24 Oct 2025 | Asia and Pacific, News and features, Pakistan
Inside the National Press Club (NPC) of Islamabad stands a column topped with a hand cast in iron and holding a pen, which shows the concept of a free press. But unfortunately, realities on the ground are quite different in the capital, let alone other parts of Pakistan. The proof: On 2 October 2025, the police carried out a raid at the NPC and assaulted journalists present inside the press club.
Journalists’ unions and human rights bodies have condemned the assault by the Islamabad police in the strongest terms with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) demanding an immediate inquiry and saying that those responsible should be brought to book.
During my visit to the press club this month, I met journalists, photographers, and cameramen who were assaulted by the police. One of them was Mohammad Shezad. According to him, he was beaten up by officers carrying out the raid.
“The cops grabbed me by my shirt,” he told Index on Censorship. “As I resisted, they ripped my shirt across the back.”
Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily broadsheet, condemned the raid the very next day in an editorial, calling it “a trend that one associates with authoritarian regimes, which crush protest and cannot tolerate even peaceful dissent”.
“On that very day, there were three demonstrations at the press club,” recalled Azhar Jatoi, the president of the NPC, during an interview with Index. “The JKJAAC (Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee) had issued a call for a demonstration at the press club, and they were surrounded by the police as soon as they started demonstrating.”
The JKJAAC is an alliance demanding civil liberties and political rights in the Kashmir region in Pakistan, an end to special privileges for government officials, the restoration of student unions, access to free and quality healthcare and education, among other things.
The organisation had engaged in talks with the government which failed, and that is why they called for a region-wide strike on 29 September. In the lead up to the strike, the government shut down all mobile, landline and internet services in the region, but unfortunately, the protests soon turned violent. According to a report by Reuters, eight were killed in the protests.
As a result, the JKJAAC protestors went to demonstrate outside the National Press Club in Islamabad, so their demonstrations could be peacefully recorded.
According to Jatoi, the police started assaulting the journalists to stop them reporting on how the protesters were being beaten and dragged away.
Rashed Ahmad, who works at the press club, said while talking to Index that he too was beaten up by the police when he wanted to close the gate.
Most of the journalists present at the NPC complained about the police raid, calling it an attack against the press freedom in Pakistan. One of them was Ishaque Chaudry, a senior journalist in Islamabad who said that there had been attacks on the press club before.
“This is not the first time that the journalists have been assaulted at the press club. In the past, these kinds of incidents have taken place too,” he told Index. He added that these attacks were happening when Pakistan had a democratic government, and not when the country had been under military rule.
Other journalists echoed the same claims. Afzal Butt, the president of PFUJ (Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists), termed the assault “one of the darkest days” in Pakistan while talking about the press club raid.
It is interesting to note that Islamabad used to be a safe place for journalists. But over the last few years, it has become unsafe. According to an annual press freedom report by Freedom Network, Islamabad was termed in 2024 as the “second most dangerous place to practise journalism” in the country with a quarter of all attacks on journalists happening in the capital.
This is not something surprising. The most senior journalists, known nationally in the country, have been attacked in Islamabad for years. In 2017, a senior investigative journalist of The News Ahmed Noorani was assaulted by knife-wielding assailants along with his driver in Islamabad. Due to the persistent threats to his life, he fled the country.
In 2021, prominent Pakistani journalist Asad Toor was assaulted by three unidentified men who broke into his apartment in Islamabad. In the same year, senior journalist Absar Alam too was shot and injured in an attack in Islamabad.
The list of assaults against journalists in Islamabad goes on. But the reporters this time around were lucky enough to survive. They are lucky in the sense that Pakistan is still one the deadliest countries for journalists to work in the world according to the latest figures from Reporters without Borders. At least 138 journalists have been killed in the country since 1990.
Instead of protecting journalists, government-sponsored advertisements appeared in media on the same day as the police carried out the raid on the press club, portraying journalists, freelancers, and others as anti-state.
