There is a certain theatre to Indian mainstream media today.

Anchors shout so that no one has to think.

Panels are arranged so that disagreement looks like chaos rather than democracy.

And somewhere in this daily circus, a simple fact gets buried: India, the so called world’s largest democracy, now sits at rank 157 out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index released by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). That is one place below Palestine. It is a fall of six places from 151 in 2025, and part of a longer slide from 142 in 2021. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka all rank above us. Only Nepal, among our neighbours, does noticeably better.

This is not a small statistical embarrassment. It is a mirror. And most of us would rather look away from it than into it.

The Ranking Nobody Wants To Talk About

RSF’s report this year is blunt. It says India’s media landscape has entered what it calls an “unofficial state of emergency” since 2014, citing rising violence against journalists, concentrated media ownership, and outlets with overt political alignment. It names specific business houses whose ownership stretches across major news channels, and it uses a phrase that has now entered common vocabulary: ‘godi media’, meaning media sitting comfortably in the lap of power.

RSF notes that colonial era laws such as sedition, along with newer anti-terror statutes and defamation suits, are increasingly used not against criminals but against reporters doing their job. The global trend backs this up too. Worldwide, the legal indicator in the RSF index recorded its sharpest decline this year, meaning governments everywhere are learning the same trick: you do not need to ban a journalist, you just need to make the law expensive and slow enough that self-censorship becomes cheaper than truth.

This is where the mockery of mainstream media culture becomes serious. The evening debate format that Indian television perfected, loud, binary, built for outrage rather than understanding, is not an accident of bad taste. It is what happens when journalism stops asking uncomfortable questions of power and instead asks manufactured questions of each other.

Nation Uncomfortable With Its Own Reflection?

Cinema in India has a long and slightly absurd history of censorship. Films have been stopped from release for showing a widow’s grief, for depicting a real bomb blast while trials were ongoing, for daring to name a rape survivor after a Hindu goddess. In July 2025, the Central Board of Film Certification asked for 96 cuts in a film called Janaki vs State of Kerala, a story about a sexual assault survivor, because her name Janaki is another name for Sita. The director’s response was simple: apparently a woman who has survived abuse cannot share her name with a goddess.

Punjab 95, a biopic on human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, was asked for 21 cuts, then the number grew to 127. It remains unreleased more than 2 years after it was meant to premiere internationally.

Empuraan, a big commercial Malayalam release, lost 128 seconds of footage in 2025 after right wing outrage over scenes resembling the 2002 Gujarat riots, cuts the makers made “voluntarily” once the pressure built.

Santosh, Britain’s official Oscar entry and a BAFTA nominated film about misogyny and caste in rural India, was denied a release certificate altogether. A documentation project called CBFC Watch found more than 100,000 cuts across nearly 20,000 films between 2017 and 2025, and noted the board goes hardest after religious, political, and substance related content while being far gentler on violence.

In December 2025, nineteen films, including a century old classic, were blocked from screening at a film festival in Kerala simply because the ministry did not issue exemption certificates in time. Books face a quieter but similar fate: import bans, state level prohibitions, and the ever present threat of mob outrage that makes publishers timid long before any court gets involved.

None of this is new to Indian history. Films were banned during the Emergency in the 1970s. Political satire has always made governments nervous. What is new is the scale, the speed of digital outrage, and the fact that the tool of choice has shifted from formal government order to informal mob pressure, which is harder to challenge in court and far more effective at teaching everyone else to stay quiet.

Why Do We Struggle So Much With Disagreement?

German researcher Elisabeth Noelle Neumann gave us the theory of the ‘Spiral of Silence’ decades ago. Her argument was simple: people constantly scan their environment to sense which opinions are safe to share in public, and those who feel their view is in the minority tend to stay quiet, which makes the majority view look even bigger than it is, which pushes more people into silence. In a country of over 1.4 billion people, with intense social pressure around family, community, and religious identity, this spiral moves fast and hits hard. Disagreement in India is rarely treated as a normal exchange of ideas. It gets read as disloyalty, to family, to faith, to nation, sometimes all three at once.

Add to this what the researcher Geert Hofstede called ‘high power distance culture’, where hierarchy is respected almost automatically and questioning someone above you, a boss, an elder, a government, feels socially wrong even when it is legally protected. Combine that with what sociologists describe as a shame based rather than guilt based social structure, where public reputation matters more than private conscience, and you get a society where the safest social move is always agreement, and the most punished social move is public dissent.

This is not a moral failing of Indians as people. It is a predictable outcome of a large, hierarchical, tightly networked society where social cost of disagreement is high and reward for conformity is immediate. But predictable does not mean healthy for a democracy.

The Media Theories That Explain the Circus

Antonio Gramsci’s idea of ‘cultural hegemony’ is useful here. Gramsci argued that ruling ideas do not need force to dominate, they need to feel like common sense. When most large media houses are owned by a handful of business groups with interests tied to government contracts and policy favour, what looks like “neutral” news coverage quietly becomes manufactured consensus.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky called this the ‘propaganda model’ decades ago in a different country, but its five filters, ownership concentration, advertising dependence, sourcing from official channels, flak against critics, and a unifying fear or ideology, map onto Indian television with uncomfortable precision.

Then there is ‘agenda setting theory’, the idea that media may not tell people what to think but is extremely good at telling people what to think about. When prime time debates spend 40 minutes on a provocative statement by a minor politician and 4 minutes on an actual policy failure, that is agenda setting doing exactly what it is designed to do, distraction dressed as concern.

‘Gatekeeping theory’ adds one more layer. Every news story passes through gates, editors, owners, advertisers, before it reaches you. In India, today, those gates are increasingly narrow, and self-censorship has become the most efficient gatekeeper of all, because no memo needs to be written when everyone already knows what will invite trouble.

The Numbers Behind the Silence

According to Access Now and the KeepItOn coalition, India recorded 65 deliberate internet shutdowns in 2025. That is actually the lowest figure since 2017, yet it still placed India second globally, behind only Myanmar, a country under military rule.

Since 2016, India has recorded 920 of the world’s 2,102 documented shutdowns, the highest cumulative total of any country on earth, democratic or otherwise. These shutdowns hit twelve states and territories last year alone, mostly during protests, communal tension, and religious events, precisely the moments when information and calm reasoning matter most.

Globally, 2025 saw a record 313 shutdowns across 52 countries, the highest number ever recorded, and RSF’s global press freedom score has hit its lowest average in 25 years, with over half the world’s countries now rated difficult or very serious for journalism. India’s decline is not happening in isolation; it is part of a global pattern. But being part of a global trend is a weak excuse when you are the country that calls itself the mother of democracy.

What This Costs India on the World Stage?

Soft power runs on credibility, not just cinema exports and cricket diplomacy. When RSF, a globally read and cited index, places a G20 economy below Palestine on press freedom, that number travels. Foreign investors read it. Diplomats read it. Universities abroad read it when deciding how to describe India in their textbooks. A country that wants a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council, that wants to be seen as a counterweight to authoritarian models in the region, cannot simultaneously top the world charts in internet shutdowns and expect its democratic branding to remain unquestioned.

There is a deeper cost too, one that numbers cannot fully capture. A society that punishes disagreement teaches its most talented, questioning minds two options: leave, or go quiet. Neither builds a confident, self-correcting nation.

Democracies survive not because everyone agrees, but because disagreement is allowed to exist in the open, tested, argued, and occasionally proven wrong without anyone going to jail or losing their livelihood for it.

India does not need less patriotism. It needs more confidence, the kind that can sit through a hard question without reaching for a ban, a case, or a mob.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

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