AAP’s Double Face on Media Freedom in Delhi & Panjab

August

2026

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has repeatedly accused other parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of controlling and gagging the media. However, in AAP-ruled Panjab, since October 2025, the party has claimed copyright ownership of at least 48 videos and posts uploaded by journalists on Facebook that were critical of them. Four Facebook pages were taken down between Jan–Apr 2026, after copyright infringement notices for content AAP claimed as its own. A fifth was removed after a Panjab police notice was sent, which was separately hit with five copyright notices. Together, the five pages had over 3M followers when they were taken down. The five cases included Facebook accounts of RMB Television, Lok Awaz TV, Maninderjeet Sidhu, Rattandeep Singh Dhaliwal, and Parmeet Singh Bidowali. Four Panjabi journalists run these pages. A copyright strike is a legal penalty issued by an online platform to take down content when a genuine copyright owner claims their work was used without permission. The pages stayed inaccessible for months, until The Reporters’ Collective sent a questionnaire to Meta, which owns Facebook. A Meta spokesperson said, 'The content and accounts were removed in error and have since been restored.' Four of the five pages were restored. The content AAP flagged as copyright infringement included press releases from Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, Panjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann’s own social media posts, AI-generated images, a government notification on state board appointments, and photos of the state legislative assembly. Since forming the government in Panjab in 2022, AAP has been accused of threatening journalists and Right to Information activists with police cases, blocking the circulation of newspapers including The Indian Express, running a targeted witch-hunt of the Punjab Kesari group, and getting journalists’ social media accounts suspended. Opposition parties called it a 'chilling attack on press freedom'. When asked about the copyright strikes, Panjab AAP’s media in-charge Baltej Pannu claimed that the four men whose Facebook pages were deleted were 'not journalists'. In India, journalists require no degree to practice journalism. Media practitioners, along with common citizens, have the right to critique any government and its policies. By exploiting intellectual property laws, AAP has found a new way to target journalists critical of the state government. Meanwhile, across India, the BJP government brought down 200K social media posts in the last five months (earlier coverage).