On September 8, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon, a few months into a job at Anthropic (a leading US AI company) after three years at OpenAI, announced his resignation on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Within a day, the post had been read more than 100 million times. Four days later, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” declaring that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” or risk “losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.” Within hours, Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed, Elon Musk posted “Dario is right,” and Google and Microsoft fell into line.

Coxon was interviewed by Time, Axios, and NBC within two days, and Amodei’s essay was front-page news across the business press. Compare that with what happens to people who expose the harms AI is causing right now. Warnings about AI-generated fraud, model bias including racist bias, about chatbots and vulnerable users, about surveillance and AI’s use in military kill chains and the genocide in Gaza, get a news cycle at best. A warning about a hypothetical machine superintelligence got a global media event and a policy proposal from the industry’s leadership within four days.

AI systems do need regulating. The question is why the men who spent a decade racing towards what they now call an existential threat discovered their conscience on the same weekend, and what kind of regulation they are actually asking for.

What the Dario essay asks for

Stripped of its language of alignment and catastrophe, Dario Amodei’s essay is a list of demands. First, outside “evaluators” from bodies such as METR, a lab that tests AI models, would be given “company badges, desks, and laptops” inside the big labs. Second, the leading companies “within democratic countries” would jointly set safety standards and limits on how fast they build, for which Amodei asks the US government for “a narrow waiver” from antitrust law. Third, models crossing certain capability thresholds would have to carry “certifications” of good behavior, and limits on the computing power used to train them are put on the table. Fourth, the United States must “not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.” Amodei is candid about the goal: done well, these measures “would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly.”

The words “open source” do not appear in the essay. They do not need to. AI models come in two kinds. Closed models, like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, run only on the company’s own servers and users pay for access. Open-weight models, like China’s DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, and Qwen, are published as files that anyone can download, run on their own machines and modify. A certificate that must travel with a model cannot be attached to a file that anyone may copy. A ceiling on computing power freezes the ranking of the firms that already occupy the frontier. An antitrust waiver lets the five largest companies write rules for everyone else. The effect is a licensing regime only the incumbents can satisfy; the technology publication The Register called it regulatory capture with a nicer name.

The incident that supposedly proves it

The essay’s centerpiece is what Amodei calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident of July. In plain terms: OpenAI was testing its AI “agents,” programs that can act on their own, on a set of hacking puzzles. Roughly a third of the puzzles were impossible, driving the agents to look for ways to cheat the marking. The agents were supposed to be sealed off from each other without access to the internet. In practice, they weren’t, and through that loophole they found their way into a second test environment that was connected to the open internet. From there, one of them found login credentials that OpenAI staff had left exposed online, used them to break into Hugging Face, a website where AI models are shared, and rummaged through private files to work out how their answers were being marked. Amodei describes this as “a swarm of agents” acting as “a fanatically devoted collective” that, with more capability, “could have caused catastrophic damage.”

The people whose job is computer security reached a different conclusion. The investigation by METR, the very body Amodei wants embedded in every lab, found that sandboxes meant to isolate the AI agents were not, that the credentials should never have been exposed, and that OpenAI’s security team had noticed the agents misbehaving days earlier and done nothing. One practitioner quoted by IANS Research summed it up: “many failures and lack of controls that could have prevented this from happening in the first place.” Any bank that ran untested software with live internet access and exposed passwords would be found negligent. Routine containment, of the kind every serious IT department practices, would have stopped it.

Calling a security lapse a “fanatically devoted collective” is not analysis. It is anthropomorphizing, dressing an operational failure in the language of science fiction. And it is useful. A company whose product is being marketed as near-superintelligence that must be restrained for humanity’s sake has a far better story for investors than a company that left its passwords on the internet. The doom narrative and the hype narrative are part of the same cycle. Both say: this technology is so powerful that you cannot afford to be without it, and only we can be trusted with it.

Why now

The timing becomes clear once one looks at the money. The five big American technology companies are budgeted to spend close to $690 billion this year on data centers and chips, and borrowing now funds 32% of that spending, up from 9% two years ago. On the very day Amodei’s essay appeared, Altman announced that OpenAI’s stock market listing, which bankers had been preparing at valuations of up to $1 trillion, would not happen in 2026 because it was “an ill-advised moment,” citing safety. The next day, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic’s much-advertised profit margin of “above 80%” is calculated before two of its largest costs: the cost of creating its models and the revenue it shares with Amazon, its main distributor.

