International journalists are hearing echoes. From countries around the world that have witnessed the rise of autocratic and populist leaders, they are watching the U.S. and warning of a characteristic of wounded democracies everywhere: an endangered free press.
This issue of Nieman Reports features insights from nine journalists abroad, offering advice to American reporters on preparing for attacks on press freedom.
Dressed in a white salwar and tunic, journalist Meena Kotwal speaks of equality, hope, and revolution and of leaving a better world for her 4-year-old daughter than the one she is fighting. Her eyes are resolute, her voice impassioned; and yet, in moments, all that ferocity melts into fear.
“I grew up in this same colony ... but please don’t write its name,” she says of the New Delhi neighborhood where she has an office and where the two of us meet. “I don’t want my address to be published.”
Little Dharaa sits on her mother’s lap, scribbling on her desk with her crayons. Behind them is a poster of The Mooknayak, an online news channel and website that covers issues related to the Dalit community in India, whose members are often perceived as inferior and “impure.” A Dalit herself, Kotwal founded the platform in 2021, and now, she says, she fears for her daughter’s safety.
“That’s why I registered that police complaint. The threats I receive, I want them to be limited to me, not extend to my family. But they keep dragging my daughter in,” she says.
About three years ago, Kotwal filed a complaint with a New Delhi police station, including 20 phone numbers of unknown men who had threatened her over phone and video calls. One told her to “drink the urine” of an upper-caste person, one claimed to be a police official and called her a “prostitute” and a “bastard,” one threatened to tear her butt off, another flashed his penis, and several others showered her with abuse.
“I am a journalist, and I spend most of my time outside my home, [in] the field. My 1½-year-old daughter is with me on most occasions. There is a threat to our lives,” Kotwal noted in her complaint. “Therefore, please provide security to me and my family — and these callers, who have been threatening me, should be caught as soon as possible and appropriate action should be taken.”
The complaint was filed on Jan. 5, 2022. No arrests have been made, and Kotwal believes it’s because she is a Dalit.
The Hindu caste system, which dates as far back as 3,000 years, categorizes Hindus at birth, dictating aspects of their social, professional, and religious lives. It considers Dalits – once called “untouchables” – as the lowest echelon of society, and although India’s Constitution banned caste-based discrimination in 1950, Dalits are still consigned to jobs like disposing of dead animals and manually cleaning sewers.
About 100 million Dalits — or a third of the total Dalit population — still live below the World Bank’s poverty line of $2.15 a day, and the community continues to face extreme discrimination and violence. Around 10 Dalit women are raped every day. Their presence in Indian newsrooms, too, remains abysmal. According to a recent Oxfam India report, Dalits held zero leadership positions in the newsrooms of mainstream Indian media.
To give her community a voice, Kotwal founded The Mooknayak. She hired Dalits, Adivasis (or Indigenous people), and women as reporters, and together, they’ve been publishing written reports and videos in Hindi and English, covering individual injustices as well as policy debates concerning marginalized sections of Indian society.
“We are fighting for equality,” says Kotwal. “We are fighting for our rights. We want to be considered citizens just like you are.”
Over the past few years, The Mooknayak has received several Indian and international journalism awards for its reportage, including a Best Media Organization award at the Human Rights and Religious Freedom Journalism Awards in 2022; however, the outlet's journey has hardly been easy. Kotwal says that she has been subjected to constant online abuse — and the smear campaign, she adds, has led to a significant drop in the money the platform raises through public donations, its main source of funds. In the past few months, Kotwal has had to downsize her editorial team from 20 to six, and now, she is afraid not just for her daughter, but also the future of The Mooknayak.
“I do not know how long we can go on this way,” she says.
A way from the chaos of New Delhi, a narrow bylane leads me to the Pushpa Bhawan shopping complex, home to The Mooknayak’s office. Embodying some of the contrasts of India, the compound contains graying old buildings and freshly painted ones, cars amassing dust and those newly washed, and clothes drying on makeshift clotheslines amid the offices of private enterprises. Electric wires snake along the window panes. Some of their glass panels are missing; some are broken.
