The recently concluded general elections in India saw the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) falling short of a majority. Unlike the last two elections in 2014 and 2019, when the BJP came to power with massive majorities, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi will now have to depend on its political allies to run a coalition government.
The new dynamics, observers claim, may substantially clip the Prime Minister’s ability to make policy decisions unilaterally and to continue his crackdown on all forms of dissent. However, given the government’s autocratic impulses in the last 10 years, a course correction doesn’t look imminent. Here, ARTICLE 19 explores the manifold challenges faced by Indian democracy, despite Modi’s reduced mandate.
Over the last decade, Modi – seen as both charismatic and divisive – has steered a government that has tightened his grip on every layer of Indian democracy. To do this, he continuously relied on the support of a large section of India’s majority-Hindu community who believe that the Prime Minister’s leadership has brought about a stable government, sped up economic growth, improved India’s global stature, and kept hostile states like Pakistan and China at bay.
Simultaneously, under Modi’s leadership, India has seen a state-sponsored normalisation of majoritarian extremist politics and autocratic practices that have resulted in increasing discrimination, including lynching of Muslims and widespread fear among religious minority communities. The government has presided over a big chunk of the Indian mass media becoming pliant to different forms of state sponsorship, aiding and abetting the expansion of Modi and his party’s ideological agenda.
Crucially, the last 10 years have seen the Modi administration pass a series of politically partisan government policies and contentious laws. Seen as divisive and disrespectful of India’s diverse population, these instruments have apportioned unprecedented power to the central government in India’s otherwise robust, constitutionally mandated, federal state structure.
Specifically, these legal changes have empowered the state machinery to abuse civil liberties and human rights, violate freedom of expression conventions, and unprecedentedly target opposition forces, be they civil society groups or political parties that oppose BJP’s Hindutva ideology – a belief that only Hindus are the original claimants of Indianhood.
The impunity with which critics, dissenters, independent thinkers, critical journalists, and minorities have been suppressed, arbitrarily arrested, detained, or sanctioned under different charges has stood in stark contrast with the freedoms and rights guaranteed to all Indian citizens by the Constitution.
Against this backdrop, the outcome of the 2024 general elections may open up room for a much-needed level playing field in Indian democracy. The result of the elections is seen as Indians rejecting the Modi government’s contempt for democratic norms, abuse of civil liberties, and his inclination to empower the rich while ignoring the concerns of the poor.
The 2024 elections were conducted amid widespread voter suppression, political repression, and the Modi government’s near-complete takeover of constitutional institutions. Now, with a reduced mandate for the BJP and Modi, democratic-minded citizens and civil liberties activists will have the opportunity to reclaim their constitutional rights and freedoms and try to dispel the environment of fear, anxiety, and insecurity that the BJP government has fomented over the last 10 years.
Crackdown on media freedom
ARTICLE 19’s Global Expression Report, which measures the freedom of everyone – not just journalists or activists – to express opinions, communicate, and access information, paints a bleak picture for India. The 2024 report ranked India 123rd out of 161 countries. India has seen a 35-point decline in its score over the past 10 years, since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. The percentage of people living in a free expression crisis rose to 53% globally as a result of the country’s drop into the lowest expression category.
The last 3 years saw India holding 7 journalists behind bars: the highest number since 1992. Of these, 6 have been charged with sedition or under security laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). They were reporting from India’s only Muslim-majority province, Jammu and Kashmir, where the media has found itself increasingly gagged after the government repealed the region’s constitutional autonomy in 2019. As of 18 April 2024, 15 journalists across India had active UAPA cases against them, 40% of them in the troubled region of Jammu and Kashmir.
Back in 2020, the Delhi-based Rights and Risk Analysis Group showed that 55 Indian journalists were either arrested, booked, or intimidated by state authorities for reporting on the human crises that erupted during the Covid-19 pandemic. From 2014 to 2020, 135 journalists across India have been booked under different charges, a large number of which were frivolous and vindictive, leading to media workers being afraid to report freely.
The criminalisation of journalistic work is only an indication of a larger-scale crackdown on free expression. As his government continues to gag critical voices, Modi himself has not addressed a single open press conference in the last decade, and has chosen to only give scripted interviews to supplicant journalists.
