Critics are repeatedly silenced in their attempts to hold mainstream media and government  accountable – last year, Freedom House found that the world’s most populous democracy, India, dropped from a “Free” to a “Partly Free” status, which means that less than 20% of the world's population lives in a “Free” country, the smallest proportion since 1995.

“Decentralized Hindu nationalist campaigns violently discourage forms of expression deemed ‘anti-national’, which has exacerbated self-censorship in the media,” the report states.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP government spending $270,000 daily as a major advertiser across media outlets in the country, political and civil liberties continue to erode with the mainstream’s highly censored and manipulated form of media and journalism attacking Muslims and other religious minorities in India.

Associations of Hinduism with Indian-ness in India, highlight the country's exacerbating challenges: “The desire and support for religious freedom directly contradict many peoples’ ideas of ‘Indian-ness’ and national identity. This cognitive dissonance creates a gap in which hate speech, hate spin, and other kinds of dangerous speech can be, and has been, utilized by bad actors to incite violence,” the report states.

Key resilience-building opportunities in India would include Inclusion, State Capacity, Civil Space, Social Cohesion and Environment – i.e investing in holistic media literacy; encouraging journalists to reflect on the diversity of sources; analyzing the importance given to officials in power; reducing rhetoric from officials conflating Hinduism with Indian nationality; investing in watchdogs who check nationalistic media bias; breaking down community barriers through dialogue around common issues.