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NEWS YOU CAN USE Editor: N. P. Chekkutty Media Focus |
N.S.Jagannathan In a retrospect of the vicissitudes of the freedom of the press in the fifty years of Independence, a little nostalgic self-indulgence on the pretext of "backgrounding" is perhaps permissible. First generation post-Indian Independence journalists, who had cut their journalistic teeth in pre-Independence India were not journalists at all. They were evangelists rather than professionals which their descendants all too obviously are to the point of being hacks. Their adulthood had coincided with Gandhian "Aggression by Truth" against a satanic alien rule. Many of them deeply believed in this description, and acting on it, were regularly in and out of jail. They lived on salaries that their descendants would find derisory. Even these salaries were often not paid. Liberals Under the Skin The story is told of T. Prakasam, the legendary Andhra leader who lost a fortune he earned as a barrister in running Swarajya: Months of arrears of salaries, he came to the office one day with a huge sackful of rice and told his employees: "Look, I have no money. Here is some rice come from my village for my use. If you wish, you can take a padi each". (Padi was a measure of volume in those days in the Tamil country.) Another story was related to me by the late A. Hariharan, friend and colleague in the Hindustan Times in the sixties. It was about a respected member of a national news agency. In his previous incarnation he was a staffer on a paper of exceptional patriotic credentials but chronically broke. Once driven to desperation with no money for the next meal, he walked away with the owner’s cow and sold it in a village on the outskirts of Madras. When the proprietor learnt of it, he merely shrugged his shoulders and went about his business. Another Hariharan story is of a night-duty sub in mid-fifties who used to carry away stacks of unsold copies of his paper for selling as raddi for financing his morning coffee. None of these desperately impecunious men would have exchanged their vocation for another with a steady income. Their chronic poverty was voluntary. And beneath the self-inflicted indigence and the passionate nationalism they proudly wore as a badge, they were political liberals committed to the liberty of the individual, freedom of discourse and other attributes of a democracy, all values they had learnt by their deep study of British history. Many of the stalwarts whose lives spanned the great divide were also deeply read in British history and their heads were chock-full with English liberalism. This they used with panache in the plangent prose of their editorials. Many of them were writers manqué, suckled on English literature. Pothan Joseph’s daily column, Over a Cup of Tea in innumerable papers he served on, over the years, was redolent with Biblical and Dickensian quotes and was a rage among the readers of the times. (Parenthetically, Krishna Menon who was once a journalist on Annie Besant’s New India was at his acerbic best when he squelched a British diplomat at the UN who dared correct the English of his draft. He told the impertinent Briton witheringly that he had learnt English "the proper way" and not picked it up from the gutter as his meddlesome British colleague had obviously done.) Khasa Subba Rao’s chiselled prose in his terse daily commentary was a model of educated English. Chalapati Rao was another icon of the young journalists of the fifties, the envy of his fellow scribes. And Raghunatha Iyer of The Hindu who was the opposite of Chalapati Rao in considering journalists as elite professionals rather than "working journalists" was another erudite writer, whose anonymous editorials were read with awe by generations. For decades after Independence, Sotte Voce, his celebrated column in Khasa Subba Rao’s Swarajya, in which he aggressively flaunted his conservative liberalism, was read with admiration for the graces of his Edwardian English, even when one disagreed with his politics. More to the point of the theme of this paper, all of them were liberals under the skin. Like other pre-Independence intellectuals, they had totally internalised concepts like the Rights of Man and the Freedom of Thought and Expression derived from classics of English libertarian political thought of the 19th century. Cobbett, Bentham, Mill, Bright, Morley and the rest were constantly on their lips and at the tip of their fountain pens. (Well sharpened pencil, in the case of Raghunatha Iyer.) Freedom of the press, consistently under assault during the British period from successive press laws, was an article faith. They would quote the 18th century pseudonymous pamphleteer, Junius, to the effect, " The liberty of the press is the palladium of all civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman [read Indian]". Came Independence , the hate object was no longer available for venting their cultivated spleen. The political -- read Congress -- leaders they had made common cause with were now the rulers. It took some time for these stalwarts to reorient themselves to the adversarial role of the press to established authority that had come so easily and naturally when the British were the target. The new leaders had been their heroes. And in the past, they had often willingly subordinated their own judgement to those of these leaders and readily allowed themselves to become instruments of the agenda of these leaders. Consequently, criticism, if any, of the new authority was muted and qualified. Moreover, though the Independence they had fought for was a fait accompli, it was a deeply flawed one. The trauma of post-partition riots and the diaspora that followed dictated "responsible journalism" and was practised without demur except at the lunatic fringes of communal instigators and avengers on both sides of the border. On the whole, during this phase it was a "conformist press". Even later, as James Cameron, a popular British correspondent posted in Delhi during the early sixties, wryly noted, the