Threats – Journalists

One more Gauri Lankesh in the making — that’s what a tweet from one ‘@Mitra_Cariappa’, which has ‘A Proud Hindustani’ in its bio, tweeted to senior journalist Swati Chaturvedi on Wednesday. Swati reported it to Twitter and also filed a police complaint on Thursday evening, however, authorities haven’t taken any action so far.

“Even though the tweet was deleted, there are screenshots of it. Other people have also reported the user going by the handle ‘@mitra_cariappa’, but there has been no response,” said Swati Chaturvedi, who is a resident of Delhi. Swati recently won the Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Award for Courage on 9 November.

A journalist with over 20 years of field experience, Chaturvedi has reported on the Jain Commission, the Rafale deal, the CBI controversy, among other stories. “I have been in this profession for 20 years, but have only started receiving such threats for the last four years and eight months. Now, I get at least a dozen such threats every week. It’s evident where they are coming from and what they mean, but the Centre is not even pretending to investigate such instances anymore,” Chaturvedi adds