Media Bans in South Asia: A stranglehold on Information as Messengers are Silenced

Amid calls to end a media ban between India and Pakistan, journalist and author Meena Menon*, who was summarily asked to leave Islamabad in 2014, reflects on the impact of the media ban on the free flow of information between the two countries.

Over a decade ago, when I was stationed in Islamabad, a retired brigadier would often ask me how he could access India Today magazine. He was fascinated by its reports and I would try and download the magazine on my iPad for him to read. I suggested an online subscription but he insisted on hard copies which were difficult to procure. In my nine-month tenure as a correspondent for The Hindu, I received books and documents without any difficulty from India. All that changed in a few years.

With a long history of conflict and Partition, it was a cross the media had to bear when Snehesh Alex Philip (from the Press Trust of India) and I were summarily asked to leave in May 2014. I remember that my paper was mainly worried if anyone would be allowed to replace me and despite some assurances from the Pakistani authorities, there was no Indian correspondent in Pakistan since we left, ending decades of a mutual press exchange and friendship.

My first trip to Pakistan was in 2012, as part of Mumbai Press Club delegation to Karachi and Hyderabad in Sind. It was memorable for many reasons and there was a reciprocal visit when a team from the Karachi Press Club visited Mumbai. In Islamabad, I met several press delegations from India, from Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. They were hosted by the government and allowed to meet dignitaries such as the President, a privilege denied to us two Indian journalists who lived there.

People often ask why our visas were revoked. The funniest part is that after the initial three-month tourist visa, our visas were not renewed at all. There was a hasty trip to an office to stamp our passports to show that we had visas for a few days before we left on May 18 2014. By ending our posting, Pakistan displayed the regrettable pettiness that characterises the relationship between the two countries. No Pakistani journalist in India, so tit for tat, no Indian journalist in Pakistan.

India mirrors similar behaviour, harassing journalists and diplomats, not allowing them to visit even the Taj Mahal, though the last two Pakistani correspondents I met seemed to have good experiences, or so they said. Any thought that we would be allowed to report fairly and fearlessly ended in the first few months but we didn’t realise that it was a sign of things to come. We were a soft target and no amount of persuasion would change things.

Repressing the media, worldwide

For a while now, undermining and repressing the media has been a leitmotif in both so called democratic and authoritarian regimes and increasingly the world over, there is a relentless attack on free speech and press freedom. The Indian subcontinent, no stranger to armed conflict, has also witnessed suppression of information and media bans, the latest one coming after the 26 April 2025 massacre of tourists at Pahalgam. Most Indian outlets are banned in Pakistan while in India there is a total ban on Pakistani media and several YouTube and TV channels, adding to the anti-Pakistan jingoism.

The world’s leading democracy, the USA, is witnessing a flurry of cases demanding the right to report. The recent sacking of over 300 journalists at the Washington Post is a blot on the newspaper’s long investigative tradition. In India, press freedom is in serious decline and the latest order of conviction of investigative journalist Ravi Nair in a criminal defamation case, portends ill for press freedom.

According to a report by the Open Observatory of Digital Interference (OONI), a global community which measures internet censorship since 2012, and Digital Rights Foundation (DRF), in the past years, India has been an international leader in the number of internet outages documented in different regions of the country. According to the #KeepItOn campaign of the STOP (Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project) dataset, India experienced more than 450 localised internet outages between 2020 to 2025. The regions of Manipur and Jammu and Kashmir experienced the longest outages, lasting more than 200 days in 2023 and 2020, respectively.

It is little wonder then that calls for ending this prolonged media ban in India and Pakistan has drawn support in the region and the recent appeal from Southasia Peace Action Network (SAPAN) and others demand a lifting of the bans imposed in both countries and restoring access to cross-border journalism (scroll down for the appeal). It expressed ‘deep concern over the continued blocking of Indian news websites in Pakistan and Pakistani news websites in India. These reciprocal bans prevent people on both sides of the border from accessing news, perspectives, and information from their neighbours, further shrinking an already constrained public sphere’.

While recognising that sections of the media on both sides have, at times, played a damaging role by spreading misinformation, sensationalism, war hysteria, and panic, the statement said that while such practices undermine public trust, endanger lives, and weaken democratic institutions, banning entire news platforms and blocking access to information is not a solution. Opening windows to information is not a threat. It is a step toward understanding, accountability, and a more peaceful Southasia, it added.

It rightly points out that engaging with each other’s media, even when uncomfortable or critical, is essential for informed citizenship, accountability, and peace building. Banning news platforms does not erase realities on the ground; it merely blinds people to them.

Why the media ban?

After 22 April 2025, when 26 tourists were killed in a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of India issued an advisory on May 8, seeking the removal of content “affecting the integrity and sovereignty of India”. The advisory sought to ban all content originating in Pakistan, relying on the Information Technology Rules, which advise caution while using content which can affect the sovereignty and integrity of India or can threaten, endanger or jeopardise the security of the state.

While all kinds of unverified videos flooded social media, the India and Pakistan government sought to keep a tight control on the narrative and the media bans was one way of ensuring it. Pakistan-based social media accounts, YouTube channels and even music and video streaming platforms were affected by censorship in India and Pakistan, and several news media websites were blocked on both sides of the conflict. The media bans continued after the ceasefire on May 10, 2025, the OONI DRF report said.

DRF compiled a list of 30 websites reported to be inaccessible by local communities: 22 blocked in India, 15 in Pakistan, and 7 inaccessible in both countries. According to OONI data, the news media websites, access to which was likely blocked in Pakistan between 22nd April 2025 to 30th May 2025, include www.indiatoday.in, www.republicworld.com , www.thehindu.com, www.ndtv.com, timesofindia.indiatimes.com, www.hindustantimes.com, indianexpress.com and www.indiatvnews.com.