Meanwhile, the competition has arrived, and it is nearly free. On OpenRouter, a widely used exchange through which software developers send requests to AI models, Chinese open-weight models now handle 58% of the traffic from American firms; a year ago American models held 70%. DeepSeek and Qwen charge 60 to 90% less than Anthropic and OpenAI. A firm that cannot win on price, cannot fund its next model from earnings and cannot yet sell shares to the public has one option left: change the rules.

Washington says no, for its own reasons

The Trump administration has so far refused. The president’s response was that “whoever wins AI, wins,” and his AI adviser David Sacks called the whole affair a “doomer psyop” aimed at open-source models. This is not a defense of the public interest. It is arithmetic. According to ING, spending on AI equipment, software and data centers accounted for roughly a third of all US economic growth in the second quarter of this year; on the broadest measure, half. The rest of the economy is being squeezed by the war on Iran: petrol prices have risen 53% since it began, consumer inflation reached 4.2% in May, and energy costs are up 23.5% on the year. Take the data-center boom out, and the United States is close to recession. Washington cannot allow the frontier to be paced because the frontier is the only thing still growing.

Two futures

China’s official response was brief. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” said foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun on September 14. A more revealing reply came from inside DeepSeek, where Shengyu Liu, a kernel software engineer, published a widely circulated essay arguing that the safest path is to keep frontier AI open and cheap rather than concentrated in any single company, American or Chinese. As AI develops, he wrote, society “may be pulled toward one of two extremes: communism or Cyberpunk 2077.” In the first, “productive capacity is liberated on an enormous scale, and people’s standard of living rises substantially.” In the second, “a handful of technology companies control most of society’s resources”; a tiny number of people have access to the most advanced AI, “while most people are left with only weak, second-rate AI.”

That is the real choice, and it is a choice about ownership, not about speed. Real regulation would hold companies liable for the harm done by the software they run, including inside their own labs, and would treat running powerful agents without containment as the negligence it is. It would cost the labs money, which is why it is not in Amodei’s essay. What is in the essay is a request to be made gatekeepers of a technology built on borrowed money that its owners now fear they cannot sell.

The frontier does not need pacing. It needs owners who can be held to account, and a public that is not frightened into paying monopoly prices for AI services by the very people who build it.

Bappa Sinha is a veteran technologist interested in the impact of technology on society and politics.

President Xi Jinping is set to visit to the United States from September 23-25. His visit must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures.

In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents, and incidents the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.

In the other future, the two countries accept that neither can destroy the other without destroying much of humanity. They recognize that coexistence is not an act of charity and collaboration is not a concession. Both are necessities.

That is the significance of President Xi’s decision to travel to the United States. China’s foreign ministry has described head-of-state diplomacy as having an “irreplaceable” role in guiding relations between the two countries. The visit follows President Donald Trump’s trip to China in May and continuing negotiations over tariffs, trade, and investment. There are indications that President Xi will travel with a substantial delegation of Chinese business leaders. These facts suggest that Beijing wants to move the relationship away from the permanent crisis and towards practical engagement.

But diplomacy between China and the United States cannot merely be a photo opportunity. Nor should it be understood as a negotiation in which one side must surrender to the other. It must be based on a sober recognition of reality. Or to be precise, four realities.

The first reality is that China cannot be contained. China is not a minor country whose development can be suffocated by sanctions. It has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, a vast industrial system, an increasingly sophisticated scientific community, and deep commercial relationships across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Whatever one thinks of China, it is absurd to imagine that it can simply be excluded from the world economy. The attempt to contain China has already produced an extraordinary catalogue of restrictions: tariffs, semiconductor controls, investment prohibitions, sanctions on Chinese companies, naval patrols along China’s coastline, and the construction of new military arrangements from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Each of these measures is presented as defensive. Taken together, however, they form an architecture of confrontation. There is a dangerous illusion in Washington that pressure will force China to abandon its development. No Chinese government could accept such a demand. After the century of humiliation (from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasion) the restoration of national sovereignty and the improvement of living standards are not negotiable matters for the Chinese people. The United States may slow certain aspects of China’s development, but it cannot persuade China to return to poverty.

