On Sunday night, police officers in Kerala’s Varkala town allegedly assaulted journalist Sajeev Gopalan and stripped him in front of his wife and 15-year-old daughter. Gopalan, 49, says he was targeted because of a story that he had done against the police a few months ago. The case is another reminder of the challenging conditions in which many journalists in the vernacular media work. This month itself has seen a spate of such attacks. Two days after Kannada journalist Gauri Lankesh was murdered near her Bengaluru home on September 5, two bike-born assailants shot dead Pankaj Mishra, a journalist with Rashtriya Sahara in Bihar’s Arwal district. On September 20, television reporter Shantanu Bhowmick was abduced and killed in Tripura while covering a political demonstration. Since 2015, as many as 142 attacks against journalists have been registered in the country, according to the latest data available with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). As many as 70 journalists were killed in India between 1992 and 2016. Many of them were independent journalists who were murdered close to their home or their workplace.