Those media organisations that have continued to act independently have faced the wrath of investigation agencies. Various such agencies have raided the offices of at least 8 prominent media groups – The Wire, BBC, NewsClick, Dainik Bhaskar, NDTV, The Quint, Bharat Samachar, and Greater Kashmir – for alleged criminal or corrupt conduct. None of these cases have been proven in the Indian Courts as yet; in many, the agencies did not even file their chargesheets for several months, leading to a widespread perception that the raids were merely coercive measures to silence the media.
Record internet shutdowns
The number of state-sanctioned internet shutdowns in India remained the largest in the world for the sixth year in a row in 2023, when the internet shutdown in conflict-ridden Manipur (population roughly 3.2 million) lasted for 212 days.
Impunity for shutdowns was further exacerbated by the government passing the Telecommunications Act in December 2023, which marked a pivotal shift in India’s digital and telecommunications policy. It not only makes biometric identification mandatory for internet users, but also gives the government unprecedented power to intercept telecom and digital exchanges between citizens, to take over private telecommunication networks, and to suspend telecom and internet services at any point, citing emergencies. Each of these provisions has dangerous implications for privacy and individual freedoms.
Contentious laws as means to curb freedom of expression
In July 2023, the Modi government used its overwhelming majority in parliament to make numerous amendments to existing laws that seek greater state control over cinema, television, media content, and platforms like Netflix. The Cinematograph Act was tweaked to tighten the grip of the Indian government’s Censor Board, which orders cuts and deletions in movies and television shows, over the content that Indians watch.
Last year, the Modi government amended the Information Technology Act, 2000, seizing sweeping powers to remove any online content it believes is ‘false’ or ‘misleading’. Since then, the Indian government has been able to take down or ban shows and movies on digital platforms, as well as content published on platforms like YouTube, Google, X (formerly Twitter), and even news published by reputed media sources. In early 2023, for example, the government used its ‘emergency powers’ under the IT rules and regulations to ban the two-part BBC documentary India: The Modi Question, which was critical of Modi’s alleged complicity in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, an Indian province where he was the chief minister.
In 2020, the government also banned 59 apps, alleging ‘they were engaged in activities which is [sic] prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order’. Among those apps were multiple Chinese franchises, including TikTok, ShareIt, and WeChat.
In March 2024, the government went on to force the closure of 18 streaming platforms that it deemed ‘vulgar’; 19 websites, 10 apps, and 57 social media accounts associated with these platforms were blocked from public access in India. Many of these broadcasted content that was critical of Hindu-majoritarian aggression.
The Modi government has also systematically attacked provisions for transparency in India. In August 2023, it amended the Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005 through new legislation (the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023), removing the safeguards that the law provided against granting exemptions.
The RTI has been a powerful tool enabling citizens to expose corruption and government high-handedness in multiple matters. The latest amendment, and a number of periodic changes in the RTI rules preceding it, allowed the government to withhold information if it thinks it is ‘private’ (which the government interprets as broadly as possible) or ‘related to national security’ and not in the ‘public interest’. Access to information regarding political leaders, university rules, government consultations, and any basic records of government decisions have been denied citing these new rules.
Over the last few years, the government has expanded the list of nodal agencies that are exempted from the ambit of the RTI Act. Among the 26 agencies outside the purview of the Act are the Computer Emergency Response Team (responsible for computer security incidents), Intelligence Bureau, Research and Analysis Wing, Directorate of Enforcement, National Technical Research Organisation, Defence Research and Development Organisation, and Border Roads Development Board – all of which are involved in gathering intelligence and building military infrastructure.
Among many such instances, stonewalling of information was particularly glaring when the government refused to share any records regarding its consultations on three contentious farm laws that had triggered nationwide protests by farmers who believed the new laws undermined their autonomy.
Government-mandated online censorship
In 2023, Twitter (now X) admitted that India was one of the top four countries in the world – along with Japan, South Korea, and Turkey – to serve legal notices demanding removal of content. The Elon Musk-owned company said it received 53,000 such legal requests from the Indian government in 2023 alone. In February 2023, X admitted to taking down accounts and posts related to the farmers’ protests following ‘executive orders’ from the government.