The second reality is that economic separation is neither simple nor painless. The United States and China remain deeply connected through trade, investment, supply chains, scientific knowledge, and consumer markets. US farmers depend upon Chinese buyers. US companies depend upon Chinese manufacturing and upon Chinese consumers. China, meanwhile, benefits from access to US technology, agricultural products, and capital. Negotiators are now discussing reciprocal tariff reductions and new mechanisms for trade and investment. These are modest measures, but they acknowledge an important truth: economic warfare injures both countries. Tariffs are announced with nationalist speeches, but their costs appear quietly in grocery bills, factory closures, disrupted supply chains, and lost employment. Working people in the United States do not benefit when China is weakened. Their difficulties are rooted principally in decisions made by their own ruling class: decades of deindustrialization, the power of finance, attacks on trade unions, the privatization of public services, and the refusal to undertake serious social investment. China did not close the factories of the US Midwest. US corporations closed them in search of higher profits. The answer to inequality in either country is not economic nationalism by the United States.

The third reality is that humanity faces problems that cannot be solved by either country acting alone. The climate catastrophe does not carry a passport. Carbon emitted in one country heats the atmosphere everywhere. The United States possesses immense scientific and financial resources, while China has developed enormous productive capacity in solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, public transport, and renewable-energy infrastructure. Collaboration between them could accelerate a worldwide energy transition. Confrontation will delay it precisely when delay has become intolerable. The same is true of public health. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the human cost of secrecy, competition, and vaccine nationalism. Artificial intelligence creates another urgent area for cooperation. These technologies cannot be governed adequately by rival military doctrines or private corporations seeking maximum profit. The two countries must develop common safeguards against autonomous weapons, destabilizing cyberattacks, mass surveillance, and the use of artificial intelligence to intensify social inequality.

Finally, the fourth reality is the question of war. China and the United States are nuclear-armed powers. Any direct military conflict between them would have consequences beyond calculation. This is why Taiwan must not be transformed into the trigger for a catastrophic confrontation. The one-China framework and the existing diplomatic understandings must not be hollowed out by provocations, arms sales, or gestures designed for domestic political theater.

Peace requires restraint from both sides, but restraint cannot mean that the United States surrounds China with military bases and warships and then demands that China alone remain calm. Security cannot be achieved through the permanent insecurity of another country. There will, of course, be disagreements. Collaboration does not require agreement on every political question. Nor does coexistence require silence about differences. But disagreement must be conducted through diplomacy, international law, and the institutions of the United Nations, not through sanctions, threats, and military exercises.

The countries of the Global South have a particular interest in the success of this visit. They do not want to be instructed to choose between China and the United States. They do not want their ports, minerals, telecommunications systems, and political institutions turned into battlefields in a new cold war. They want access to finance, technology, medicine, and markets without political subordination. They want development, not recruitment into rival military camps. Xi Jinping’s visit therefore carries a responsibility that extends far beyond Washington and Beijing. The world does not need an agreement merely to divide markets between Chinese and US corporations. It needs a commitment to reduce the danger of war, dismantle unilateral coercive measures, restore normal economic relations, cooperate on climate and public health, and strengthen the principles of the United Nations Charter.

The importance of the visit lies not in ceremony but in possibility. It offers both countries an opportunity to step back from the cliff. The United States must abandon the fantasy that it can preserve its primacy by preventing China’s development. China, for its part, has repeatedly said that it does not seek to replace the United States as a hegemonic power. That principle must become the basis of a durable relationship: no containment, no domination, no war.

There is an old habit among powerful states of treating compromise as weakness. In the nuclear age, the opposite is true. It takes no courage to order another warship into contested waters. It takes political courage to recognize that one’s adversary also has legitimate interests, that coexistence requires reciprocity, and that the survival of humanity is more important than the vanity of supremacy.

This visit should therefore carry a simple message from Washington to the world: collaboration is not surrender, diplomacy is not weakness, and peace is not an abstraction.

