Published: October 2025 (12 days ago) in issue Nº 435
Keywords: Community media, Documentation, Journalism, Auroville Today, Censorship, Auroville crisis and Values of Auroville
Editorial
Almost 37 years ago, on a rainy day in November, 1988, the first issue of Auroville Today was published. The main theme was the Auroville Foundation Act, which had just been passed by the Government of India. Since then, in over 434 issues we have published thousands of articles on every aspect of Auroville.
The intention, as our somewhat prosaic title suggests, was not to preach what should be here and not to erect a false image, but to present the actual Auroville as it exists in all its diversity – the successes, the failures, the aspirations, the shadows – because we believed that it is important to document every aspect of this unique undertaking for the benefit of the residents and for the wider world.
Since the new administration took office in 2021, however, it has become increasingly difficult for us to do this. This is mainly because, while we have reported extensively on the many initiatives of the new administration and their impacts upon residents, almost without exception officials of the new administration and Aurovilians who have allied themselves with it have refused to explain to us their point of view and why they are taking the actions which they are taking, in spite of many requests for interviews.
Inevitably, this has given our coverage of recent events a somewhat lop-sided feel, which, ironically, has been used by some allied with the present administration to justify their refusal to engage with us. We believe that a free press which honestly tries to document what is happening on the ground and allows a range of opinions to be expressed about this is an essential element of every healthy society, and especially for one like Auroville which aspires to be an experiment in human unity and consciousness change. In carrying out this mission we have always tried to live up to the principles laid out in the Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists.
However, recently there have been several worrying developments.
A member of one of the groups appointed by the present administration apparently has said that they intend to ‘go after’ Auroville Today, and, recently, one of our editors received an email from a member of another group in which she rejected the request for an interview on current town planning because, she said, Auroville Today had published misleading comments on current affairs in Auroville, as well as material from working groups which had not been constituted or supported by the current Governing Board. She advised him to refer to Auroville Tomorrow, a publication of the present administration, or to official announcements of L’Avenir d’Auroville for all information relating to the real and ongoing progress of Auroville.
This is the first and only time in the 37 years of Auroville Today’s existence that an individual or group, including past and present Governing Boards and International Advisory Committees, has told us what we can and cannot publish. Until now, even if individuals or the authorities were not always happy with our coverage – which is inevitable in a place like Auroville – they trusted that we were working with goodwill and for the greater good of the community, and that we would not publish anything which we felt would be detrimental to this.
The threat to close us down and the instruction concerning what we should and should not publish appears to be an attempt to establish only one narrative about what is happening in today’s Auroville. But we believe that Auroville is too complex, too ‘creatively messy’, to be shoehorned into only one narrative. Therefore, for as long as we are able to continue, we will attempt to report on and celebrate the astonishing diversity of this place.