In the hours following the Red Fort blast that killed 13 people on November 10, Indian media once again demonstrated that it is more capable of peddling confusion than giving information. While the government functionaries maintained deliberate silence on details still under investigation, newsrooms across the country, unleashed a tsunami of claims, quoting the ever-convenient "highly placed sources" and "senior police officials."
I am not even venturing into the jarring broadcast space, which has become a toxic purveyor of hate and falsehoods that are blared on television channels 24/7 without any guardrails. In the face of terrorism or major scenes of crime, as usual, even some of the most respected and responsible journalists of the print medium, in their race for scoops and exclusives, find little time to sift through the opacity and silence.
The tendency is to rely on “highly placed sources” – a term purportedly used for officials who are either chicken enough to say something responsible and authoritative or those who want to plant some version of the story deliberately.
The result: Columns after columns, reams of pages wasted over breathless exclusives that carry no names, no accountability, and no verification. The reporters take the dictations from their sources, without asking questions, and the editors fail to see the contradictory voices of the stories they publish. Everybody wants to break a story. The veracity takes a back seat, and the consequences are not considered.
Link between Blast and Terror Module
So, it was in the case of the Delhi Red Fort blast. Every newspaper published definitive links between the blast and the Kashmir-Faridabad terror module, even before the investigations had begun.
The revelation of the terror network came to light a day before the blast when Jammu and Kashmir police issued a press release maintaining that it had dismantled an interstate and transnational terror module connected to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind. The release mentioned that following the discovery of threatening JeM posters in Srinagar on October 19, 2025, investigations revealed a network of radicalised professionals and students coordinating with foreign handlers from Pakistan and other countries. Seven individuals, including two doctors – Dr Muzammil Ahmed Ganai and Dr Adeel - were arrested from various locations in Jammu & Kashmir, Faridabad and Haryana, the release said.
Following the statement, some news reports, quoting a ‘police spokesperson’ mentioned that “2,900 kg of IED-making material” or “explosives” have been recovered. Why was such a huge haul of explosives not part of the original press release?
Why was the information selectively released to reporters by officers who didn’t want to be named? No reporter was interested in asking this question: What is the connection between JeM (whose posters happened to be the origin of the investigations) and the Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind. Jaish-e-Mohammad, led by Masood Azhar and responsible for major attacks including the 2019 Pulwama bombing, is a significant Pakistan-based militant threat, while Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind is a smaller Kashmir-based group formed in 2017 with claimed Al Qaeda links but limited operational history.
While everyone faithfully lapped up this ‘fact’, they also absorbed as gospel truth the theory of the Delhi blast link and the Faridabad terror module. Newspapers claimed that the signatures of explosives used in the Delhi Red Fort blast were similar to those recovered in Faridabad. Yet, some unknown officers were quoted as saying that they are “gathering evidence” and trying to find out what kind of explosives were used in the blast that left no sharpnels.
A Times of India report quoted officials describing the blast as one of ‘military grade’. Yet another report in the same newspaper, again quoting no one, mentions that it appears that similar ammonium nitrate seized in the Faridabad operations has been used.
In such situations, contradictory statements and theories will be floated and will naturally exist. But while the reporter’s job is to ask for a logical explanation and present not just what is known but where that knowledge comes from, that of the editor is to ensure that each contradiction, instead of getting the stamp of approval and seal of authority, is published with an explanation every reader deserves.
Identity of i-20 Car Driver
The most glaring assertion was the sudden propping up of the identity of the driver of the car, which was purported to be carrying the explosives – a white coloured Hyundai i20 – as Dr Inam un Nabi, a doctor who hailed from Pulwama and worked at Faridabad’s Al Falah School of Medical Sciences & Research Centre in Faridabad, Haryana, without even a hint of evidence. Most newspapers, from Hindustan Times to the Hindu, offer the same set of contradictions, even as this person is the most baffling in the entire puzzle.
They quote sources to maintain that he was traced through CCTV footage, some state they are privy to the footage, and some reports publish a grainy photo of a man wearing a mask behind the wheel in a white car. Clearly, the identity had been established the morning after the blast, even as the DNA tests of the named person’s family members were yet to be conducted. In their November 13 editions, the newspapers quoted sources as saying that the man could be seen without the mask outside a mosque and in Connaught Place, but no photos appeared.