Confrontation offers neither country a future.

Collaboration offers the world a chance.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books(New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

On October 4, nearly 160 million Brazilians will go to the polls to elect their next president, vice president, members of Congress, governors, and state legislators from the country’s various states. If no presidential candidate receives more than 50% of the valid votes, a runoff election will be held on October 25.

At this time, 13 presidential candidates are vying for the presidency in Brasília, although polls clearly point to two candidates vying for the presidency of Latin America’s most economically powerful country.

On one side is Brazil’s current president, the former union leader and progressive Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula served as president from 2003 to 2011 with very high approval ratings, although following corruption allegations, he was imprisoned and sentenced to nine years.

However, after over 500 days in detention, a judge ordered his release, ruling that the proceedings were flawed. The Supreme Court of Justice called the incident a “historic error.” Following that, Lula faced off against then-far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and defeated him in the 2022 election. Now Lula hopes to be re-elected once again.

At the forefront is none other than Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, who has leveraged his father’s reputation to boost his own. This is because Jair Bolsonaro was found guilty of several crimes that, according to the Brazilian justice system, were intended to prevent Lula’s inauguration and promote a coup d’état. Jair Bolsonaro is currently in house arrest for those crimes.

Consequently, a significant portion of Brazilian society, as well as international politicians such as Donald Trump, consider Bolsonaro’s imprisonment to be unjust. This explains how his son Flávio – a lawyer and businessman who currently serves as a senator – has managed to garner significant support in his bid to win the presidency on October 4.

Thus, two clearly distinct political and economic models are pitted against one another. Lula belongs to a political tradition that seeks to strengthen the state, reduce extreme poverty, invest in social programs, and diversify trade partners (such as China and India), all in line with a clearly pro-sovereignty discourse.

For his part, Flávio Bolsonaro promises to continue on his father’s path: economic neoliberalism, reducing the size of the state, building closer ties with the private sector, and – perhaps most importantly – placing Brazil once again under the influence of the Trump administration, which supports the far-right candidate.

Read more: Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro all set to face off this October in Brazil’s presidential election

Clearly, a victory for the far right – which is close to Washington – would represent a sharp shift in the region’s current economic and political course. Brazil accounts for nearly 50% of the region’s total GDP, so a victory for a Trump ally would drastically alter not only the political landscape but also the economic one. On the other hand, a victory for Lula would signal a “halt” (probably the most significant of all possible outcomes) to the wave of victories by the Latin American right and far right – allies and supporters of US hemispheric and military policy – that have swept the electoral landscape in recent years.

What do the polls say?

Since the start of the presidential race, Lula has maintained a lead over his political opponent. However, that lead has been narrowing as the weeks have gone by, raising the possibility that the runoff election, scheduled for October 25, will be a very close race. This is because, it appears, neither candidate will manage to secure more than 50% of the vote to win in a single round.

According to a poll by the MDA Pesquisa Institute, Lula holds a solid lead over Bolsonaro: 40.06% to 30.4%. Augusto Cury comes in third with 6% of the vote, while the remaining candidates trail behind this mark. According to this poll, in the event of a runoff, Lula would win with 47.3% against Bolsonaro’s likely 40%.

However, other polls paint a different picture, in which Lula remains in the lead but by a very narrow margin. This is according to an AtlasIntel poll, which shows Lula with 46% of the vote, while Bolsonaro would receive 44% in the first round. In the runoff, the gap would disappear, and both candidates would receive nearly 47% of the vote (a technical tie).

A corruption scandal that is shaking up the political landscape

However, everything could change in the wake of a scandal that has rocked Brazilian politics. In late 2025, the former owner of Banco Máster SA, Daniel Vorcaro, allegedly committed a serious case of bank fraud. Since his arrest in March 2026, his conversations, friendships, and connections have all been under close investigation.

One of the people who has come under scrutiny is Flávio Bolsonaro, who confirmed that he had asked the banker for money to make a film about his father called “Dark Horse”. The Federal Police are investigating this case to determine whether Bolsonaro participated in any illegal activity.

Meanwhile, Lula’s inner circle has also been affected. The judge who ordered Jair Bolsonaro’s arrest, Alexandre de Moraes, is alleged to have exchanged messages with Vorcaro. Moraes has been portrayed as a judge close to Lula and thus Bolsonaro and his supporters have seized on the revelation of the messages to call for Moraes’s removal and indirectly accuse the government of suspicious activities.

The debate has led to a serious crisis within the Brazilian judiciary because a decision to investigate Moraes was postponed, prompting accusations of political bias among the judges.

In this personal essay at The New Yorker, Anna Holmes writes about growing up in Davis, California, a college town near Sacramento; the financial challenges her mixed-race family faced; and what it means to come from a family without the generational wealth that can make homeownership, and the financial security that comes with it, possible.

It’s hard to hear people who own property grumble about how little money they have. One friend who regularly moans about money has a four-bedroom home on the West Coast and a vacation house in New England. I’m unmoved by the financial lamentations of another friend, who owns a town house in New York with an apartment for a nanny or an in-law. Stuff like this makes me want to scream. Demonstrate some modicum of self-awareness! Read the fucking room! When a friend told me that her parents were going to help her buy a second home, I made a pointed remark that it must be nice to have access to that sort of capital. She conceded the point, graciously, and we moved on.

On 19 November 2025, Indian police raided the ‘Kashmir Times’ in Jammu. They said they were on an “anti-terror” operation. The offices had been shut since 2022 and were in dilapidated condition, the equipment largely defunct. Yet, the police claimed to have recovered a “pistol and live AK-47 cartridges.” 

Since 2018, only five journalists have faced cases under India’s draconian anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Trials rarely start, leaving journalists in a state of perpetual purgatory, even if they are out on bail under onerous conditions.

Before the police came charging into these unused offices last year, the ‘Kashmir Times’, founded by my father in 1954, had long suffered sustained persecution – the seizure of records, of equipment, the harassment of staffers, the use of social media to spread slurs, trumped up charges of tax evasion and the embedding of spies.

The first ever copies of Kashmir Times, initially a weekly, were seized by the government. In 1983, my father survived a murderous assault with serious injuries inflicted by a Hindu nationalist mob. I joined the newspaper in 1989, as the armed militancy, the ‘insurgency’ against the Indian state, became widespread, and experienced firsthand the struggle to report the news accurately and truthfully. The government would frequently withdraw its advertising, which was the main source of funding for most news outlets. We were besieged on several fronts, facing down the state, militants and aggressive Hindu nationalists.

In 2019, as Indian prime minister Narendra Modi began his second term in office, his government removed the special autonomous status granted to Jammu and Kashmir and protections that had existed for nearly 70 years. Once a state, Jammu and Kashmir was split into two federally governed territories. The Indian-administered part of Kashmir – the subject of several military conflicts between India and Pakistan, with both countries claiming the entire disputed territory while controlling a portion of it – had effectively become a police state and control of the media was a critical component of this transformation.    

As Executive Editor of the ‘Kashmir Times’, one of the oldest newspapers in the region and the largest, with four editions, I petitioned India’s Supreme Court against the six-month-long internet shutdown that the Modi government imposed in 2019. But by 2020, three editions of the ‘Kashmir Times’ had shut down and the fourth only limped along, a once daily newspaper that was now only occasionally published. By February 2022, even this edition was shut down. I left India with my husband Prabodh Jamwal, the editor of the ‘Kashmir Times’, and revived it as a digital newsroom in exile in the United States in November 2023. 

But, as the so-called terror investigation and the mysterious discovery of weapons in our long disused office in 2025 showed, the ‘Kashmir Times’ remained a thorn in the side of the Modi government. The Indian prime minister has frequently presented India on the international stage as the “mother of democracy” and the “Vishwaguru”, a moral exemplar and teacher to the world. Just last week, between September 12 and 13, Delhi hosted Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian as part of the annual BRICS meeting, the global group founded initially by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (hence the acronym) that is increasingly being presented as an alternative power centre to the American-led Western alliance. For an India seeking to portray itself as not just an emerging superpower but as a democratic force, it is vital that Kashmir remain repressed, hidden away from global scrutiny.  

It’s why, even as a newsroom in exile, we continue to be pursued by an Indian government seeking to tarnish our credibility, to deny us the right to report on Kashmir. We are being subject to a vendetta and it represents what has happened to journalism in Kashmir. Journalists have been silenced by the Modi government, Kashmiri voices strangled, and the local media industry deliberately destroyed. 

What is happening to journalism in Kashmir is a harbinger of what lies ahead for the rest of India.

A model of suppression

Geeta Seshu of Free Speech Collective, which monitors press freedoms in India, argues that Kashmir is a laboratory where every strategy of media suppression is tested and perfected for use elsewhere. India, which once had a noisy, argumentative press, now ranks at a lowly 157 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index. Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the ranking, says “press freedom is in crisis” in Modi’s India. 

The 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act provided a “dangerous framework for expansion of surveillance and censorship” across the country. It empowered the government to demand data from any entity, including journalists, effectively requiring them to reveal their sources. The amendments to the 2020 Information Technology Rules already burden intermediaries with harsh obligations and have been used to arrest journalists, block websites and compel social media platforms to restrict content. Recently, Instagram restricted posts about reports of Kashmiris shot by Indian security forces using pellet guns on unarmed protestors. 

Seshu’s fear that what happens in Kashmir will be replicated in the Indian mainland has largely been borne out. For example, in 2023, nearly 50 journalists associated with the portal ‘NewsClick’ – some only vaguely – were subject to arrests and interrogations. Many had their devices seized without due process. Their alleged crimes were essentially guilt by association, charges manufactured not from evidence but from a, frankly, lazy piece of journalism published in the  ‘New York Times’ about NewsClick’s funding. The charges were eventually quashed by an Indian court.  

Such court rulings are less likely in Kashmir. As a Kashmiri journalist based in Delhi says, “unlike the rest of India, Kashmir is a police state, and state control requires any independent journalism to be shut down.” 

In Kashmir, the Indian state has engineered a sophisticated edifice of control through securitization, surveillance and interrogation. It is invisible, intangible, and all-pervasive, a model that extracts quiet surrender and obedience. Unlike the targeted killings of journalists in Gaza, in Kashmir the control of information is seamlessly embedded in everyday life, requiring no enforcement, no traces of brutality. The journalists are essentially cowed into submission.

It began with the world’s longest internet shutdown – a complete lockdown for six months and a partial one for another year. What the shutdown created, despite a court verdict restoring communications, was fear among journalists compelled to work out of a government-surveilled computer facility, and then a perpetuation of that fear through consistent localized and temporary digital shutdowns. So commonplace are these shutdowns that they no longer warrant reporting or commentary.

In June 2020, the Modi government introduced a 53-page document called ‘J&K's Media Policy’ which gave the authorities sweeping powers to monitor, judge, and punish journalists, branding critical reporting as “fake news”, “unethical”, or “anti-national”. The authorities would also routinely remove government advertising from cash-strapped outlets and provide accreditation only to journalists deemed loyal, thus turning bureaucrats into arbiters of what constitutes news and who gets to report it. The effect is chilling.

And then there’s the monitoring of communications.

“I can’t say if they’re using Pegasus or some other spyware or technology,” a journalist told me about being interrogated over emails sent to an editor, “but they knew everything about our conversations.” In a 2021 leak, it turned out the Indian government was using Pegasus to spy on at least 40 Indian journalists, only one of who was Kashmiri.

But, a Kashmiri journalist says, “officials have told us ‘nothing in Kashmir is end-to-end encrypted’ and digital activity is clearly being constantly monitored.” No Kashmiri journalist I spoke to for this story, including those who contribute to the ‘Kashmir Times’, have the encrypted messaging Signal app, used worldwide by journalists, on their phones. Devices are routinely checked when journalists are summoned to police stations in Kashmir for questioning. Some said their devices were returned after being tampered with. “You face humiliation and beatings for using Signal and VPNs,” many journalists said. “You can only get away with it if you’re not on their radar,” said one. 

In November 2025, the Indian government issued a directive insisting on verifying the “bona fides” of journalists working in Jammu and Kashmir, and the police followed up by requiring journalists to part with personal information including biometrics and bank statements. In January this year, senior journalist Basharat Masood of The Indian Express spent seven hours at a Srinagar police station, then was summoned for three more days and told to sign a bond promising not to “repeat his mistake” – for reporting on the surveillance of mosquea surveillance, even as officials had already admitted to large-scale data collection and verification. 

Surveillance normalized

Police also surveil Kashmiris through the use of drone cameras, a network of 1,000 electronic cameras installed at major traffic junctions, and through unrestricted access to people’s social media activity across platforms ostensibly to track anti-India activity. During an illegal “Census 2024” drive, the police collected residents' personal data and GPS-tagged coordinates of homes. And the soon-to-be-rolled-out Jammu and Kashmir-specific digital identity cards that collects the data of entire households, purportedly to ensure the smooth rollout of welfare schemes, has also sparked local anxieties. 

Still, as pervasive as the surveillance is, it is journalists that find themselves in the firing line. Any critical word warrants a summons to a police station, interrogation, intimidation and even detention. This happens repeatedly, with journalists never aware of what specific “offence” might trigger a police summons. The reflex, after several such visits to police stations, is self-protection and self-censorship.

A Kashmiri journalist told me that the language the police use to summon journalists for questioning is particularly sinister. It is almost as if the police are enjoying instilling fear. “Aaj dastarkhan par aapki dawat hai”, for instance, is a typical summons. You are invited to a feast, the police say cynically, knowing a journalist is likely to be harshly questioned, even beaten.

Often, Kashmiri journalists, without notice, are placed on no-fly lists. Sanna Irshad Mattoo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, was twice prevented from travelling abroad for exhibitions and award ceremonies, a pointed message that even international recognition offers no protection. At least twelve journalists have had their passports revoked; two of them were already abroad at the time, rendering them stateless. 

The Free Speech Collective filed a Right to Information (RTI) query in March 2024 to ascertain exactly how many Kashmiris had had their passports revoked or cancelled. The plea was rejected by the government on grounds of “national security”.

As India continues to press its case as a formidable, if still rising power, citing its 7.8% growth rate over the past quarter, it continues to be defensive and secretive about Kashmir. Foreign journalists are largely barred, or at least heavily restricted, from reporting from both Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir. In May, last year, India and Pakistan exchanged air strikes after a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir and Modi fell out with Donald Trump over the latter’s claim to have stopped both nuclear powers from accelerating towards a disastrous war.

Despite Kashmir being a long-standing issue that merits global attention, reporting from the region has reduced to a trickle. 

A Google search of Kashmir-related news floods your screen with links, but it is bulk without substance. Articles read like a log of official announcements and statements, punctuated by the occasional piece on a shrinking water body, a development project, a political tussle over a non-issue, or unemployment figures. Each report floats like a loose, individual particle suspended in air, packaged and presented as definitive. No investigation into context. No excavation of the past. No interrogation of contributing factors. A story about an alleged terrorist’s hair transplant and cosmetic dentistry, based entirely on police sources, is passed off as an investigation into Kashmiri insurgency. A superficially detailed piece on anti-encroachment drives or home demolitions will carry little beyond the grief of the displaced, or the remarks of a politician whose interest in the community begins and ends with votes. A terrorist’s hair transplant story, based on the police version, passes off as an investigation into Kashmir’s complex insurgency dynamic. 

Kashmir fell off the radar a long time ago, says Free Speech Collective’s Geeta Seshu.  

Even mundane stories are difficult to report. No one wants to be quoted. A university professor said he could once “talk to journalists and trust they understood the context. Now, a single sentence can be pulled out, circulated on WhatsApp, and suddenly I’m either an anti-national or a government stooge. Both sides will use the same quote to attack you differently. Why would I take that risk?”

Tarushi Aswani, an Indian journalist, told me that “a curtain has been pulled over Kashmir by silencing journalists who ask questions.” Instead, she added, “press release journalism fills the vacuum, erasing the truth about Kashmir, its history, its politics, its development, environment and aspirations.” Kashmir is no longer looking at a mirror. The lack of truthful reporting means nothing is reflected back. Instead, Kashmiris are looking into the lens of a surveillance camera. 

*The eight Kashmiri journalists interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity.

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