India's actions to curb press freedom in 2002 indicate the political leadership's growing intolerance, a media watchdog said on Monday.

In its annual report, the Committee to Protect Journalists said quoting unnamed Indian journalists that the Bharatiya Janata party-led government seems to target its critics in the media as a matter of policy and largely gets away with it.

The report said that in Gujarat, police and political activists were responsible for assaulting journalists covering the riots.

The journalists were vulnerable not only to the rage of mobs, but also to harassment and assault by the police, who did not want their complicity in the attacks publicised.

The CPJ said that the police beat Sudhir Vyas of The Times of India when he tried to cover the violence and asked him whether he came to report on what the force were doing. "They knew I was seeing what they allowed others to do," the report quoted Vyas as saying. "The assault on Vyas was typical of the attacks against journalists reporting on the communal violence," it said.

The CPJ report noted that journalists working in Jammu and Kashmir continued to endure physical assault, threats and harassment and the number of attacks against the press increased there last year. It said that a spate of attacks against local journalists in Kashmir highlighted the dangers of reporting on the conflict there.

The 425-page report also cited other alleged attacks on journalists in states like Tamil Nadu. "Though covering India's conflict areas was obviously dangerous, even ordinary reporting on crime or political infighting occasionally sparked violent reprisal," it said.

Worldwide, the report said, the number of journalists behind bars rose sharply last year.

In all 19 journalists were killed in 2002, down from 37 in 2001 while 136 were imprisoned, an increase of 15 per cent.

China continued to be the leader in jailing journalists. Last year it imprisoned 39 journalists, it added.