Unpaved roads. Known rapists walking free. Perhaps because make up about 20 percent of the population of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, some government officials started paying attention. Roads got paved. Toilets got built. Hospitals got stocked with medicines.
“Almost every month, our reporting brings justice to people,” Kavita Devi, the paper’s told me in an email originally written in Hindi.
Today the whose name in Hindi means “news waves,” is a digital-first rural news network with its own talk shows and nearly 550,000 subscribers on YouTube.
The publication ran up against the many familiar hurdles that can make as difficult as it is essential to the success of democracy. Reporters were intimidated and belittled. It was hard to get taken seriously in a country where media giants often hire high-caste men from big cities who kowtow to the party in office. The powerful don’t like pushback. And for a group of women who were viewed as powerless by virtue of their gender and caste, the power of the press was their only option. Democracy, their story shows us, requires not just courage and hard work but also constant vigilance and ingenuity in the face of change.
The story of how newly literate rural women became investigative journalists is chronicled in a new documentary, “Writing With Fire,” which made the Academy Awards shortlist this year.
If it wins, it will make history as the first film about India directed by Indians to receive an Oscar. It will also give a boost to democracy’s unsung champions at a time when democratic norms are under threat around the world. The movie opens with the chief reporter, interviewing a woman who recounts being raped in her home on six separate occasions in a single month. The woman’s husband tried to file a complaint, but police officers refused to take it. In the walks into the police station and demands an explanation.
“Journalism is the essence of democracy,” she says afterward. “When citizens demand their rights, it is us journalists who can take their demands to the government.”
The married team that made the film and Thomas, who shooting footage in 2016, the year Lahariya’s reporters made the leap to digital news. In the film, women, some of whom don’t have electricity in their homes, unwrap boxes of brand-new cellphones gingerly, like bricks of dynamite. By the end of the film and her colleagues are pushing through crowds at political rallies with their cellphone cameras rolling. Although the staff members are from marginalized tribal people and the so-called backward castes — they don’t see themselves as part of any political movement. First and foremost, they are reporters who claim objectivity and independence as core values.
A lot of people say: Where do you think they get this crazy courage from? Is it that they have nothing to lose? Each one of them is so aware of how rare it was to have had access to education and how much it means to people whose voice they have become. They know that if they don’t show up reporting that story, nobody else will.
“Writing With Fire” is a road map of sorts for how to stand up for democracy even in the face of great danger. In 2017, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk who once announced that he was preparing for a religious war, took the helm as chief minister in Uttar Pradesh. Members of the Hindu Youth Brigade, an organization he founded, brandished swords in the streets, vowing to protect Hindus and punish Muslims. Lahariya’s reporters created a game plan for how to cover the rise of Hindu nationalism. They tread carefully, assigning only the most experienced reporters. In the film, interviews a leader of the Hindu Youth Brigade and gets him to explain his vision for the country.
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