Similarly, Google received hundreds of requests from the Indian government to take down India-related content from YouTube. In 2022, the government banned over 100 YouTube channels, most of which were critical of the Modi government’s decisions and policies, accusing them of ‘spreading disinformation about India’.
As recently as June 2024, the government succeeded in getting YouTube to block a globally popular video satirising the Modi government’s impact on Indian democracy. The video was produced by Australia-based Giordano Nanni, who runs the Juice Media channel and publishes a satirical series about different governments called ‘Honest Government Ads’. The banned video highlighted unemployment and growing inequality under Modi.
State-sponsored surveillance of citizens
Simultaneously, the Modi government has put Indian citizens under unprecedented surveillance, even using military-grade spyware against them.
In August 2021, Indian news platform The Wire, along with 16 international media outlets, revealed the names of 174 individuals who were possible targets of Israel-based NSO’s Pegasus spyware. Since NSO has always held that it only sells Pegasus to governments, it was widely perceived that the Modi government used the spyware against its own citizens, most of whom were critics, dissenters, opposition leaders, and Supreme Court judges, but some of whom were government ministers.
The timing of this surveillance frequently matched occasions when the ruling BJP toppled provincial governments, sanctioned leading activists in serious cases, or made important business deals with foreign governments.
The Modi government has been so obsessed with controlling information and the political narrative that, in August 2023, India adopted a personal data protection law that grants the government unregulated powers to put citizens under state surveillance. The new law forces all Indians to share all their personal information, from birth to death, through their Aadhar card (a kind of national identity card). There are no restrictions in the law to prevent the government from sharing citizens’ personal information with its own surveillance institutions, nor to prevent employers or Big Tech from collecting their employees’ and users’ personal information.
Moreover, the personal data protection law weakens the RTI Act, making it difficult to access the personal information of bureaucrats and ministers who sign key government files. The law further emboldens the information asymmetry between the state and its people: the state is empowered to collect all personal data while restricting information sought by its citizens.
State-sponsored suppression of free expression has assumed alarming proportions in the last few years. Perhaps nowhere was this more visible than in the aftermath of the 2018 Bhima Koregaon violence in the Indian province of Maharashtra.
Every year, on 1 January, the Dalit community (who occupy the lowest rung in India’s discriminatory caste system) marks the anniversary of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon, in which a Dalit regiment defeated the oppressive Peshwa rulers in 1818. At the 2018 celebrations (which marked the 200th anniversary of the battle), a mob allegedly instigated by pro-Hindutva leaders attacked the Dalits, sparking protests and violence in which at least one person died. Police took no action against them – yet in a move described by the Supreme Court Observer as ‘baffling’, they used the UAPA to arrest 16 civil liberties and human rights defenders for playing a role in organising the celebrations, accusing them of ‘waging war against the nation’.
One of those arrested was activist Rona Wilson, renowned for his campaigning to release political prisoners. Police claimed to have found evidence on Wilson’s laptop, which they had seized, of a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister. However, following an independent investigation, digital forensics firm Arsenal Consulting concluded that this ‘evidence’ was planted on Wilson’s device using spyware, that his laptop had been hacked over a period of 22 months, that 52 files had been planted to incriminate the activists, and that his co-defendants were similarly targeted.
No country for non-profits
Under the Modi government, the Ministry of Home Affairs, led by the powerful minister Amit Shah, has also moved to cancel the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 (FCRA) licenses of hundreds of non-profit organisations in India. The FCRA license allows non-profits to receive international donations from charitable trusts.
The Modi regime has frequently tried to undermine the work of international NGOs and to silence them by claiming they are engaged in ‘anti-national’ activities and that they wish to tarnish India’s image abroad. As a result, even NGOs like Oxfam India and Amnesty International, which consistently draw attention to issues of justice and rights in India, have had their FCRA licences cancelled, preventing them from receiving vital funding to carry out their work. Even non-profit think tanks like the Centre for Policy Research, Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, and Centre for Equity Studies have been unable to renew their FCRA licences. As of April 2024, the Modi government has cancelled over 20,000 FCRA licences.
