As Bihar goes to the polls, the last five years have been marked with assaults on journalists, with six killings and eleven instances of attacks. The general climate for free speech has also been affected by detention and arrest of journalists and threats to editors of prominent dailies, coupled with defamation and censorship of social media posts.
Of the six journalists killed, two worked for leading Hindi dailies Prabhat Khabar and Dainik Jagran while the other four operated independently or for local media. These journalists wrote on a range of local stories covering corruption, crime, the liquor mafia, medical negligence etc.
In a gruesome incident in 2021, the body of journalist Manish Kumar Singh was found in East Champaran district with both eyes gouged out. Singh, who worked with a private news channel, was the son of Sanjay Kumar Singh, editor of a leading Hindi newspaper, Areraj Darshan.
In November 2021, two days after journalist Budhinath Jha uploaded a post on Facebook about fake medical clinics, his half-burnt body was found on a roadside in Madhubani district.
If the killings were brutal, so were the attacks, with journalists barely surviving being shot at or beaten up, leading to one of them being seriously maimed.
Lawfare
During the Covid 19 pandemic and after, there was an uptick in lawfare. A report in The Caravan documented at least ten journalists who were arrested on various charges including criminal conspiracy and extortion.
In January 2021, a circular issued by the Additional Director General (ADG) Nayyar Husnain Khan, the head of Economic Offences Wing (EOU), the nodal body for cyber-crime, said all “offensive/obscene” (aapatijanak/abhadra) social media posts on the Chief Minister, ministers and elected representatives and state government officials would constitute cybercrime.
Police crackdown on those protesting the Agnipath scheme – a newly launched recruitment scheme to the armed forces — in Patna in 2022 resulted in detention of three journalists and the arrest of one. Police roughed up and assaulted the journalists but they were charged with obstructing police officers on duty.
In December 2023, the Editor-in-Chief of the Hindi daily Prabhat Khabar, Ashutosh Chaturvedi, received a threat call from the Birsa Munda Central Jail in Hotwar, by a person who identified himself as Yogendra Tiwari. Further calls were made to the city editor Vijay Pathak. The caller said that reports published in the newspaper were objectionable but did not give details.
Tenuous Press Freedom
Press freedom has been tenuous throughout the rule of the Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar. Nitish Kumar has been Chief Minister of Bihar briefly in 2000, between 2005 and 2014 and uninterrupted since 2015. In 2016, the killing of journalist Rajdeo Ranjan in Siwan, allegedly at the behest of gangster and former RJD Member of Parliament Mohammed Shahubuddin shook up journalists and Nitish Kumar quickly acceded to the demand of Asha Ranjan, the school-teacher wife of Rajdeo Ranjan, for a CBI inquiry into the killing. Five persons, including Laddan Miyan, a close associate of Shahabuddin, were arrested for the killing.
Shahabuddin then lodged in jail, convicted for the killing of two brothers, succumbed to Covid in 2021. On August 30, 2025, barely two months before the Bihar Assembly elections slated for November 6, a CBI special court acquitted Laddan Milan and two other accused due to “lack of evidence” and convicted three others.
Both print and electronic media in Bihar have been at the mercy of the state’s advertisement policy of 2008. In 2012, amidst criticism of Nitish Kumar’s media strategy to give government advertisements to the media, the then Press Council of India (PCI) chairman Markandey Katju said there was no press freedom in Bihar and appointed a three-member committee comprising Rajeev Ranjan Nag, Arun Kumar and Kalyan Barooah to investigate the precise nature of government pressure on media in Bihar.
The committee’s report was tabled, kept in abeyance and finally adopted in 2013. It had said that newspapers in Bihar were downplaying issues like corruption due to government pressure, favouring the establishment and ignoring the opposition in their news coverage. But the committee’s recommendations for an independent body to oversee disbursal of advertisements were ignored and Bihar slipped further away from press freedom.
(Visit the Free Speech Tracker or scroll to the end for more details.)
By 2015, when Nitish Kumar was re-elected as Chief Minister, several independent journalists began using social media platforms to publish stories, and alongside began facing reprisal. By 2020, when the Nitish Kumar government was re-elected as part of the JDU-led NDA along with the Bharatiya Janata Party, repression on the media continued unabated, this time targeting social media.
Bihar struggles with low socio-economic indicators. It consistently throws up high unemployment rates and there is an abject lack of facilities for health and education. In the NITI Aayog 2019-20 State Health Index, Bihar was ranked 18th out of 19 large states. In March 2025, Niti Aayog’s Macro and Fiscal Landscape of the State of Bihar said that the sex ratio is lower than the national average. Low literacy levels and low per capita income and high unemployment, forces lakhs of youth to migrate every year. With little or no industries, agriculture is a mainstay and government employment is a desperate struggle for thousands of youth. In NITI Aayog’s SDG India Index of 2023-24, Bihar was adjudged the worst performer in terms of social, economic and environmental parameters.
The large-scale deletion of voters in Bihar in the run up to the Assembly election, ostensibly to revise the electoral rolls, is bound to have an impact on the polls. But the slow erasure of an independent media that can question and hold its government accountable can only further weaken the foundations of a democracy.
Read our special features:
Wanted: A Responsible Media in Bihar, by Kiran Shaheen.
Criminalisation of politics in Bihar, by C P Jha.
Details of Free Speech Violations in Bihar, November ’20-’25: