"Hey! Your voice is on the rise"

Since the mid-1980s, the police of Andhra Pradesh (AP) have idiomatically created a buzz line for bullying against the assertive journalists to intimidate them: “Hey! Your voice is on the rise. Do you want to be a Pingali Dasaratha Ram?”
Highly acclaimed journalist Pingali Dasaratha Ram, the grandson of Pingali Venkaiah, the designer of the Indian national flag, was gruesomely killed on October 20, 1985 and it was an open secret that the state was the prime accused. His monthly magazine, Encounter from Vijayawada, the cultural and political capital of AP, stopped after his murder, had lasted five years. With his brave and uncompromising reports, Pingali proved that a journalist, howsoever lonely and poor he may be, could shatter the corrupt system in the interests of the public.

Since he was unsparing in making scathing attacks on politicians, including the then chief minister, N. T. Ramarao and the administrative echelons including senior IAS and IPS officers, he had as many foes as friends. But his friends were as fragile and weak as he was, and his enemies were the makers of society. So, in an obviously brutal assault, he was hacked to death while travelling by a rickshaw, which was taking him home on that fateful night. His body was reported with more than 30 ghastly stab wounds. But no one was found guilty for lack of evidence.

It was the beginning and there have been a couple of incidents of gruesome murders of journalists by the state since, and even by Naxalites. After six years since Pingali’s murder, a Hyderbad city journalist Gulam Rassol, working in Udayam, a daily started by former Union Minister and film director Dasari Narayanarao, was killed in an ‘encounter’ by the police on December 28, 1991.

“Undoubtedly it was a fake encounter. Besides killing Rasool, the police also killed his friend Vijaya Prasada Rao, only to hush up the evidence. Vijaya Prasad had got his passport a few weeks ago, that too before the police gave a clear certificate on his testimonies. Suddenly, within days, how could he be a notorious Naxalite, to be killed and cremated in no time without informing the relatives,” Laxmaiah M, senior journalist and once a colleague of Gulam Rasool said to Governance Watch. It was also heinous that some leaders of journalists unions with vested interests scuttled the case, as they were hand in glove with the state.

While Rasool was killed by the police, Sridhar Reddy Chada of Nalgonda was gunned down by PWG Naxals in 1993, branding him an informer to police. Chada was working as  a reporter for Udayam from Nalgonda district. Long after his killing, the Naxals did confess that they killed Chada in haste with wrong presumptions. In another case, a spirited journalist Mallepula Narendra, an Eenadu correspondent from Nizamabad district, was killed in the crossfire between police and Naxals when he came in between, while on his job of reporting the incident.

In another incident, Yadagiri Veeraboina, a veteran journalist and staff correspondent in Telugu-language daily Andhra Prabha, was stabbed to death in the town of Medak by the toddy mafia on February 21, 2004. Yadagiri had written a series of articles detailing the dangers of consuming toddy and accusing local politicians of being involved in its trade.
The culprits in no case have been brought to book in a span of two and a half decades. In fact, in a couple of cases the High Court bench has even pulled up senior police officers for their deliberate involvement in the cases of assault on journalists.