I stand in the compound, searching for The Mooknayak’s office — and there, above, amid the canopy of trees, I spot its logo: “The Mooknayak” written in white ink against a blue backdrop, the nib of a pen drawn next to it, and the words “Aawaz Aapki” (Your Voice). The board seems to have come off its hinge at one end. It hangs askew, held by a single screw.
Mooknayak, a Hindi word, means leader of the mute. Kotwal named her platform after a century-old publication of the same name, launched in January 1920, that aimed to vocalize the concerns of the “untouchable” community in India. That Mooknayak was a fortnightly newspaper, started by Bhimrao Raoji Ambedkar, the first law minister of independent India, widely known as the architect of the Indian Constitution and for leading colonial India’s only autonomous struggle for Dalit rights and social recognition.
Between 1869 and 1943, Dalits published more than 40 journals that opposed caste-based oppression, advocated for educating Dalits, and called for Dalit representation in government jobs. As India battled for independence from the British, they also created space for Dalit voices in the national discourse.
After India’s independence in 1947, several small weekly newspapers, booklets, and other print sources were launched to advocate for the Dalit community, says Harish Wankhede, an assistant professor with the Centre for Political Studies at the Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University. This, he says, was because mainstream media would not cover the political and social needs of vulnerable social groups. So such groups “published their own newspapers to educate poor masses and to establish a conscious dialogue with the ruling elites,” says Wankhede.
Although more than 150 years have passed since the first Dalit journal was published, Dalits still do not have a strong representation in national media, says Ashok Kumar, founder and editor of Dalit Dastak, another news website and YouTube channel that covers issues related to marginalized communities, including Dalits. Perhaps in response, the past 15 years have seen the rise of a new wave of internet-based journalism by and for Dalits in India. A handful of news websites have emerged, including Round Table India, Velivada, and The Dalit Voice — in addition to YouTube-based news channels like Dalit Camera and The Voice Media.
Vivek Kumar, a sociologist and professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems in New Delhi, says that unlike mainstream publications, these new outlets highlight the issues of the Dalit community and allow Dalits to speak for themselves.
“Because of the presence of this media, the mainstream media is pressurized. And something which is getting viral in Dalit publications, mainstream media is now forced to take notice,” says Kumar, citing the example of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit doctoral student, who died by suicide in 2016 after allegedly facing caste-based hostilities at his university. Vemula’s death sparked nationwide protests. “The Rohith Vemula case was first taken up by the [Dalit media]. Then it became a movement of its own.”
The lack of diversity in mainstream Indian media, Ashok Kumar says, means that Dalit issues are not addressed because they are not a concern for the owners of media houses or the editors and journalists who run them. “Because their identity is different. Because they can never feel the pain, the humiliation that a Dalit and [Indigenous person] feel[s] every day,” says Kumar. “Dalit Dastak talks about these topics. Because this is our issue. It is our pain. That is why we are different from others. That is why we are needed.”
The internet-based Dalit media, including Kotwal’s outlet, Wankhede says, are often fearless and advance the interests of vulnerable groups. However, they’re heavily outmatched by conventional media. “To run a national news channel, one requires heavy funds, good infrastructure, better technicians and network amongst influential people. The Dalits lack it on every account,” says Wankhede.
This seemed evident the day I met Kotwal. Raja, her husband, led me to The Mooknayak’s second-floor office through a dimly lit staircase. He opened the lock at the bottom of the iron shutter and raised it like a curtain. It was a working day, and the newsroom had over half a dozen chairs, awaiting staff journalists. No one was coming.
T he walls of Kotwal’s office are adorned with awards and mementoes of appreciation. One certificate dated May 2022 reads, “Ambedkar Association of North America recognizes you for the exceptional work done for raising voice and awareness about the social issues of underprivileged following the vision of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar.”
The award came less than a year after Kotwal reported one of her most important stories for The Mooknayak. On a rainy day in 2021, a 9-year-old Dalit girl was found dead under mysterious circumstances in the crematorium of Old Nangal village in southwest Delhi. The girl had told her parents that she was going to fetch water from a cooler in the crematorium. Less than an hour later, the crematorium’s priest and a few others summoned the girl’s mother and led her to her daughter’s body. They claimed that the child had been electrocuted while getting water from the cooler.
