Research Projects

The Indian Muslims Today

The Indian Muslims Today website is part of a 4-year research project, Indian Muslims at a time of Hindu Majoritarianism, generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and Columbia University, and run by Sciences Po with collaboration from Princeton.
This website aims at presenting, through various media, an image of the situation and lives of India’s largest minority community.
It seeks to inform students, academia, the media as well as the general public.
Some of the content presented here is new and emerges from the fieldwork and academic research of the 50-odd core team which contributed to the project.
Other content reproduces relevant open source material on the topic, New documents and new analyses will regularly be posted, thereby making this website a one stop archive for anyone interested in the subject.

Indian Media : challenges and resilience

The Indian media landscape is like India itself – huge and densely populated – and has more than 100,000 newspapers (including 36,000 weeklies) and 380 TV news channels. But in the RSF World Press Freedom Index which assesses the state of journalism in 180 countries and territories, India was ranked 161 st in 2023 – it had dropped 19 places in two years. The violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in “the world’s largest democracy”, ruled since 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the embodiment of the Hindu nationalist right.
Indian media are changing quickly since Narendra Modi’s rise to power in 2014. First, the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a very small number of powerful capitalists accelerated (as evident from the taking over of NDTV by Gautam Adani, Modi’s oligarch in chief). Second, the so-called “mainstream media” not only promoted the interests of the ruling party, the BJP, but propagated its Hindu nationalist ideology too, at the expense of secularism and the relative multiculturalism that the minorities enjoyed so far. Third, pressure on the journalists - from the media owners as well as from the government and Hindu
nationalist trolls/vigilantes - have intensified, resulting in censorship as well as self-censorship. High-quality non-biased information is only available in a few places - mostly online platforms - whose business model might not be sustainable.

The project has three specific objectives
- To analyse the ownership pattern of the Indian media
- To research and highlight the sociology of the Indian newsrooms
- To understand the mechanisms accounting for censorship as well as self-censorship of/in the Indian media.