In addition, under Modi, the authorities have used intimidatory tactics such as revoking visa privileges from overseas critics of Indian origin who have spoken out against the ruling BJP and its government’s policies.
In their annual reports, multiple international organisations have specifically spoken out against the government’s widespread abuse of state systems to target India’s minorities, political opposition, critics, and dissenters – but the Prime Minister remains undaunted.
Voter suppression and lack of a level playing field in the 2024 elections
The 2024 general elections were conducted against this backdrop, leading to concerns that the state’s impunity and the lack of a level playing field at the hustings may damage the already hostile situation for dissenters.
Since India’s independence in 1947, no other election has been this controversial. People’s faith in the Electronic Voting Machines used in Indian elections was at an all-time low, given the high number of discrepancies between votes polled and votes counted in recent times; yet the Election Commission of India made no effort to assuage these concerns.
The lack of fairness and transparency in the 2024 general elections was noticed worldwide, leading to unprecedented levels of international scrutiny, including from the Independent Panel for Monitoring Indian Elections: a group of former bureaucrats, academics, and activists who meticulously tracked the campaign and the government’s overreach in the polling process.
Midway through the elections, a number of incidents pointed towards widespread voter suppression, including, for instance, names missing from electoral rolls. In the small town of Sambhal, the state police stormed election booths, confiscated identity cards, and beat up Muslim voters. In other places, like Kaushambi, BJP workers beat up Dalit voters for not voting for the BJP.
In a few constituencies of India’s largest province, Uttar Pradesh, a number of voters who did not want to re-elect the Modi government were allegedly prevented from voting by BJP supporters and state police. Multiple reports stated that, in constituencies where the contest had become ‘too close’, BJP polling agents – with the help of state officials and police – steamrolled their way to victory. For example, in Mumbai North-West, the opposition candidate led the BJP candidate by one vote after the counting of ballots was concluded. However, following a recount demanded by the BJP candidate and his supporters, the BJP candidate was declared the winner by a margin of 48 votes.
Political repression
The Modi government has normalised the brutal handling of protesters. Under Modi, law-enforcement agencies have misused existing laws to prevent most protest gatherings, increasingly used the provision of ‘preventive detention’ against protesters, and arrested students, activists, and citizens for peacefully putting forward their demands. This is despite the fact that Indian citizens have the constitutional right to peacefully protest.
In recent years, a number of high-profile protests – from the Muslim community protesting against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (which allows citizenship only for non-Muslim refugees) to the farmers who led a year-long campaign against bills that sought to corporatise agricultural trade – were dealt with by brute force.
Similarly, the Modi government has spawned the deplorable practice of targeting all forms of political opposition, including abusing the legal system to harass opposition leaders in a number of cases, most of which date back more than a decade. At the same time, opposition leaders have been given relief from these cases if they switch sides to the BJP camp. A recent report showed how 23 of the 25 opposition leaders who have joined the BJP since 2014 received a reprieve in their cases.
Days ahead of the first phase of polling, the Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Chief Arvind Kejriwal – who is also one of the most important leaders of the opposition alliance, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A) – was arbitrarily arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), India’s central investigation agency, which probes financial crimes. He was implicated in a corruption case related to the now-scrapped liquor policy in the Delhi province.
In the same case, Kejriwal’s deputy, Manish Sisodia (who was also the State Minister for Education), was arrested by the agency in February 2023. Although Sisodia is still in prison, Kejriwal was allowed interim bail by the Supreme Court of India after spending almost two months in custody. Similarly, two other top AAP leaders, Sanjay Singh and Satyendra Jain, have also been arrested. While Jain is still in detention, Singh has been granted bail in light of the enforcement agency failing to produce substantial evidence against him. Kejriwal’s arrest prevented the popular leader from leading his party, AAP, during the crucial election campaign.