Farooq Sulehria, a teacher at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore and author of the books on the media in Pakistan, told Index that the raid on the press club was part of “a creeping authoritarianism in Pakistan”.
He further explained that by creeping authoritarianism he meant the increasing repression of the state in Pakistan, which was affecting aspects of life where it was not present before. “For instance, the police carried out a raid inside the press club in Islamabad which people could hardly think that could happen,” he said.
In his concluding remarks, journalist Ishaque Chaurdy comes up with a disconcerting view while talking about police raid at the club: “If this is the case in the capital for journalists, then the situation for journalists is obviously quite worse than we can imagine in rest of Pakistan.”
15 Sep 2025 | About Index, Asia and Pacific, Nepal, News and features, Newsletters
It’s been a week of political violence and while many might still be glued to news about the murder of Charlie Kirk (my response here), I want to turn attention to another unfolding crisis – the growing war on digital freedoms. This week that war flared dramatically in Nepal.
The story moved fast. Thousands of people, mostly young, took to the streets at the start of the week to protest the government’s decision to ban 26 social media platforms. Scores of unarmed protesters were killed and government buildings torched. The prime minister and other officials then resigned. The social media bans were lifted. Writing for Index from the country this week, Gary Wornell spoke of his horror and sadness at what unfolded. “The Nepal I had known as my second home for the last 13 years would never be,” he said. His piece is both a good explainer and a deeply emotional witness account.
The government tried to justify the bans as necessary to tackle fake news, hate speech and platform accountability. The youth saw it differently, and called it censorship, plain and simple. We agree, not least because we’ve heard this line before, many times. Across South Asia (and for that matter the world) governments use the pretext of “online safety” to roll back digital rights and, by extension, civil liberties.
In India, we’ve closely tracked how Narendra Modi’s government has tightened control over digital platforms through legislative and regulatory measures, often under the guise of combating fake news or protecting national unity and security. The ruling party has also benefitted from the mob veto, where right-wing groups and influencers have lodged a blizzard of police complaints about errant social media posts. These have resulted in prominent individuals, such as commentator Dr Medusa and journalist (and Index award winner) Mohammed Zubair, being charged with sedition. In Pakistan a bill was passed in January that gives the government sweeping controls on social media. Users can now be sent to prison for spreading disinformation. Sri Lanka’s Online Safety Act allows the government to take down content critical of it to apparently protect national security interests. Bangladesh has the Digital Security Act, which has been criticised for its breadth. I’ll park the UK’s Online Safety Act but we have concerns about that too, as we’ve frequently highlighted.
Not all legislation is cynical or censorious. Several voices from our South Asia network reminded us this week that digital spaces are indeed being used to incite hate and violence. The amplification of hateful content against the Rohingya in Myanmar on Facebook is a tragic example. But here’s a distinction: recognising and responding to harm is not the same as justifying an authoritarian response. Even those most concerned with digital hate in South Asia condemned Nepal’s actions.
The fury has died down in Nepal. Still, as the above pattern shows, it’s unlikely this woeful chapter will be the end of government attempts to shut down digital discourse.
27 Aug 2025 | About Index, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Newsletters, United Kingdom
Far too often in Britain and elsewhere governments claim the price of countering extremist threats is limiting free speech. The latest example in the UK is proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, which has led to hundreds of people arrested for peacefully holding up banners supporting the organisation. On the other side of the aisle, people are exercising their right to protest against the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, actions justified by the shadow home secretary Chris Philp, who said they had “every right to protest”. But there is a fear by some that that “cordon sanitaire” between peaceful protesters and extreme far right neo-Nazis is being breached, with Byline Times identifying known supporters of extremist groups taking part.
That balance between free speech, protest and extremism is a delicate one and the instinct of some politicians to demonstrate grip, or respond to what they see as the consensus, can be to ban things and even label them terrorist or extremist activities. We at Index were warning about this 10 years ago.
