Express Exclusive Explodes: The Dateline Says Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi, Panaji
The Indian Express investigation into the Election Commission is a reminder of what print journalism can still do in India, and of the unglamorous machinery that makes it possible
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The story itself has been argued about all week. Ritika Chopra's investigation in The Indian Express, published on 23 September, reported that two of the three Election Commissioners had formally objected on record at least 14 times in ten months, four of them on a single day, to decisions taken and orders issued without their knowledge. The Commission has responded, the Opposition has issued its demands and all of that will play out over the coming weeks, and it is not what this column is about.
What interests me is the thing underneath. How a story like this gets made, and what its existence tells us about the state of Indian journalism at a moment when the accepted wisdom is that such stories can no longer be made here at all. Start with what the piece does that is not obvious to a casual reader. It says, plainly, that the newspaper has seen each of the exchanges it describes. It names officials rather than gesturing at them. It gives dates for every objection: a warning in May, a change in July, a note on 13 August, letters between 11 and 17 February. It cites the specific provision of law under which the Commission is required to work, Section 18 of the 2023 Act, and it lets that provision do the arguing instead of announcing a verdict of its own.
And then it does two things that separate reporting from advocacy. It records that all three Commissioners, including the two who objected, were appointed under the same government, which complicates any simple partisan reading of the story. And on West Bengal, where the investigation could most easily have reached for a thunderclap, it states that in the 47 seats where deletions exceeded the victory margin, 26 were won by the BJP. Then, flatly: there was no evidence of its role in the election outcome.
That sentence is worth pausing on. A reporter who has spent months on a story does not write a line like that because it helps. She writes it because it is true, and because leaving it out would make everything around it less believable.
Then there is the paragraph most readers skip. On 21 September, the newspaper sent a questionnaire to the Commission and emails to both Election Commissioners, asking whether their concerns had been addressed. It followed up with phone calls on Monday and Tuesday. There was no response. That is the right of reply, offered, documented, and its absence placed on the record rather than quietly dropped. Any reporter who has been on the receiving end of a legal notice knows exactly why those four sentences are there.
Real Journalism at Peak here! ๐ฏ๐ฅ pic.twitter.com/wa3ZxnUEB0
— เคตाเค़िเคซ़ เคนैं เคจिเคाเคนें ๐ (@Tere_do_nainaaa) September 26, 2026
A word about the reporter. Ritika Chopra began in Kolkata with Hindustan Times in 2006, moved to Delhi, worked at Mail Today and The Economic Times, and joined The Indian Express in 2015. She has covered the Election Commission and the education ministry for the better part of a decade, has won the Ramnath Goenka award in 2021, the IPI India award in 2022 and the Chameli Devi Jain award in 2024, and is now the paper's Resident Editor in Mumbai. On 24 September, the day after publication, the Express ran a piece in which she answered readers' questions about the investigation. That is not a small thing either. A reporter willing to be cross-examined in her own paper is a reporter confident of her file.
The decade on the beat is the point. You do not walk into a constitutional body and understand, in a week, why a change to a form called Form 6 matters, or what it means when access to a database called ERONet is quietly narrowed. You learn that over years, by attending briefings nobody else attends, by reading annual reports nobody else reads, by building relationships with officials who will one day tell you something because they have watched you get things right for a long time.
This is the practice we are steadily losing. Beat reporting has been squeezed everywhere by the economics of the trade, by newsrooms that want a reporter to file sixteen stories a day on whatever is trending, by the assumption that the specialist can be replaced by the generalist with a search engine. When the beat goes, institutional memory goes with it, and what remains is a press that can report the noise around an institution but not the thing itself.
The other half of the answer is the part no reader ever sees.
A story like this does not travel from a reporter's file to a printed page in one motion. It goes to a desk, where an editor asks where each claim comes from and whether the documents actually say what the draft says they say. It goes back. It is rewritten, tightened, and rewritten again. Somewhere in that chain it is read by a lawyer, line by line, asking a different set of questions: is this defensible, is this fair comment, have we given them a chance to answer. It is proofed, because a single wrong date in a story about dates would be enough to discredit the whole. Every one of those stages is a place where the story could have been softened, delayed or dropped, and every stage it survives is a decision somebody made.
In my judgment, the Indian Express has as fine a group of editors as any newsroom in the country at the moment and this is what that looks like from the outside: a story that holds up.
The paper's masthead carries the phrase "Journalism of Courage", and the phrase has an address. On 28 June 1975, three days into the Emergency, the Delhi edition of The Indian Express appeared with a blank editorial space. Ramnath Goenka's paper endured power cuts, raids and pressure of every sort through those months and it is the reason the Express is still spoken of the way it is. Legacies of that kind are not inherited, they are re-earned or lost, story by story, and mostly they are lost.
Which brings me to why this Sunday feels, unexpectedly, like a good one.
In April, Reporters Without Borders placed India 157th of 180 countries on its World Press Freedom Index, a fall of six places from the previous year, citing violence against journalists, concentrated ownership and the use of legal instruments against reporters. Those findings are serious and I would not wave them away. But an index measures conditions, not capacity, and this week India's oldest argument for itself was made not by a spokesman at a podium but by a newspaper.
A reporter spent months on a file. A newsroom backed her. A lawyer cleared it. A paper gave it most of pages one and two. And on 26 September, the Election Commission met and issued a press note recording, among other things, that agendas would henceforth be circulated in advance, minutes would be issued, and directions given by the Commissioners to officers would be meticulously complied with. That note carries the approval of the full Commission.
Institutions do not commit such things to paper because a newspaper asked nicely. They do it because someone showed their working, in public, and the working held. That is what a free press looks like on an ordinary Wednesday. Not a slogan. Four cities in a dateline, and a reporter who knew what she was looking at.
Also Read: Why India's Print Media Still Matters