The men insisted on cremating the girl’s body, telling her mother that the police would demand an autopsy and then sell her organs after stealing them. The family, who earned their living by begging, was suspicious of the explanation and raised a clamor. Around 150 villagers gathered and doused the funeral pyre with water, but could retrieve only the girl’s burnt legs.
“On the first day, I saw the child’s legs. They were so small because they had burnt the whole body, and the people around, they tried to pull the body out, so the legs had broken,” says Kotwal. “And I couldn’t get that image out of my head. I, too, was a mother. My daughter, too, was little.”
— Ashok Kumar, founder and editor of Dalit Dastak
“This is our issue. It is our pain. That is why we are different from others. That is why we are needed.”
The Mooknayak was the first media organization to cover the story. Kotwal reported every day from the village for a fortnight, posting four to six videos a day, in addition to written stories and around a dozen social media posts. The coverage drew engagement from tens of thousands of people, she says. It also reached the mainstream press, and journalists from various media outlets started reporting on the story. As media coverage snowballed, then-Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Rahul Gandhi, senior leader of the opposition Congress party, visited the village. Police arrested the priest and three other workers at the crematorium, alleging that they had gang-raped the girl, then burnt her alive.
When Kotwal reported on the case, she highlighted the child’s Dalit identity. In one of her video reports, she can be seen arguing with an activist on why the victim’s caste mattered, and how it had enabled her rapists.
“She was a Dalit, a beggar. It was easy for the rapist to rape her,” Kotwal tells me. “Fifteen days before this crime, there was a wedding in the priest’s house. If there was a wedding, there would have been women around, of all ages. Why didn’t he feel like raping then? Why did this happen to that girl? Because he knew what that 9-year-old girl was. He knew that no one would listen to her in the police station because she was a beggar, a Dalit. Every woman has a caste — and when all this happens to you, it’s because of your caste.”
Since its inception in 2021, The Mooknayak has published dozens of stories that have made a difference to the marginalized sections of Indian society. In February 2022, it published a report about a neighborhood with a large Dalit population in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh that still hadn’t been electrified. A day later, concerned authorities took notice of the report and announced on X that the area would be electrified “on priority.”
In November 2022, Ankit Pachauri, deputy editor of The Mooknayak, reported a story about how the government in the central state of Madhya Pradesh had not disbursed a fund of about $4.5 million aimed at giving loans to Dalit youths to start their own businesses. After Pachauri published a series of reports highlighting how Dalits were unable to access government programs meant for their economic empowerment, the government released the funds.
In May 2024, The Mooknayak published a story about the plight of thousands of Indigenous mine workers in Madhya Pradesh who were unable to afford treatment for lung disease. The report prompted politicians to provide financial support to one of the men quoted in the story and promise state support for other afflicted workers.
Kotwal’s reporters have also covered stories of individual injustices. Soon after The Mooknayak published the story of a homeless woman who did not have the necessary documents to access government aid, officials remedied the situation. Similarly, in response to a story about a 13-year-old Muslim boy who was beaten up because he had entered a Hindu temple, a crowdfunding campaign raised nearly $6,000 for the boy’s education.
“We’re not aiming for viewership, but impact,” says Kotwal. “We know it’s a long battle.”
A s a child growing up in a Delhi neighborhood populated mainly by Dalits and Muslims, Kotwal did not realize that she belonged to a shunned group. Her parents worked as laborers, her school was dilapidated, and the family did not travel for holidays, but the five children never went without two meals a day, nor did they realize they weren’t affluent. Unlike one of her friends, Kotwal did not hide her Dalit identity either, even as her father registered her name in school only as “Meena.” A surname would have given away her social status.
Yashica Dutt, a New York-based Indian journalist and author of “Coming Out as Dalit,” kept her Dalit identity hidden for a decade as she worked in Indian newsrooms. She says she belongs to the manual scavenging community among Dalits, which lies at the bottom of the untouchable pyramid. Dalits make up 97 percent of manual scavengers in India, cleaning, carrying, and disposing of human waste, according to a report from 2022.