Indian press, even when free, inclined to be deferential rather than rebellious. The Three Phases Rather conveniently for the historian of post-Independence freedom of the press, periodisation is easy: Ignoring short interruptions, we have three well-demarcated reigns of the Nehru dynasty: father, daughter and grandson. Each phase had its high and low points in the fortunes of the press and its specific crises, when "freedom was in peril". The Nehru era had its share of turbulence -- the Kashmir imbroglio, the war with China and less dramatic moments of perceived internal disorder. Restrictions on the press to cope with these were considered expedient. But during the Nehru era such abridgements of the liberty of the press were comparatively benign and shame-faced, and were contained by the courts. In sharp contrast, the Indira years saw some of the darkest hours of post-Independence history for the liberties of the individuals and institutions including the press and the judiciary. Rajiv’s own shorter tenure in power did not witness the same kind of terrorisation of the press. It could not have, after the decisive rejection by the people of Indira Gandhi’s methods of governance. Rajiv’s confrontation with the press over the Defamation Bill was more a case of poor judgement than an expression of an authoritarian streak in character as was the case with his mother. The Nehru Era The fifties -- notionally extended up to 1964 to make it coincidental with the end of the Nehru era -- was, despite hiccups, the halcyon days of press freedom. For one thing, unlike his successors, Nehru was a sincere believer in democratic liberties .The paper he founded in 1938, National Herald, defiantly carried on its masthead the legend, "Freedom is in peril, let us defend it with all our might." Ironically, this slogan was to be raised against his daughter during the Emergency of the seventies and his grandson Rajiv in 1988 over the Defamation Bill. Nehru took every opportunity to declare in Jeffersonian accents that he would prefer an irresponsible press to a shackled one and he meant it and acted on it most of the time. Politically, the period was dominated by the Congress and dissent was muted in the mainstream press. With Pakistan hived off, ancient animosities took on the new coloration of clash of national sovereignties notably over Kashmir, a running sore to this day. This meant even more conformism as an expression of patriotic solidarity. Thus in the main, the press had a certain cosy togetherness with authority at least till mid-fifties, born of shared sacrifices during the pre-Independence period. However, in fairness both to the press and Nehru, it should be said that dissent was not absent even in the early years and was accepted stoically. Even over Kashmir, sensitive because of the Pakistani angle, there was plenty of criticism on the way Nehru had handled, more accurately, mishandled it. Though Nehru was genuinely libertarian, especially when compared to his daughter and grandson, his 17-year tenure as prime minister saw from time to time the enactment of laws restrictive of fundamental freedoms. On every such occasion, extenuation was plausibly and implausibly pleaded. The Newsprint Control Order was issued in January, 1951, partly on the ground of the need to share equitably the burdens of shortage of the then wholly imported newsprint. This led to rationing and the "price-page schedule" designed to control "the so-called monopoly press". This regime continued to be in operation till much later when it was struck down by the Supreme Court in a series of memorable cases. (Express Newspapers v The Union of India, 1958; The Sakal Papers v Union of India, 1962.) Even more draconian measures such as the Press (Objectionable Matters) Act was passed after bitter debate in Parliament in October,1951. Among other things, this was designed to contain insurgencies inspired by the then prevailing "Ranadive line" of the Communist Party of India in places like Telengana. Rajaji, (who a year later as chief minister of Madras was to declare famously, "Communism is my enemy number one.") successfully piloted the bill. The object of the 34 clauses and two schedules of this bill was declared to be "to provide against the printing and publication of matter which is scurrilous, obscene, or matters likely to encourage violence or sabotage for the purpose of undermining the Government established by law in India, or encourage murder, sabotage or violence or incite any person to interfere with the supply of and distribution of essential commodities or services or seduce any member of the armed forces from his duty, or promote feelings of enmity between different sections of the people of India." Ironically, the provisions of the bill and even its language bore a striking resemblance to the press laws of the British period such as the Indian Penal Code of the19th century, the acts of 1908, 1910 and the ordinances of the early thirties. In true British fashion, the bill provided for the demand of security deposit from a newspaper, and its forfeiture in cases of perceived delinquency, demand for fresh deposits and fine (up to Rs 2000) and imprisonment in case of default. Even harsher was the first amendment to the Constitution designed to nullify the effect of some memorably liberal decisions of the Supreme Court such as the Gopalan case (Gopalan v the State of Madras, 1950) and the Ramesh Thapar case (Ramesh Thapar v the State of Madras, 1950). The original clause 2 of Article 19 did not contain the expression "reasonable restriction" and the court held in the Ramesh Thapar case that pre-censorship or any form of previous restraint on the freedom of expression of the press prima facie constituted an infringement of the right guaranteed by Article 19(1). This (among other things) was the provocation for the substitution of the original clause by a new one that provided that the guaranteed freedom of speech and expression can be abridged by any existing law or any new law that might be made that seeks to impose "reasonable restrictions