Around two months before Kejriwal’s arrest, the ED arrested another chief minister, Hemant Soren, in a case related to illegal purchase of community land – an allegation that Soren has vehemently denied. Like Kejriwal, Soren is one of the prominent leaders of I.N.D.I.A, and is extremely popular among indigenous communities in the eastern province of Jharkhand. Soren resigned minutes before the ED arrested him, helping his party, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, to choose his replacement. His quick thinking prevented the Modi government from imposing a President’s Rule in Jharkhand: an emergency provision in the Constitution that allows the central government to take over state administration in times of crisis.
Although there have frequently been bitter confrontations between the ruling party and the opposition forces, the spring of 2024 saw unprecedented targeting of opposition leaders by the Modi-led central government. It is telling that the cases used against Kejriwal and Soren were several years old, but that action was only taken when both leaders were preparing for their own election campaigns.
Political vendetta writ large became a clearer pattern when the Congress’s bank accounts were frozen by Income Tax sleuths, preventing the party from withdrawing its own funds at a time when it had to launch its poll campaign. The IT department served multiple notices to the Congress for non-compliance from 1993–94 that required the party to pay up around $220 million, including penalty and interest.
These last-minute moves against prominent opposition leaders created tensions in India’s political environment and drew flak and adverse remarks internationally. Kejriwal’s arrest was criticised by Germany and the United States, and then by the UN. International observers unanimously demanded ‘a free and fair trial’ for Kejriwal, prompting an almost-immediate response from the Indian Foreign Ministry, which labelled the remarks ‘blatant interference in India’s internal matters’ and moved quickly to warn a few diplomats in New Delhi to ‘not interfere’ in India’s judicial matters.
Modi has brooked no criticism in the years he has helmed the national government. He has functioned like a demagogue, ignoring – and often catalysing – India’s democratic backsliding in his pursuit of an illiberal Hindu-majoritarian state.
Such have been his autocratic impulses that his government has nearly devised a strategy for suppressing and criminalising dissent. A case in point is the increasingly politically partisan use of UAPA, an anti-terror law that makes bail almost impossible, against activists. In addition to the writer Arundhati Roy (see below), many other critics are facing UAPA charges, in which they have been held captive without a timely trial and their families subjected to relentless surveillance, raids, and harassment.
The Modi government brought about an amendment to UAPA in 2019 that allowed the government to designate individuals as terrorists, even if they are not a part of an organisation. This amendment has significant implications for free expression: any critic could be labelled a terrorist if the state deems their writings, opinion, or speech to be supporting terrorist activities. This, in turn, allowed the government to seize the assets of the accused and initiate travel bans against them. Consequently, a number of student leaders, journalists, activists, human rights lawyers, and even university professors have been charged under draconian sections of the UAPA. Almost all of them have been severely critical of the Modi government’s autocratic policies and measures.
From a free nation to ‘electoral autocracy’
The Modi government’s clamp down on freedom of expression has drawn international attention to steep democratic backsliding in India.
In early 2021, the US-based non-profit Freedom House downgraded India from a ‘free democracy’ to a ‘partially free democracy’ in its assessment of 195 countries.
In the same year, Sweden-based V-Dem Institute said that, since 2018, India had become an ‘electoral autocracy’. In its latest Democracy Report in 2024, it termed India ‘one of the worst autocratizers’, and noted that a third term for Modi ‘could lead to further autocratisation given the already substantial democratic decline under Modi’s leadership and the enduring crackdown on minority rights and civil society’.
All these reports (as well as ARTICLE 19’s aforementioned Global Expression Report) viewed India’s democratic backsliding as grave – especially given that, since becoming free from colonial rule in 1947, it has widely been considered the world’s largest democracy.
Unperturbed by such an international backlash, in 2024 Modi carried out his most Islamophobic election campaign yet. In one of his speeches he referred to Muslims as those who ‘have more children’, tapping into an age-old prejudice, commonly believed across India (despite the scientific data refuting it), which presumes that Muslims have more children than Hindus in order to stake a greater claim to India’s resources. In another speech, he misled voters by falsely claiming that the Congress planned to snatch the wealth of Hindus to distribute it among Muslims – one of Modi’s many attempts to polarise the electorate along religious lines.
The Narendra Modi government has flouted not only international norms and conventions but also Constitutional guarantees to Indians. His pursuit of power and obsession with controlling everything and everyone has besmirched India’s reputation as one of the most vibrant and diverse democracies in Asia – and the world.
