On 7 September, ahead of state elections in Madhya Pradesh, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan promised a law to protect journalists. The same day, police in the district of Guna filed the first of 11 FIRs against Jalam Singh, a journalist who, earlier that day, published a report on a viral video of a BJP minister and a woman that he described as “crossing all bounds of obscenity”. Singh’s editor spoke to us about the extraordinary action of the State against Singh, who has now been in jail for 35 days.