on the exercise of this right in the interest of the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence." This clause was further modified by the sixteenth amendment of 1963, adding "sovereignty and integrity of India" to the list of subjects on which there could be no untrammelled freedom of speech. In the subsequent years there was a lot of logomachy and casuistry in the courts about the precise meanings of these words and the courts, to their credit, sought to restrict the scope of the restrictions imposed. ("Thus advocacy of revolutionary socialism as a panacea for present-day evils cannot be restricted under the present ground, unless the use of violence is suggested" -- State of Bihar v Shailabala, 1952). Recalling pre-Independence legal pyrotechnics over the meaning of "sedition," it was held in some cases that "criticism of a party, government is no ground for restricting freedom of speech and expression, unless it is intended or has a tendency to undermine the security of the state or public order or to incite the commission of any offences. Sedition, i.e. merely exciting disaffection or bad feelings towards the government is therefore no ground for restricting the freedom of the press." ( Kedarnath v State of Bihar,1962; Ramesh Thapar v State of Madras, 1950). During the Nehru era, several important judgements of the Supreme Court memorably enlarged the scope of the freedom of the press. Firstly, in more than one case, the court declared that though Article 19(1) does not specifically say so, Freedom of the Press was subsumed in the Freedom of Speech and Expression mentioned. This precious right is now part of the "judge-made law" of the land. (Virendra v State of Punjab, 1958; Sakal Papers v Union of India,1962.) In a number of cases, the court amplified the ramifications of the concept of the freedom of the press as guaranteed by the Constitution and set out the limits of restrictions imposed by successive amendments: Any restriction that is directly or indirectly imposed upon the right to publish, disseminate information, or to circulate, constitutes a restriction upon the freedom of the press. The right to publish includes the right to publish not only its own views but also those of its correspondents. The right to circulate refers to both the matter to be circulated and the volume of circulation. To require a newspaper to reduce its space for advertisements would directly affect its circulation since it would be bound to raise the price. (Sakal Newspapers v Union of India, 1962.) The price-page schedule and rationing of newsprint went out of the window as a consequence of this judgement. It was also held that it would not be legitimate for the state to subject the press to laws which would curtail circulation and thereby narrow the scope of dissemination of information, undermine its independence by driving it to seek government aid. (Express Newspapers v Union of India,1958). Other impermissible laws would be those that seek to single out the press for laying upon it excessive and prohibitive burdens or to impose a specific tax deliberately calculated to limit the circulation of information. (Express Newspapers v Union of India, 1958.) The important point, about the Nehru era is this: both intrinsically and in contrast to the subsequent periods, the ambience for the press was fundamentally liberal; and despite all the low key constitutional litigation detailed above, authority’s -- more particularly, Nehru’s -- attitude was, if not exactly friendly, not positively hostile. The traditional adversarial role of the press was accepted out of genuine conviction. The terrors of the restrictive laws were mitigated by a certain laid-back and relaxed invocation of them in practice. A rather interesting aspect of the litigation during this period was that except in the earlier cases like Ramesh Thapar v State of Madras, it was more about the commercial aspects of carrying on the newspaper business than about the right of the professional journalist to express himself freely. Nehru’s economic policies such as central planning, commanding heights for the public sector, etc., non-alignment, and his miscalculations over Chinese intentions, were contemporaneously criticised severely without bringing down the wrath of authority on one’s head. Many papers and editors were openly pro-American in their ideological stances without noticeable damage to their reputation, well-being or liberty. The Indira Years After Lal Bahadur Shastri’s all too brief tenure as prime minister, Indira Gandhi re-established, not without a bitter struggle, the continuity of the Nehru dynastic rule. But by then Indian politics had begun to undergo basic shifts in power equations. Congress dominance of the scene was decisively impaired, especially at the state level. New caste and other coalitions of convenience, such as those that accommodated at once the Jan Sangh and the Communists, had wrested power from the Congress in UP and elsewhere. Anti-Congressism was born and has never looked back since. The great split in the Congress in 1969 was again a milestone: post-Nehru power manipulators, christened derisively "Syndicate" in the mobster-mafia argot, were decisively worsted by Indira Gandhi’s superior tactical skills. The spectacular victory in the Bangladesh war consolidated her position further. Her sweeping victory in the 1971 election gave her the kind of authority her father enjoyed at the zenith of his career. Unfortunately, it did not last. By 1974 she and the country were in deep crisis. For the mainstream press, Indira Gandhi’s early years as prime minister were trying, but not particularly oppressive. Many of the senior journalists of the time had been on the wrong side of the battle-lines between her and the old guard, with whom they were in natural ideological sympathy. Indira Gandhi’s pseudo-radicalism in such matters as abolition of the privy purses of the princes, bank nationalisation and so on was under ferocious attack by major papers. Another major development of the early seventies was the floating of some half -baked ideas on "diffusion of ownership and de-linking of ownership of newspapers from industrial interests". This idea conceived by the first Press Commission in the early fifties used to be inconclusively discussed from time to time but never seriously pursued, certainly not by the governments of the day for fear of stirring the hornet’s nest. But Indira Gandhi’s Government inspired a "working paper" on the subject. It was opposed ferociously by the affected papers and others who saw it as a ploy to get even with a hostile press and of a piece with her populist "Garibi Hatao" posturing. (Indira Gandhi’s new enthusiasm for egalitarian radicalism was suspect because of her long anti-Communist history, dating back to the late fifties. It was she who, as resident adviser and Congress president, was instrumental in pushing Nehru into dismissing a legitimate government in Kerala led by communists.) Nothing came of the initiative except the settled hostility of the mainstream press against Indira Gandhi. But things came to a boil by the beginning of 1975. JP’s successive movements in Gujarat and Bihar engulfed her. On top came the adverse Allahabad High Court decision holding void her election to the Lok Sabha (which Mr Justice V.R.Krishna Iyer’s ambiguous interim order on appeal did little to mitigate) was the last straw. She imposed Emergency. Nothing like this had ever happened in the nearly thirty years of Independence, not even when the country was thrice at war in 1962, 1965 and 1971, the last a spectacularly victorious one when she was prime minister. Of course 1975 was not the first time that Article 352 under Chapter XVIII relating to emergency situations of the Constitution had been invoked. In fact, there already was an emergency imposed in1971 at the time of the Bangladesh war. Before that, emergency had been declared in 1961 and was in operation, believe it or not, till 1969. But the use of the emergency powers was so rare that it remained unfelt and even unnoticed for nine years. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the 1975 Emergency was quite different both in its intentions and impact. Overnight all the important leaders of the Opposition including JP and Morarji Desai and innumerable lesser persons in different states were arrested without warning; 26 political and other organisations including the RSS were banned. Power was invoked to detain anyone without assigning reasons. Total censorship was instantly imposed. A series of constitutional amendments and Presidential ordinances put the election of the prime minister beyond judicial scrutiny and provided her immunity from civil and criminal proceedings. Arrested citizens were denied the right to go to court for redress. Fundamental rights were suspended and the courts could not call into question this suspension. The life of the Parliament due to expire in1976 was extended by two years ( though, in the event, Indira Gandhi announced elections in January, 1977, well before this extended life of the Lok Sabha ended). Duly constituted state governments were dismissed and President’s rule imposed. Not the least terrible consequence of the Emergency proclamation was the total irresponsibility of the executive acting under the direction of the "extra-constitutional authority" of Sanjay Gandhi, who was practically running the government. Honest officials were rendered impotent. The recalcitrant ones were replaced by Sanjay’s sycophants. Every institution, including the Reserve Bank and nationalised banks, were thoroughly subverted. A horribly misdirected zeal for population control led to the most brutal enforcement of mass vasectomy against the will of the persons concerned. The resentment generated by this barbarous violation of human rights boomeranged and is generally considered as the most important single reason for the Congress party’s electoral debacle. With no press to report what was happening, a barrage of official propaganda of the crudest and naivest kind at total variance with the facts on the ground was unleashed on a shell-shocked people, increasingly sullen and indifferent. The Emergency ran its course till Indira Gandhi, hungering for democratic legitimacy and misled by sycophantic advice about the popular mood, ordered elections in early 1977. As she was to admit ruefully later, this is where total censorship proved disastrously counter-productive. Striking a personal note, the day Emergency was declared I was in Teheran having left the country ten days earlier. When I returned in some haste two days later, B.G.Verghese, my editor in the Hindustan Times, said grimly, "You have returned to a different country from the one you left behind." I replied rather idiotically, "See, I take my eyes off for a moment and this is what happens." Verghese wasn’t amused. Every journalist of the time, particularly those who worked in the capital, has his version of the period. Those were trying days and one coped the best way one could. The first few days were the worst. The Indian Express had its power supply cut off, its bank accounts frozen and was otherwise sought to be immobilised. The Statesman, the only other English paper in the capital to have shown defiance, was also harassed in many ways. Within days, Inder Gujral, Minister for Information and Broadcasting, who was unwilling to take orders from Sanjay, was brusquely replaced by V.C.Shukla. He was soon to out-Herod Herod, doing the absurdest things at Sanjay’s bidding or even without it in anticipation of his weirdest wishes. Simultaneously, the secretary to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting was replaced by a "no-nonsense" police official. A censorship apparatus was assembled hastily imposing on the hapless Press Information Bureau unfamiliar tasks. With pre-censorship, especially of the "rogue" papers, obligatory, the new zealots of discipline anxious to please their masters, not only ruled out even harmless items but, more cunningly, delayed editions by passing pages too late for the paper to reach readers on time. Even my fallible memory can recall hilarious instances of the censor’s obtuseness. Swarajya of Madras, which was regularly publishing even before the Emergency Rajaji’s Swarajya pieces of the past (an act of piety wickedly but plausibly attributable to reasons of space filling!) had these articles promptly banned as subversive. The Eastern Economist started publishing on its cover a full length picture of Mahatma Gandhi walking in Noakhali. After three such issues, the pictures were banned, on the ground that it gave an impression that Gandhi was turning his back on the Emergency. (For once, the censor was right about the editorial intention.) And so on. No story even mildly unfavourable to the new dispensation got past the censors, some of whom were shamelessly more loyal than the king. To control the flow of even this trickle of non-official versions of what was happening, the two domestic news agencies, PTI and UNI, were merged into a new one called Samachar with Mohammed Yunus as the boss. Thus the whole country including Mrs. Gandhi was totally ignorant of what was really happening. Both the facts that Sanjay’s goons were running amok all over the country and that there was overt defiance and even quiet subversion all over the place were hidden from the public. Mark Tully, the India-born BBC correspondent in India (who had earlier been much lauded for his supportive role in the run up to the Bangladesh war even to the point of underplaying Indian presence in the then East Pakistan) became persona non grata overnight and was asked to leave. Foreign disapprobation, especially by well-known papers like The Times, New Statesman and the New York Times was blacked out. If this was the dismal record of the government, what about the behaviour of the press? Nothing, but nothing, in the past had quite prepared it for the new situation, despite having lived in an emergency regime for 13 continuous years, with a short break of two years between 1969 and 1971. In all candour the earlier emergencies were emergencies only in name, a matter of law rather than practice. Their rigours were largely unfelt and even unnoticed. But this time round, it was totally different. After the initial shock, the press as an institution and individual papers and journalists as professionals gropingly worked out their survival strategies and techniques of defiance. Some papers and journalists simply caved in, "crawling," in L.K.Advani’s memorably terse characterisation, "when asked merely to bend." Others were reduced to sullen silence or ingenious protests. Quoting from memory, Opinion, the fearless, one-man-libertarian brigade of A.D.Gorwala, read with admiration by thousands in the preceding years, ceased publication. In the capital, with which I am more familiar, two papers stood out as defiant and unbowing — the Indian Express and the Statesman. Ramnath Goenka, the intrepid owner of the Indian Express, was seriously ill at Calcutta when Emergency was declared. But he recovered miraculously when he heard the news and smelt a fight. He came to Delhi soon after and personally led the Indian Express team of journalists, instilling into them some of his fighting spirit. But there were journalists who fell in line, without as much as a squeak, and even enthusiastically. One of them, on a mainstream paper, wrote an editorial comparing Sanjay with Lenin and Vivekananda. (He later claimed that he was in fact JP’s mole in the paper hiding his tracks effectively by such idiocies.) On the other hand, there were those who had heroism thrust on them by being arrested for subversive views. Yet others, not so honoured, were expressing their resentment and anger in ingenious ways. The day after the declaration of the Emergency, V.K. Narasimhan, the shy and soft-spoken vintage liberal, carried in the pages of the Financial Express the famous Tagore prayer asking God to let his country "to rise in that haven of freedom" where "the mind was without fear and the head held high." Later in the Emergency, as the editor of the Indian Express, he used many ingenious methods of getting at the hateful regime. He used to discuss democratic liberties in the abstract and in other contexts, and quote judicial pronouncements like those of Justice Learned Hand of the United States with a direct bearing on the current Indian predicament. He got away with it probably because the Sanjay brigade and its minions were too dim to read the all-too-obvious message between the lines. There were innumerable other such ploys employed by journalists at bay. Confining myself to Delhi which I know best, V.Balasubramaniam of the Eastern Economist was another editor who pitted his wits against the regime in ingenious allegorical ways. Early in the Emergency, he carried a solemn editorial discussing the cattle wealth of India and referred in passing to flocks of sheep moving obediently at the crack of the shepherd’s crook. In the context, the parallel could hardly be missed. (I would like at this point to strike a personal note of a non-hero: I wouldn’t be doing it if it hadn’t provided the occasion for a rather good joke worth retailing. Within months of the declaration of the Emergency, I was feeling stifled in the loyalist atmosphere of the Hindustan Times. I soon left it to join the Statesman, then conspicuously at odds with the regime. When I mentioned my intention to a friend, he remarked wryly: "We all have heard of rats deserting a sinking ship. But this is the first time I hear of a rat swimming towards a sinking ship!") Another major response of outraged journalists relates to a version of the underground press. A few of us in the capital formed an informal group which often produced "Satya Samachar", a news network to write and circulate cyclostyled versions of events, developments and opinions that the official news agency Samachar would not touch. Among others, K.G.Ramakrishnan, who was still with the government in the Information Service, was a prominent member of the group. In less than no time, something like a national network had developed. Considering the circumstances in which it functioned, it was astonishingly effective. Critical comments in foreign newspapers and journals were reproduced in these news-sheets. Pre-Independence sources were ransacked for morale-boosting material, particularly from Mahatma Gandhi to keep struggling against tyranny. Its readership reach was necessarily limited. But for those who produced it, it was an exhilarating experience. And when in January, 1977, Mrs. Gandhi unexpectedly announced elections, it was as if the darkest night of the soul ended and a new dawn of hope was heralded. Two occasions remain deeply etched in an otherwise fallible memory. A meeting was held at the Constitution Club premises on Rafi Marg in which dissenters of the Emergency period including lawyers, politicians, journalists and others met and made and heard speeches. The meeting held in the first floor hall was jam-packed and went on late into the evening. In telling irony, the Congress meeting fortuitously held downstairs had a pathetically thin attendance and the few who came for it inexorably drifted upstairs, leaving poor Antulay, the organiser, tearing his hair in exasperation. The other even more memorable experience was on the night the election results were being announced. Sitting in the PIB hall at Shastri Bhavan and watching the results coming in, first in a trickle and later in a flood, it was an incredible catharsis of fears belied and hopes triumphantly vindicated. The defeat of the Congress was awe-inspiring and when after agonising delay, the defeat of Mrs. Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi at Rae Bareilly and Amethi was reluctantly announced well past midnight, the reaction was not a whoop of delight but a benumbed silence at the unbelievable turn of events. There was also the fear that, given her record, Mrs. Gandhi might not accept the verdict. But this fear too was belied in the wee hours of the morning and one went home bleary eyed but quietly happy. The next few days saw in the papers a flood of recall of the excesses of the Emergency. The Statesman printed a six column list of its stories that the censors had spiked in the two years. Articles were written about the many misdemeanours, particularly of the extra-constitutional authority in Delhi and of its surrogates in the rest of the country. The Statesman also carried a detailed article showing the shocking extent to which the Reserve Bank and some nationalised banks had been completely subverted by Sanjay who had put some of his cronies in responsible positions. Bankers who had earlier refused to oblige Sanjay with loans for his pet Maruti project had been harassed. The Shah Commission that was set up later to inquire into these excesses drew copiously from these reports. Mrs. Gandhi’s place in history is admittedly a complex question best left to historians to determine. But she has embroiled herself in the history of post-Independence journalism in ways that her father did not. In any assessment of Nehru, his relations with the press will merit no more than a passing reference, if that. But no judgement of her character and no account of her tenure as prime minister can be complete without examining her extremely dubious record as a respecter of the freedom of the press. Nehru’s relations with the press were not exactly smooth, but there cannot be any doubt whatever that he was deeply and genuinely committed to the concept of the freedom of the press. This can hardly be said of Mrs. Gandhi. Rajiv’s Record There is some irony in the circumstance that Rajiv began his tenure as prime minister with abundant goodwill from the press. The tragic circumstances in which he came to power; his relative youth with his shining morning face unwillingly becoming prime minster (recalling to the literary-minded Shakespeare’s schoolboy with his shining morning face dragging himself unwillingly to school), his persona as Mr Clean in sharp contrast to his younger brother Sanjay; his mind uncluttered by ideological baggage (unlike his grandfather’s) and the impression he gave of being a result-oriented modern mind -- all this made for instant rapport even for those who were inveterate foes of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Symbolic of this new relationship was one of those rare signed articles by Ramnath Goenka in the Indian Express in which he said famously, "Now I can die in peace." All this was to change within two years. The growing estrangement found its decisive moment when the notorious defamation bill was introduced in Parliament. Actually, a similar bill had earlier been introduced in Tamil Nadu by M.G.Ramachandran and had had a safe passage without any excessive show of protest at the all India level. The Congress government in Bihar under Jagannath Misra had earlier attempted a similar enactment but was forced to give up the idea by popular protest. And when the central bill came, it led to unprecedented opposition from all sides. Recalling the great popular movements of the past, a solidly united press carried on a tearing campaign against it. The high point of the protest movement was the march of thousands of journalists from India Gate along Raj Path. Lending colour and an exceptional show of purpose and determination was the presence of the octogenarian Ramnath Goenka leading the procession in the blazing sun. Within a week, Rajiv lost his nerve and caved in and the bill was withdrawn. It was a famous victory. This retrospect of the post-Independence Indian press in confrontational situations with authority is, of course, not the whole story of the institution. A more complete history taking in its less dramatic, quotidian behaviour will give a much less flattering picture. But this would be true of any institution, country or individual. It is not given to man, the child of original sin, to display sustained heroism for any length of time. Even in moments of crisis, as the above account shows, heroism has not been universal. But it would be fair to say that as a whole the Indian press does come into its own in moments of crisis and shows its true mettle in the ordeals by fire that it is subjected to from time to time. [GO TOP] Abu Abraham Neither Bend nor Crawl Indian society and the Indian press in particular have established, over the years, a tradition of liberty that sustains free thinking. There have been, of course, brief periods when this freedom has been curtailed, as during the Emergency, but these were aberrations. However, something happened during the Emergency that has somewhat changed the nature of a journalist’s freedom. In the effort to curtail the freedom of editors and senior staff, the government sought the collaboration of the proprietors of some major newspapers, who were only too keen to help. After all, foremost among proprietors’ priorities was to see that advertising revenue continued to flow, and government was a major source of that revenue. Once they had tasted editorial power, they began to exercise control over the editors they appointed. He who paid the piper called the tune. The phenomenon had already happened in Britain and the United States, where the owner-editor was the unquestioned authority. Newspaper tycoons, like Beaverbrook, Lord Thomson and Murdoch, built up newspaper empires that exerted unprecedented political power in UK and USA. They would have done the same in India too, if we had let them come in. Business houses, almost all over the world, are fascinated by the power of the press. Apart from the commercial advantages, there’s also the sheer prestige that goes with owning a newspaper or two. They buy a successful newspaper or newsmagazine, hire new editors, fire them if they are unwilling to play their games, and in a couple of years make these journals unrecognisable from the original. A few courageous editors in India have survived such goings-on, and their contribution to journalism in this country has inspired newer editors and journalists. But the proprietor-editor combination remains a continuing threat to freedom of expression. There is no law that can stop a proprietor from interfering with the freedom of the journalist. Though freedom of speech is guaranteed in our Constitution, it is a daily battle to preserve that freedom. It may be Shiv Sena today, it may be some public interest litigant tomorrow, or some religious fundamentalist the next day. Our society has enough eccentrics and bigots who can threaten libertarians. "The worst terrorists," wrote Michael Foot recently in an essay in support of Salman Rushdie, "are the religious ones since they have the strongest sense of their own rectitude. Religious sensibilities should not be protected by blasphemy laws which infringe on the rights of free speech." Journalists must avoid the temptation to promote a particular political party or politician or a certain business house or businessman. They should not attempt to gain cheap popularity by promoting religious and communal hatreds and prejudices. It may bring material benefits, but damages the prestige and liberal traditions of the profession. Ultimately, it is the journalist himself who has to defend the freedom of the press. Too many didn’t exercise that right during the Emergency, provoking L.K. Advani to make the acid remark afterwards to journalists: "When you were asked to bend, you crawled." It was a well-deser- ved rebuke. The pursuit of truth is the only religion that a jo-urnalist should owe allegiance to. [GO TOP]
Sadanand Menon With Intent to Gag After over twenty-five years in journalism, I cannot escape either the premise or the conclusion that Indian media is entirely distorted by overt and covert forms of censorship which are integral to its very structure. Recent public revelations by senior newspaper editors at a Press Club meeting in New Delhi, about the pressures brought on them to censor/ suppress several stories related to Kargil, to Operation Vijay and to the human and material losses suffered by India -- while allotting considerable space to the gratuitous hot air of ‘strategy analysts’-- surely makes one disbelieve our status as an open and ‘free information’ society. Not surprisingly, post-Pokharan II and right through ‘Operation Vijay’, voluntary media jingoism which thrives on its own triumphal tone and the deliberate obliteration of all other voices, has been the preferred mode of mainstream media. All the jump-cuts in my own career in journalism have been provoked by the persistence of censorship. Joining the desk of the Madras edition of a leading national daily, I was soon its regular film critic for Tamil/ Hindi/ English films. Being an unabashed fan of former Filmfare assistant editor S.J.Banaji, whose acerbic approach to film criticism sought to raise the level of debate/ discussion/ reflection around cinema rather than pander to its natural cosmetic and consumerist tendencies, I too explored every critical mode in the 400 to 700 words format to treat it as a genre of pedagogical entertainment. In less than six months my highly respected news editor, under pressure from the ad department, handed me an edit room reprimand for "hurting the feelings" of theatre-owners and distributors who brought advertisement revenue to the paper. I was served a firman to "tone down". This turn of events wounded more than just cocky, fresh-into-the-profession pride. It turned me quite suspicious of the intentions of the newspaper business itself vis-a-vis ‘truth’, ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’. What about the "hurt feelings" of audiences victimised by bad cinema, I asked? The silence was censorious. One couldn’t help concluding then that mainstream media had deep vested interest in superficiality and mediocrity. Having no mechanism for grooming young reporters/ writers to look sharper and write better, the media merely takes the line of least resistence to discourage and stifle anything out of the ordinary. Quickly disillusioned, I shifted my critical impulses to English theatre -- where there was no danger of interference from commercial interests. However, there were so many self-important wives of IAS officers whiling their time doing ‘English theatre’, that I was