On 16 June 1998, four journalists, including two photographers, were hospitalised with serious injuries after they were attacked at the additional District Court in Kollam, Kerala state, by activists of the ruling Marxist Communist Party (CPM). Police reportedly stayed away from the court premises until the attack was over. The hospitalised journalists are Tony Dominic of the daily "Malayala...
According to information released by RSF on 18 May 1998, Dhiren Chakravarty and Atanu Bhuyan, editor and executive editor respectively, of the Guwahati-based daily "Ajir Batori", were woken up and arrested at 3:00 a.m. (local time) on Friday 15 May, by Assam state policemen (in the northwestern state of Assam). They are charged with defaming Parliament and its members after the publication, on 21...
In late November 1997, the Advisory Committee, the local administrative body for the National Security Act (NSA), concluded that the grounds for detaining Ajit Bhuyan, former editor of the Assamese-language daily newspaper "Asomiya Protidin" and its sister paper, the Assamese-language weekly "Sadin", were not acceptable and ordered his release. Following this decision, the central government...
According to reports from India received by CPJ, 50 armed men attacked the Madurai office of the Tamil-language daily newspaper "Dinamalar" in the early morning of 1 March 1998. Bearing clubs and knives, the armed men assaulted the office watchman, hurled four molotov cocktails, and destroyed property which included press equipment, windows, electrical fixtures, furniture, and automobiles. This...
Ajit Bhuyan, editor of the widely read Assamese-language newspaper "Asomiya Protidin" ("Assamese Daily") and its sister paper, the Assamese-language weekly "Sadin" ("Seven Days"), has been the target of repeated arrests since August 1997. According to news reports, Bhuyan has been linked by state authorities to the banned United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and with complicity in the...
On 13 August 1997, Indian immigration authorities refused to allow Martin Sugarman, an independent United States (US) photographer and filmmaker, to enter India for the purpose of reporting in the Kashmir Valley. Sugarman arrived in New Delhi on a flight from London, United Kingdom shortly before midnight on 12 August. He had been issued a visa on 16 July by the Indian Consulate in San Francisco...
On 27 July 1997, Habib-ullah Naqash, photojournalist for The Asian Age in Srinagar, was beaten by two policemen when stopped at a highway check point en route to cover the visit of Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral to the region. Similarly, on 8 August, Mukhtar Ahmed, a reporter for the Indian daily "The Telegraph" and a correspondent for Cable News Network (CNN), and photojournalist Arshad Ahmed...
According to RSF, on 7 July 1997, forty men stormed into the office of the "The Asian Age" in Bangalore, brutally stabbed two journalists and chopped off the thumb of a security guard. The mob then smashed and burned computers and office equipment. They were apparently angered by a news report about a poster in a West Bank town that depicted the Muslim prophet Muhammed as a pig. It was not clear...
On 27 June 1997, police assaulted Surinder Singh Oberoi, the correspondent for Agence France-Presse in Srinagar, as he and about twenty other local journalists had gathered in front of the United Nations Military Observers Group office in Srinagar. They intended to cover a demonstration by the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference which was protesting the authorities' refusal to allow them to hold a...
The 16 March 1997 slaying in Kashmir of Saidain Shafi, a contributor to programs carried on the official Indian television network Doordarshan, marks the second time in 1997 that a Kashmiri broadcast journalist has been killed and the eighth time that a journalist has been assassinated in Kashmir since an armed insurgency against Indian rule broke out in late 1989. On 16 March, two unidentified...
