of having to pack up and go, soon.

The ABC asked the Australian government to step in and lobby for my approval to stay in the country.

Meghna and our producers in the Delhi bureau eventually got their press passes to cover the election just in time, but when they went to collect them a government official laughed and said there was “no chance” I would get mine.

Indian officials would later tell local media my requirements for covering the election were “being looked into positively and could have been arranged despite previous disagreements over her coverage of Punjab”. I was never given that assurance.

I was eventually granted a two-month visa extension after the Australian government intervened, but it was too late. By then I’d packed up my home to leave the country, my flight was booked for the next day, and it was clear the increasing obstructions to my reporting would make it impossible for me to do my job effectively.

‘Shut up and show respect’

I flew out of Delhi as voting began in the largest democratic exercise in history.

When I returned home to Australia and my visa drama was made public, I faced a media storm.

Outlets sympathetic to the Modi government discredited me, saying the allegations I’d made about my visa being denied were “baseless” and that I had a “track record of peddling anti-Hindu propaganda”.

One popular YouTuber ranted about my case, saying: 

“Australia is nothing, nothing. Do you know the size of India? So next time, shut up and show respect. You’re talking about the Prime Minister of India.”

Publications notorious for their take-downs of anyone questioning Modi’s authority got even more personal.

Perhaps my favourite of the headlines read that a “marriage lured Avani Dias back to Australia, not intimidation by Indian government”.

The article failed to mention my partner had been living with me in India the whole time and our wedding happened before this all began.

Publications including the New York Times and the BBC covered my story — they quoted Indian officials who’d told them I was assured by high-ranking officials that my visa would be renewed. That never happened.

I had no certainty my visa would come through until the day before my flight.

My visa wasn’t outright cancelled, a short extension was issued in the nick of time after a bureaucratic back and forth, which has allowed the Indian authorities to say I chose to leave instead of being forced out of the country.

While the Modi administration may not be marching foreign journalists out the door, its subtle clampdowns can be just as effective. It allows India to keep up its image as a friendly and free country, something that’s helped it get closer to nations like Australia.

Do you know more? Contact Four Corners here.

India’s just been ranked 159th in this year’s World Press Freedom Index out of 180 countries and territories.

Reporters Without Borders, which publishes the index, said: “With violence against journalists, highly concentrated media ownership, and political alignment, press freedom is in crisis in the world’s largest democracy.”

Mandeep Punia is an Indian freelance journalist who says he was beaten by Indian authorities in custody in 2021 after claiming a BJP worker attacked protesters with a petrol bomb.

Police accused him of obstructing an officer. He puts it like this:

“They broke my camera, my phone, everything … I was able to understand that this is not an attack on me, it is on journalism.”

Back home in Australia, people ask me if I’m glad to have left India.

I say it was a privilege to be on the ground there, to learn about this behemoth in the world.

My posting was always going to end after the election and I’d accepted a job with the ABC’s Four Corners in Sydney, but I did not want to leave a country I had made my home, in this way.

Our job as journalists is to hold those in power to account and I hope India will get back to having a thriving free press soon.

In the meantime, I’m continuing to report. My upcoming story for Four Corners has uncovered the long arm of the Indian state targeting residents here in Australia and new details about the local “nest of spies” previously disrupted by ASIO.

I’m already anticipating the story will be blocked in India.

Last week, Modi won a historic third term as prime minister but didn’t win enough seats to form a majority, meaning he’ll need to work with smaller parties to get anything done.

There’s some optimism among Modi critics that this will take him down a notch and force his government to respect India’s democratic foundations — and the press.

Others are worried putting a leader who has only ever experienced invincible power in a precarious position could make him crack down even more.

Read Avani Dias’s Four Corners report on Monday, June 17, on ABC News and watch the documentary “Infiltrating Australia – India’s secret war” from 8:30pm Monday on ABC TV and ABC iview.

Subscribe to the Four Corners newsletter and follow Four Corners on Facebook.