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The suppression of journalists rarely looks like suppression. It looks like a press conference that is never scheduled. A question that is never asked. An editor who already knows which stories will not be commissioned and does not need to be told twice.

Anyone who has spent time covering governments that perform democracy more readily than they practise it knows this. It took a Norwegian journalist, arriving fresh, to say it out loud.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Her name is Helle Lyng Svendsen. She is in her twenties, covers labour markets and local policy for the Oslo newspaper Dagsavisen, and was in the Norwegian capital last week covering her prime minister’s bilateral summit with Narendra Modi. As the two leaders finished their joint appearance and began to leave, she called out: “Prime Minister Modi, why don’t you take some questions from the freest press in the world?”

He walked away without answering. Since becoming prime minister, Modi has not held a full press conference in India; abroad, he has only rarely submitted to unscripted questioning. In Oslo, then, his silence was not news.

What happened next was.

Within hours of Modi leaving Norwegian soil, Lyng’s Instagram and Facebook accounts were suspended, triggered, she believes, by a coordinated wave of complaints from Indian users. Indian television studios devoted prime time to her impertinence. She was branded a foreign spy, a Congress proxy, a George Soros agent. At a subsequent briefing, a senior Indian diplomat lectured her for 11 minutes about India’s invention of zero and chess.

The question she asked – why does India’s prime minister not face the press? – was never answered. It was not even addressed. It had already been replaced by a more manageable question: who does this Norwegian girl think she is?

That replacement did not happen by accident.........

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