Round the world, we know that terrorism legislation is often used to stop journalists reporting and opposition parties standing for election. Anti-terrorism laws can be a catch-all which criminalises opponents and scares off criticism. In some countries clamping down on so-called “terrorism” serves to close down interference from abroad: “Don’t criticise us with your liberal ideas, we are keeping you safe by locking up people who could blow you up.”
Mostly governments really don’t want to discuss these messy nuances. So it might be somewhat surprising that the Home Office, on its website, has decided to publish a series of essays commissioned by the outgoing Commissioner for Counter-terrorism, Robin Simcox entitled: Countering Terrorism: Defending free speech. In his introduction Simcox explains why he commissioned these thought pieces: “One, freedom of speech matters greatly to me. Two, I think it is under sustained attack. Three, counter-extremism work too often forms part of the offensive.”
One of his points, and an argument made in many of the essays, is that freedom of expression is uncomfortable. He writes: “We defend it because freedom of expression is the route by which we discover the truth; because testing conflicting opinion can be challenging but ultimately makes our discourse healthier; and because we learn to accept and indeed cherish those with differing viewpoints. The alternative – a coerced, ‘acceptable’ consensus of the day – offers a bleak vision of the future.”
The idea of “tolerance”, one essay argues, leads to a flattening of robust argument where we censor ideas and conversations in order not to offend others. Meanwhile Liam Duffy’s essay, titled Don’t Do Anything I Say in This Song: Countering Extremism with Candour, Not Censorship, is an interesting insight into how government works. He argues that there is a “complacency and cavalier attitude to freedom of expression” among those who deal with counter extremism with “concerns over free speech too often dismissed as being advanced with cynical motivations”.
Our very own editor-at-large Martin Bright’s essay, which you can read here, looks at the challenges journalists face when reporting on extremism and community relations.
Hopefully government ministers will read these essays before the end of the summer break and reflect on whether they have got the balance right in the UK.
14 Jul 2025 | About Index, Africa, Kenya, News and features, Newsletters
The directive from Kenya’s President William Ruto last week was clear: shoot protesters in the legs. It came just days after police killed scores of demonstrators, marking the most violent crackdown since nationwide protests erupted last month. On Monday, tens of thousands gathered across the country to express growing outrage at Ruto’s government. When roadblocks and a heavy police presence failed to suppress the demonstrations, authorities escalated their response. According to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, 31 people were killed, 107 injured, 532 arrested and two disappeared. Article 19 reported that three journalists were attacked and documented a series of other violations to free expression.
These latest confrontations are part of a broader protest movement that began in June following the death of a teacher in police custody. The teacher had allegedly criticised a senior police official on social media. His death ignited long-simmering frustrations over police brutality, rising living costs and deep-rooted government corruption.
Monday’s violence coincided with Saba Saba Day (Swahili for “seven seven”), which is a powerful anniversary in Kenya’s political calendar. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the 1990 protests, on 7 July, against President Daniel arap Moi’s one-party rule, which ultimately led to multiparty democracy.
Kenya appears to be caught in a cycle of protest and repression. Last year’s protests also turned violent. So did previous ones.
“Every time we try to protest against these senseless and endless killings by the police, we are teargassed and some of us get arrested. The voice of the youth is not being heard by the authorities,” we were told by a young man named Njoro back in 2022. Ruto had just become president when we spoke to Njoro, having previously served as deputy president. The election was marked by low voter turnout and widespread claims of electoral fraud. Still, Ruto portrayed himself as a man of the people and embraced nicknames along those lines, including “Hustler” and “Chicken Seller”. In recent years new nicknames – many of them mocking or critical – have emerged. While Ruto has largely shrugged them off, his government has not extended the same tolerance to satirical artists and online critics, who have been harassed and even disappeared. Last December, for example, the renowned cartoonist Gideon Kibet disappeared alongside his brother after meeting with opposition senator Okiya Omtata. Known by the alias Kibet Bull, he was eventually released in January.
In last month’s Economist, Kenya was described as a country that “once set a fine example to the rest of Africa” but “now offers a how-to guide on smothering dissent”. Orders to shoot protesters in the legs only adds weight to that.