“There is a descending scale of contempt, as Dr. B. R. Ambedkar has called it, within the caste system. So the lower you go, the higher the contempt, the higher the level of disgust, the higher the level of untouchability,” says Dutt. “So if we desired to break from this cycle of caste-based labor, the only way to do that was by hiding who we were.”
As a child, Kotwal’s parents never forced their children to study, but unlike her siblings, Kotwal was an avid student. She completed her graduation in mass media from Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, where she also met her husband, Raja. In 2014, she earned her post-graduate diploma in radio and television journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication.
After graduating, Kotwal worked with Ashok Kumar’s National Dastak, an online news portal, for a few months. Having dreamed of working for more mainstream platforms, she started applying for jobs, but soon realized that her Dalit identity was an obstacle. While many organizations make claims of diversity and inclusion, calling for journalists from marginalized backgrounds to apply for staff positions, rarely are such applicants hired.
According to a 2022 Oxfam study, Dalits and Adivasis write less than 5 percent of all stories in both Hindi and English newspapers in India. As for news websites, upper-caste journalists write around 72 percent of the bylined articles.
Disillusioned by her lack of prospects in the mainstream press, Kotwal abandoned journalism and pursued her master’s in philosophy. Towards the end of her studies, in 2017, she learned about an opening at BBC Hindi. Her friends, including Raja, encouraged her to apply, saying that the BBC would not have caste-based biases. Kotwal applied for the job and was surprised when she got it.
Kotwal joined the BBC in September 2017, and after an initial training with several other new employees, she worked mostly on translating stories between Hindi and English. That was her main task for nine months, even as others worked on different reporting assignments. During this time, a senior editor allegedly inquired about her caste.
Kotwal made verbal complaints to the leadership, but nothing changed, even after she was promised a resolution. Slowly, she started falling ill, losing weight, and sliding into depression. In March 2019, Kotwal was told her contract would end in three months.
Rajesh Joshi, who was formerly with the BBC and was assigned as a mentor to Kotwal, says that there was a “whisper campaign” against her at the organization. He says that her colleagues would comment on her journalism, saying her English and her translation skills were weak. “She was sort of isolated in a way,” says Joshi. “And caste played a major role, I think. Obviously, these things are not direct. Nobody will tell you that [because] you come from a Dalit caste, that’s why you are being discriminated against. It doesn’t happen that way. It happens in a very, very subtle manner.”
Kotwal filed an internal complaint with the BBC, alleging caste-based discrimination. She said she was not allowed to work on many of the stories she had pitched because she was told she “was not capable to do these stories,” according to the complaint. She added that her superiors knew about her Dalit background; to substantiate the claim, she pointed to a text message one of her editors sent her in Hindi. The internal investigation did not uphold Kotwal’s “grievance on merit or substance that supports your allegations of caste-based discrimination.” A spokesperson for the BBC said that Kotwal was on a fixed-term contract, which had ended. “The BBC is a diverse organization and is working hard to ensure that we provide opportunities to everyone, whatever their background,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
The episode would prove pivotal for Kotwal, who struggled to find a job after posting about her experience on Facebook. (The responses to her posts called her crazy and said she was playing the victim card, foreshadowing the online abuse she would receive later.) She says she approached several media organizations, but “they said, ‘We don’t like troublemakers.’”
In April that year, Kotwal and Raja married. Their union, too, was met with opposition. “My family didn’t agree in the beginning, nor did Meena’s,” says Raja. The resistance was rooted in both patriarchy and casteism — patriarchy because a woman was getting married to a man of her choice, and not by arrangement of her parents; casteism because Raja belonged to an upper caste while Meena was a Dalit. “They said, ‘How can you get married to a lower caste?’ But we were firm that if we get married, we’ll only get married to each other,” Raja says.
After their wedding, while Raja was employed with a leading news channel, Kotwal started working as a freelance journalist, reporting from her in-laws’ district in the eastern state of Bihar. Here, she would not have to pay for her food or housing, and could offer stories to various media outlets for free.
“I had to prove myself,” says Kotwal. “After reading my Facebook series on the BBC, people started saying that I was playing the Dalit card, the woman card, the victim card. I wanted to prove that I know my work. Hence, I worked with many people for free.”