The name of the doctor first came to the public domain after the blast. But then, there are sources who claim he had links with the other doctor – Muzammil. Both were colleagues at the Faridabad Medical College, and both hail from the same village in Pulwama. The sources then go on to claim that Inam un Nabi was absconding since the raids started and the Kashmir-Faridabad terror network was unearthed.
The crucial question was that if the investigators claimed that he was absconding and evading arrest, why were there no lookout notices for him. Muzammil, his colleague, was arrested on October 31. Why were they unable to trace him? How and where did he disappear? Inam’s family says he spoke to them a few days ago. Surely, if he were under the radar, his family in the high surveillance zone of Kashmir would have been questioned at least.
The same newspapers that reported that investigators were looking for Inam and that the latter was evading arrest, also quoted sources and unnamed officials while tracing the path of the car, which, according to these reports, starts from Faridabad on the morning of the blast. No reporter bothered to ask how Inam was freely roaming around in Faridabad, where the different investigating agencies were in hot pursuit of him, how he managed to evade arrest for so long while being present in public places.
Suicide Bomb or Panic Attack?
The news reports, at best, pivot around the question of whether Inam un Nabi was a suicide bomber or did he act in panic? Here again, they get embroiled in the maze of contradictory conjectures. Several reports emphasized that the explosion was so strong that it had left no trace of the body of the person driving it and yet quoted ‘sources’ as saying that the bomb was ‘premature’, may have gone off ‘accidentally’ while Inam was “either trying to destroy all evidence of the explosives or trying to get away”. A little dig in about the nature of explosives was in order.
The ‘sources’ tell the reporters that after the terror plot was unearthed, Inam, the man the unnamed officials identify as the driver of the i-20 car, may have panicked. How does this even square up? How is one to believe that a man who has been evading arrest for over 10 days (some reports suggest that he disappeared on the 28th of October after getting a whiff of the raids), instead of trying to save his own skin, would enter the capital city of the country with a car loaded with explosives? And then panic at the last moment.
Ever since the blast, newspaper columns are filled with theories and stories that do not reconcile – and yet are written with confidence, attributed to officials whose names would never be known.
This is not a new malaise plaguing journalism. When it comes to terror attacks and major incidents of crime, journalists are in a tearing hurry to get the story and are willing to fall for the bait of ‘sources’ and ‘highly placed sources’ who virtually dole out to the ever-eager reporter the rumour-mills of the official circles dressed in the language of expertise.
Crime after Crime, Danger of Clumsy Reports
This isn’t just sloppy reportage. It is also dangerous. It obfuscates clarity, creates a media trial based on unverified assumptions, fails to make investigators accountable, and ultimately subverts truth and justice. In many such incidents, as the unnamed investigators weave yarns of fiction for the reporters, and the latter obediently amplify these, years later, the cases have fallen in courts because there is a complete mismatch between what the media reports based on ‘sources’ and what finally makes it to the investigation files.
By failing to ask questions, the reporters are not doing any service either to their profession or to their sources. This cycle of receiving and disseminating information reinforces lethargy both among journalists and the investigators. While the reporters become more reliant on easy table journalism, the investigators are seen to be ‘men at work’ without collecting hard evidence and sometimes looking for convenient scapegoats.
The Delhi blast news coincided with another news – that of the accused in the Nithari killings walking free from jail after acquittal. For years, the Indian media vilified the now-acquitted Surinder Koli as a “butcher” and a “cannibal”. A media trial then led to his conviction and hanging, which was stopped at the last hour. The man is now free because the courts noted, after almost two decades, that there was insufficient evidence presented in court to link him to the killings.
19 women and children were raped, killed, and their bodies dismembered. Was Koli a scapegoat, or were the investigators too lazy to make a water-tight case with a collection of scientific evidence? Someone did kill them. Was that someone never named?
Nithari killings case collapse was yet another reminder to the journalists who buy the cacophony of fictions that investigators often offer them – that the consequences of lazy journalism are dangerous. But they have once again shown that they’re too busy for the mad scramble for exclusive scoops and breaking news.
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