I call it a national daily because it carries all the nation’s advertisements. You open it in the morning and the government has built a bridge, launched a scheme and congratulated itself on both before you’ve had your first sip of tea. Then you turn the page to find out what the nation has to say.

A leopard has wandered out of its natural habitat.

Now, I have nothing against the leopard. If it wandered into my compound, I’d want to know about it, preferably before I went downstairs to collect the paper.

But when young people are out protesting, I’d also like to know what brought them onto the streets, what they’re asking for and why they feel nobody in office is listening. And when a paper with that much space and that many readers finds so little room for those questions, I begin to wonder how much silence comes free with a full page advertisement.

“Did the leopard have anything to say?” I imagine an editor asking.

“It growled, sir.”

“Against whom?”

“Hard to tell, sir.”

“Excellent. Put it on page one.”

Meanwhile, a Norwegian journalist named Helle Lyng Svendsen had a question for Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited Oslo in May. Would he take questions from the press? This week, she was due to fly to Hyderabad to speak at the Bharat Summit. She says she already had an Indian visa when, minutes before she was to leave for the airport, the Indian Embassy told her she would be refused entry.

She knows that her question in Oslo had something to do with it. She says she asked for a written explanation and received none.

And what was she coming to Hyderabad to speak about?

The future of the media and press freedom.

I’d have liked to hear what she had to say. I’d also like to hear what the Home Ministry has to say. Here is a question any national daily could put to it this morning. What changed between granting her a visa and telling her to stay home? A government that puts its achievements in full page advertisements surely has the resources to give us an answer in a paragraph.

What angers me is how easily we are expected to shrug. An Indian reporter sees what happened and has to decide whether to ask the next question. An editor has to decide how prominently to print the answer, if one comes.

All this, while the rest of the world gets to watch a country that proudly calls itself the world’s largest democracy remove a foreign journalist’s freedom to ask questions.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll open the paper again and if there’s another photograph of the leopard, I hope it’s facing the camera.

In a country where everybody else seems to be looking away, I’d like to see at least one creature with the courage to look me in the eye…!

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