At the time, Kotwal covered several stories of caste-based discrimination against the Dom community, a subgroup among Dalits, in Bihar. She reported how children from the community were made to sit separately in school, how they weren’t allowed to touch the water barrel in school because they would supposedly pollute it, and how some avoided school altogether because of the scolding and discrimination, jeopardizing their futures. She continued reporting on these issues during her pregnancy and after her daughter, Dharaa, was born in May 2020.
— Meena Kotwal, founder of The Mooknayak
“We’re not aiming for viewership, but impact. We know it’s a long battle.”
Over the course of nearly two years, as she gained a following on social media, Kotwal felt encouraged to start her own platform, focused on caste and gender. She decided she would cover stories of the marginalized, whether they were Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, or anyone else troubled by the system, including the upper castes. In January 2021, she invested all her savings — about $1,782 — and started The Mooknayak.
Within weeks, Kotwal hired a reporter and an editor, but the platform, although it was building an online following, did not have a source of income. Its YouTube channel failed to monetize, but its journalism was proving valuable to people across India. After the outlet reported on the 9-year-old Dalit girl’s alleged rape and murder in southwest Delhi, several people from the Dalit community started inquiring how they could support The Mooknayak. Kotwal set up a “Support Us” page on the website, and donations started pouring in from people within the community, including rickshaw pullers, street vendors, and laborers.
Raja says that one husband and wife, both of them day laborers, sent a video explaining why they were donating three days of their wages — about $36 — to The Mooknayak: “Because you’ve raised our issues. No one else does.” Those who make donations often belong to the poorest sections of Indian society, giving as little as one cent at times, Raja says.
Between November 2021 and October 2022, the platform raised over $12,500 through online donations from hundreds of people across the country — an amount that allowed Kotwal to hire reporters in various Indian states and from various vulnerable groups. Her initial team of three, including herself, gradually expanded to 20. At first, all their donors were Dalits. However, as their coverage broadened, other marginalized groups, like the Muslim and Indigenous communities, also started donating money to the platform.
The Mooknayak doesn’t sell advertising or take money from political parties, in order to retain its editorial independence. “Everything works on the basis of crowdfunding and charity,” says deputy editor Pachauri, who has worked with The Mooknayak since 2021. “We are dependent on people who think that the issues of Dalits and Adivasis should be raised.”
A bout 500 miles away from Kotwal’s office, in a small village in Uttar Pradesh, a group of 20 children stand holding a pink poster. “Thank you The Mooknayak,” it says, with a smiley face beaming next to the words.
The children’s gratitude was for Rajan Choudhary, a journalist with The Mooknayak, who discovered that their government-run school had not served meals to the underprivileged children for two months, despite being mandated by the Indian government under a midday meal program. A cook told The Mooknayak that she was “forced” to dilute the milk served to children. The investigation, published in September 2022, went viral.
“People started questioning the school administration. They started questioning the government,” says Choudhary.
Choudhary learned about the malfeasance from Shivani Choudhary, founder of Moma for Daughters, a nonprofit focused on the education of poor children. She had posted about the issue on her social media, and she says the school authorities were pressuring her to remove the video. She approached Rajan Choudhary with the story, and “after the report was published, not just that school, but all schools in this area have started serving proper meals to the children.” (There are about 16 schools in the region.)
The Mooknayak and its reporters have won several awards for their reportage, including the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity, and a “Diversity Woman of the Year” award by two organizations working on social equity. In 2022, The Mooknayak also won Best Media Organization at the Human Rights and Religious Freedom Journalism Awards (HRRFJ). The outlet was shortlisted alongside leading Indian news platforms including Scroll and Newslaundry, and won the award jointly with Article 14.
“Raja and I were elated when we got this because many leading media organizations had applied for it,” says Kotwal, pointing to the HRRFJ award on her desk. “We were so happy that we were screaming. It felt like we had finally arrived in the race, that we were now comparable to mainstream publications.”
However, Kotwal did not realize that she was about to face a major setback – that even as The Mooknayak’s popularity increased, so did the hate, and then the financial worries.