OONI DRF data suggests that among the reported websites, at least 12 websites of Pakistani and Indian news media outlets were blocked in India, and at least 8 Indian news media websites were blocked on some networks in Pakistan. Most of these blocks remain ongoing after the end of the conflict and remain inaccessible.

Skyrocketing takedown requests from India

The number of the takedown requests from India targeting content on different social media platforms has sky-rocketed after the escalation of the conflict. While in previous years X/Twitter received a maximum of 10,000 takedown requests per year, in May 2025 they received more than 8,000 requests during the first two days of the conflict. While previously targeted platforms were mostly limited to major social media platforms (X/Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram), in May 2025, streaming platforms were also access to Pakistani films and music events for their users in India.

M J Vijayan, general secretary of Pakistan India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFFD), India chapter, said the access to each other’s media is not a security threat but a regional democratic imperative. A reciprocal ban was counter- productive to public understanding of each other’s situations and a shared reality. Historically, the arrangement that limited the number of journalists in each country was the starting point of this deterioration, he said. This way of blocking of news and not allowing free media access was legitimised early on. “Look at the example of the UK and India, where there is no limitation on journalists, despite the fact that the UK colonised India which suffered the impacts of their colonisation for centuries,” he said. In the conflict in 2025, in the absence of independent media reporting, the assessment both in terms of news and editorial was filled with government-led nationalist narrative and there was no question of balanced reporting. This allowed TV channels to report that Karachi was invaded or that the Indian army was at the door of Islamabad. Media bans help in fooling the public and serving the respective country regime’s purpose, he said.

“Democracy’s foundation is built on information. When you eliminate information, you have won the narrative completely and there is no role for journalism or any media as an agency in democracy. In the case of India and Pakistan, the fourth pillar has been annihilated by the state’s intervention and anyone who advocates cross border access to media is cast aside, – worse often as an anti-national,” he added.

Media post-ban: Sites of jingoism, not of shared pasts

In a pertinent observation, Ammad Ali, researcher and writer based in Islamabad, said, “The biggest casualty of the reciprocal ban of news outlets of Pakistan and India is that these spaces have become instruments of spreading jingoism and uncertainty. State-controlled, short of critical inquiries, and the denial of the right to who is answerable. What Hannah Arendt’s ‘Reality Wobble’ argues about continued suppression of critical voices in media ultimately results in cynicism, the purchases in this casualty are the spread of regurgitated uniformed narratives of political and ideological regimes of both countries. This makes it challenging to look beyond accepted state sanitized views which are projected by the nation states’ approved voices and criminalizes dissent.”

Reflecting on the impact of the ban on exchange of information, he added, “While, in our understanding we linked these bans as aftermaths of incidents of the loss of human lives, blamed on to the rival, in this trade of ideas and thoughts through different types of media we are equally ignoring or wilfully manipulating the very reasons where both states becomes stooges of imperialist agendas and try to disrupt this trade for their own survival. The religious revivalist attitudes in India since 2014 and long-held Hinduphobia in Pakistan, made it difficult to celebrate the shared heroes of two countries in these spaces and to imagine the shared pasts and future the way they imagined.”

While appeals for cross border access to media try to salvage the situation, governments seem reluctant to act. The OONI DRF report states that Indian censors have a vast history of platform-based blocking. Google receives thousands of requests from the Indian government to remove information from its services. Most of such requests are targeting YouTube accounts and videos, with a peak in requests to remove applications from the Google Play platform in 2022 and 2023 when India imposed a ban on hundreds of Chinese applications.

Similarly, Meta’s Transparency Report shows that Meta removed dozens of thousands of pieces of content (mostly posts and profiles) from its platforms in 2024 alone, in compliance with Indian legislation. While internet censorship in India has been extensive for years before the escalation of the conflict with Pakistan, the scale and speed of censorship implementation during the conflict are unprecedented, the report pointed out.

Pakistan too has experienced more than a decade of internet censorship, according to the OONI DRF report. The government blocked access to Telegram, Signal, Twitter/X, media and Wikipedia, international news and local political party websites. While access to Twitter/X was unblocked in Pakistan on 7th May 2025 – right at the beginning of the military conflict with India, access to Telegram and Signal remain blocked. While the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), 2016 aimed to regulate cybercrime, it was used more as a tool for internet censorship in Pakistan. While unlike India, there is no clear trend in the number of internet outages happening in Pakistan, 2024 was a record year for the country. According to the KeepItOn STOP dataset, 10 out of 16 outages in 2024 occurred during elections, protests, and conflicts in Pakistan, the report said.

India’s rank in the Press Freedom Index 2025 was 151 in 180 countries assessed, while Pakistan was 158 with numerous cases of abduction, murder and criminal intimidation in 2024. The Pakistani government in February 2024, shut down access to major platforms like YouTube, X, and Facebook for over 48 hours, citing national security concerns during political protests. Additionally, 900,000 URLs were blocked in 2024, many of which were critical media outlets, human rights organizations, and independent platforms.

The hostile relations between the countries pre-empt any efforts to engage in a serious manner with the importance of a free media exchange. While in the past, the media was a credible player in forming public opinion even on India Pakistan relations, that role has been eroded by WhatsApp universities, a hysterical TV media, and propaganda on either side. It is a situation that is increasingly becoming difficult to salvage despite so many good intentions and personal goodwill on either side.

*Meena Menon is an independent journalist and author.