Anand Patwardhan: The taming of the Mumbai Press Club

I first met Gurbir Singh in the early 1980s. It was around the beginning of the “liberalisation” era when egalitarian ideals were being replaced by the ideology of the “free” market. As the city of Bombay attempted to beautify itself to attract foreign investment, a huge demolition campaign began against the makeshift shanties of the homeless.

Not everyone believed that the poor were mere “eyesores” who made no economic contribution. The Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties and the Lawyer’s Collective intervened on their behalf, arguing in the Supreme Court that the Right to Shelter was a fundamental right that flowed directly from the Right to Life guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.

While the case was being argued, the Supreme Court had granted a stay on all demolitions but of course demolitions continued. I helped document these illegal acts, first with a still camera on behalf of PUCL and later with my second-hand 16 mm film camera.

This brought me in contact with unorganised slum-dwellers but also with activists who had taken up their cause. Gurbir Singh, a journalist from the Times of India group, was one of them. In the end many of us formed Nivara Hakk Suraksha Samiti to fight for the rights of the homeless. It was a protest movement involving thousands of homeless in various parts of the city.

Our film Bombay Our City was completed in 1984 and won a National Award but demolitions continued. The Right to Shelter case in the Supreme Court was lost and demolitions became legal again. Slums we had filmed were razed and Nivara Hakk had its hands full. Slum-dwellers whose homes were demolished had nowhere to go.

Gurbir Singh was at the heart of Nivara Haq. After yet another demolition at Cuffe Parade, some of us decided to sit on a hunger strike until the government granted an alternate plot of land in the city where the homeless could be resettled. The hunger strike of four slum-dwellers and myself would have gone unnoticed but for the fact that film star Shabana Azmi had recently watched Bombay Our City and joined us on the footpath where we sat on strike.

For the next five days the press was full of stories of Azmi’s failing health and many celebrities, including Shabana Azmi’s father, the great Kaifi Azmi, visited to give us moral support.

Finally the government caved in and granted an alternate site in Goregaon. The erstwhile Sanjay Gandhi Nagar of Cuffe Parade was relocated to Goregaon, where it was rechristened as Sangharsh Nagar (Struggle Town).

Gurbir Singh, architect PK Das and Shabana Azmi were the main organisers.

In 1992-’93 after the horrific communal violence that broke out after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, Sangharsh Nagar became an oasis where the riot-affected could take shelter without fear. Again it was Gurbir Singh and his team of volunteers who did dedicated relief work even as the rest of Bombay was literally being set on fire by communal politicians.

Over the years, my association with Nivara Haq gradually reduced but not so my association with Gurbir Singh. He went on to become an office bearer of the Mumbai Press Club, holding various posts over the last 25 years, including president and secretary. Under his leadership the Mumbai Press Club became the first in the country to do a housing scheme where 250 journalist members were housed in Pratiksha Nagar at discounted rates.

In 2007, the club building was rebuilt after Singh and his associates raised corporate sponsorships. In 2011 under his leadership, the Mumbai Press Club launched the RedInk Awards, which became a national event for the next 15 years, honouring brave, cutting-edge journalists across the country, from big cities to small towns.

In an India where such journalism is increasingly frowned upon and faces censorship, the Mumbai Press Club became an oasis of freedom from fear.

The club showed films, launched discussions, held book releases and became an important platform for debate and information on both general and professional issues to do with media.

As a representative of the Mumbai journalists in the Press Council of India, Singh took up the infamous Newsclick case in which nearly 200 journalists were raided in Delhi and other parts of the country for contributing articles to the website.

Debates at the club ran across the political spectrum. At the height of the Babri Masjid controversy, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s LK Advani faced up to journalists at the club. Student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray and lawyer Prashant Bhushan were more recent visitors.

Journalist Paranjoy Thakurta showed a film on electoral manipulation, scientist-turned-filmmaker Bedabrata Pain screened his documentary on the common plight of the farmers of US and India, support groups showed and discussed a film on the jailed activist,Umar Khalid.

Perhaps it was too good to last in an India where democratic spaces are disappearing as we speak. Last week, the axe fell. The current committee of the Mumbai Press Club expelled Gurbir Singh and two veteran journalists, Bernard D’Mello and Shrikant Modak, for a period of six years.

Singh now stands removed from the institution he had nurtured for decades. It is an unquiet takeover, reflecting a phenomenon that has been witnessed all across the country as the ruling ideology demonstrated its hostility to all those who advocate egalitarian and democratic values.

The reasons advanced for Singh’s expulsion are instructive. Apparently, he was present at a discussion on prison conditions held on the terrace of the Press Club where several persons who are out on bail in the Bhima Koregaon case also attended.

The Bhima Koregaon case had become internationally notorious as academics, professors, cultural activists and even a Jesuit priest were detained from all corners of the country and linked to an alleged conspiracy to overthrow the state.

Eight years later, not only have there not been any convictions in the case, the trial itself is yet to begin. Thankfully, almost all the arrested are now out on bail – one as recently as Monday. But Father Stan Swamy, the 84-year-old priest who worked amongst the poorest, sadly passed away in custody.

The accusation of the Press Club committee that Gurbir Singh invited them all to the club is not only untrue (he was only an attendee), it is also irrelevant. This is a classic case of “red baiting” reminiscent of the McCarthy era in the US of the 1950s. It is guilt by association because you are in the same room with people accused of a crime; that too a crime that has hardly been defined, let alone proved.

Among the Bhima Koregaon co-accused are many writers, lawyers, poets and singers. It is surely within the ambit of the Mumbai Press Club to hear what they have to say. Politicians of all hues have spoken at or been present at the Press Club over the years. Many of them, including LK Advani, had cases pending against them, as politicians often do.

Ironically only a few months earlier, the Mumbai Press Club under the same managing committee that expelled Singh, hosted two book launches at which people accused in the Bhima Koregaon case were present.

One was the launch of Iconoclast, a book on BR Ambedkar by one of the accused, the writer and scholar Anand Teltumbde. The other was the launch of journalist Nita Kolhatkar’s book in which she published interviews with the Bhima Koregaon accused.

Both these events were allowed without demur. What was then so different when Gurbir Singh and others attended a discussion at which Bhima Koregaon persons were present?

The concept of bail is that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Surely bail cannot become a reason to re-create untouchability.

Last month India fell to the 157th rank out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index. Our press freedom ranking is now worse than Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It is 22 ranks better than China.

Is that what our government wants to correct?

Anand Patwardhan is an award-winning filmmaker.