A bout three days before we met, Kotwal attended a New Delhi court hearing in a case she had filed against an X user in October 2021. The person had made casteist remarks against Kotwal and her family on X, and then, through direct messages, threatened to commit suicide if she filed a police complaint. Another tweet said: “These idiots keep abusing the Brahmins [the highest among India’s castes] all day long; have these people, who clean toilets, become so powerful? To hell with Hindu unity, kill them immediately.”
The police registered the case under a 1989 law against caste-based abuse; however, in the three years since Kotwal filed the complaint, no arrests have been made. Citing the police’s inability to find the perpetrator, the judge allegedly asked Kotwal to withdraw her complaint. “I’m not going to withdraw the case,” she says. “Had this been a case involving a VIP, they would have found the accused immediately.”
Similarly, no arrests have been made in Kotwal’s other police complaint, the one over the threats she received by phone and video from around 20 unidentified men, even as the United Nations demanded answers from the Indian government. The threats came in response to Kotwal’s burning a page of the Manusmriti, an ancient Hindu text that relegates women and Dalits to the lowest rungs of society. The U.N. noted that it was “deeply concerned by the numerous threats against [Kotwal’s] life and physical integrity.” It added that the threats appeared to be “in direct retaliation for her exercising of her right to freedom of opinion and expression online” and revealed “a seriously concerning online environment for women journalists, human rights defenders, politicians and activists.” However, the threats and harassment have continued unabated.
In April last year, Kotwal traveled to the U.S. at the invitation of universities such as Harvard and Columbia. Elated, on April 4, 2023, she posted on her Instagram account, “The daughter of a Dalit laborer has come to Columbia University to give her talk on media and diversity.” What followed, says Raja, was a campaign of trolling and online harassment, including questions about Kotwal’s identity as a Dalit, why she had chosen to marry an upper-caste man, and how she could name her publication The Mooknayak when it was the name of Ambedkar’s publication.
“They started trolling as soon as we returned from the U.S.,” says Raja. “And gradually, our crowdfunding was completely shut down.”
The trolling, led by members of the dominant subsection within the Dalit community, sowed doubts about Kotwal’s caste status among The Mooknayak’s donors, who came to believe that she was lying about it. Despite Kotwal sharing her caste certificate online in May 2023 to debunk the claims, fundraising continued to decline.
In the past year, The Mooknayak has struggled to make ends meet. Crowdfunding was its main source of financing, and the online harassment, says Raja, has meant a huge blow to its finances. Now, the organization is desperately looking for new funders.
The Mooknayak’s struggle is emblematic of the state of Dalit journalism in India, says Sudipto Mondal, a Dalit journalist. “A few new outlets have emerged, including The Mooknayak. But the way they are existing is proof of their marginalization because they’re struggling like crazy.”
In many ways, life has come full circle for Kotwal. Although she now leads an award-winning news platform, her crusade against caste is almost as lonely as the day she started The Mooknayak. But there are thousands of Dalits, Adivasis, women, and other marginalized people who have benefited from her publication’s coverage of their issues.
An example is Suneeta Arya, a Dalit woman from Madhya Pradesh, who gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock, following which villagers shunned her family. When her daughter turned six, Arya tried to enroll her in a private school near her village but was allegedly told, “We do not want to spoil our image by admitting children like yours.” Arya approached other schools, several government officials, and six or seven media outlets for help but got nowhere. But Pachauri saw the story's value and pursued it for The Mooknayak, prompting the government entity tasked with protecting the rights of caste-based minorities to intervene and secure admission for Arya’s daughter.
Pachauri, who has worked with several mainstream publications in the past decade, agrees that other platforms would not have allowed him to cover Arya’s story. He says he knows that The Mooknayak is struggling for funds, but he is committed to the platform.
He is one of the six journalists left in The Mooknayak’s newsroom, including Kotwal and Raja. Like the others, he reports from elsewhere in the country, and Kotwal is considering giving up her office to save on the monthly rent.
Kotwal, however, seems undeterred by the developments of the past year and a half. She says that the threats and hate have extinguished the fear inside her and made her stronger. She is determined to go on, she says — “even if I have to do it alone.”