What’s next?
Although he is now leading a coalition government, Modi has already signalled that his third term will not be much different from his previous two.
Immediately after taking oath as the Prime Minister in June 2024, his government decided to prosecute internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy for comments she made about the Kashmir dispute at an event in 2010. Former university professor Sheikh Showkat Hussain has also been implicated in this case. Both will now face prosecution under India’s most draconian anti-terrorism legislation, the UAPA. The decision to prosecute Roy comes even as a large number of civil liberties activists were hoping for a course correction at the central government.
The Indian general elections must be seen within their political context, and should evoke strong international reaction against the larger phenomenon of democratic backsliding in India. The lack of a level playing field, disrespect for Indian minorities, clampdown on dissenters and critics, political repression, tightening of censorship laws, and violation of free speech guarantees in India should not continue unabated without international fallout.
The world needs to be constantly reminded of the fundamental rights enshrined in the Indian Constitution, and of how the Modi government has practically overruled many landmark Supreme Court judgments. Among them is the Kedarnath Singh case of 1962 – a cornerstone in the jurisprudence of free speech in India – which emphasised the protection of free expression in a democracy and established significant safeguards against the misuse of sedition and anti-terror laws.
The Preamble of India’s Constitution guarantees freedom of expression to all its citizens. According to Article 19 of the Constitution: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’.
The heart of the Indian Constitution lies in six Fundamental Rights of citizens: the right to equality before law, the right to freedom, the right against exploitation, the right to freedom of religion, cultural and educational rights, and the right to constitutional remedies. Over the last 75 years, the Supreme Court of India has expanded the scope of these fundamental rights to ensure greater freedoms to Indian citizens. However, under Modi, each of these rights has been repeatedly violated.
The Modi government has attempted to mislead the international community. Despite severe repression of critical voices, India supposedly accepted 221 of the 339 recommendations made by the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) during the 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi. India continued its pronounced commitment to the recommendations related to eliminating caste discrimination, guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression, and protecting the rights of minorities. It also noted recommendations to repeal repressive laws like the FCRA, UAPA, sedition, and criminal defamation.
This happened even as the Kuki indigenous groups in the Indian province of Manipur were facing widespread violence and ethnic cleansing by the majority community, aided by the BJP-led state government. The violence came after a year in which several international rights organisations and member countries raised serious concerns in the UPR process about India’s declining freedom of expression and poor record of protecting minority communities and vulnerable groups.
Recommendations
ARTICLE 19 calls for the restoration of civil liberties and free speech in India. We urge the international community to highlight and hold Modi accountable for his brazen violations of the Indian Constitution and international human rights laws. Global civil society should offer concrete support to the Indians who have been speaking up against the Modi government at the cost of their own security and safety.
This should include:
- Providing financial assistance to critical journalists, digital influencers, and human rights activists.
- Supporting diaspora groups who have been exposing human rights violations across the globe.
- Using diplomatic channels from countries committed to liberal democracy to pressure the Indian government to safeguard democratic norms.
- Lobbying for an overhaul of draconian laws, like UAPA and surveillance laws, which have become increasingly prone to misuse.
More importantly, platforms like the UN Human Rights Council should take note of the fact that India has been violating its commitments to the UPR. As India begins to assert itself diplomatically, all liberal democracies should seek accountability from the Modi government on concerns related to freedom of expression, intolerance of critics and dissenters, and human rights violations against Indian minorities.
Given the contentious developments over the last 10 years, now is the time to demand a modern legal framework for the protection of personal data and free speech and an accessible grievances-redressal mechanism in India. The number of internet users in India has risen to around 850 million, and a mechanism to protect their privacy has become vital.
The Modi government’s obsession with controlling and regulating information places unreasonable restrictions on people’s right to know. Frequent internet shutdowns and the gradual weakening of the crucial RTI Act have drastically impeded journalists’ ability to report news. The international democratic community must support independent press in India in its advocacy to reclaim the rights granted under Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution and to withdraw the contentious provisions of the newly enacted laws, which severely obstruct not only press freedoms but all forms of expression.