destined to hear the phrase, "tone down", once again. Though significant, all this was kid stuff. Less than an year into the job, in 1974, I volunteered to do some pieces for my paper on police repression in railway workers’ colonies during the all-India railway strike and the resultant blanket of fear under which the striking workers’ families lived. After extensive field work, double checking all facts and talking to a wide range of affected people, I wrote three pieces meant to be run as front- page anchors on consecutive days. All it took was one phone call from the news editor to the commissioner of police to seek his reaction, to kill all the stories. I was told the stories would affect the morale of policemen. The sheer chicanery of this took my breath away. It still required a few more run-ins with the Southern Railway general manager at his daily press briefings to clarify for me the huge distortions in the media coverage of the nation’s biggest and most important workers’ strike. Even more pathetic was the total lack of editorial planning and preparation -- its sheer attitude -- to the coverage of the strike. Journalism seemed like such a casual, ad hoc activity, operating largely as a mouthpiece of authority. Here, ‘authority’ seemed to be the sole criterion for ‘truth’. This was exposed with even greater vehemence just one more year later when Mrs.Gandhi declared Emergency and officially imposed press censorship. While many major and minor newspapers, to their credit, greeted this with ‘blank edits’, one must also add that in newsrooms that I knew, there was jubilation with reporters dancing on table-tops celebrating the fact that they no more needed to slog about ‘gathering’ news, that news would henceforth be ‘hand-outs’. Censorship was interpreted as making the reporter’s life more laid-back. That was when I first bid good-bye to full-time journalism. Of course, the manner in which Emergency censorship was resisted and fought is a saga in itself. Proprietors, publishers, editors, reporters, columnists, cartoonists, photographers, typesetters, all did their glorious bit; not to speak of the sheer energy of the nationwide underground press (the Indian ‘samizdat’ or literature outside censorship) that was written, produced and distributed in the most challenging of ways. The post-Emergency spring thunder in ‘investigative’ journalism and the mushrooming of fresh media initiatives contributed to both glamorising the profession as well as setting it up, at last, as big business. Besides becoming cash cows, the big media houses also became an open plaything of specific political agendas, developing a candid nexus, and changing the very vision and direction of journalism in India. From idealism to secure careerism was a decade-long process. With cleverer investment strategies and circulation drives, with scientific mopping up of ad revenues and with brazen commoditisation of their ‘brands’, a new breed of newspaper proprietors emerged, who have in the last decade, comprehensively corporatised the journalistic profession. They don’t bat an eyelid today, in the Madras edition of a prominent national daily, when management circulates notes requiring journalists to wear ‘sober ties’ and ‘closed shoes’. Along with individual perks, contracts, number-lock brief cases and swipe card registration of attendance, the journalist today can easily pass off for a marketing executive or the front office manager of a five-star hotel. My own encounters with official machineries of control and curtailment of freedom of expression continued for the next two decades, in all kinds of farcical and severe ways -- from being beaten up and having cameras smashed by cops, receiving threatening calls, being accused of ‘seditious’ writing, being blocked by the army from meeting riot victims, having an artistic film I collaborated in axed by the government, and so on. I never saw it as particularly debilitating as it also motivated one to fight against it often with positive results. As outstanding international journals like Index on Censorship reveal, there is hardly a decline in the quantum of arm-twisting and media manipulation the world over. As Noam Chomsky would point out, anyway it is all part of a massive exercise in "manufacturing consent". At the the same time, the global resistence to all this too has acquired collective vitality and momentum. Today I have come to regard ‘official’ censorship and infringements of the rights of freedom of speech as evils that can be named and fought. They no longer afflict or threaten or cripple you with some medieval fear. Today you know you are not isolated and alone in resisting and opposing such limiting tendencies. You also see it as an essential tussle -- the battle to open up and expand the limits to ‘free speech’. There is also a whole new area of as-yet ‘open’ information pipeline on the Internet that makes one imagine a future democracy of information and knowledge. The real ‘censorship’, if it can be called that, the real curtailment of ideas/ thought/ expression today, in the era of ‘open markets’, is coming from another quarter -- from private owners of media. The shifting of media monopolies from governments to private mavericks has led to a global ‘Murdochisation’-- the rapid and predatory cannibalisation of a variety of forms of print media into stereotyped products of, not information, but entertainment. This certainly represents an extreme distortion of the idea of ‘freedom of speech’. The supplanting of broadsheet content with tabloid content -- what is being described as ‘broadloidisation’-- is truly an exercise by media monopolists in cramping mind and thought, quite unprecedented in the history of the print media. When governments exercised their awesome control and hold over news/ newsprint/ ads/ taxes, journalists and their organisations fought do-or-die battles to win major space for the cause of ‘freedom of expression’. Today, the media barons have taken over and are redefining media content in whimsical and vandalistic ways, reducing the profession to an extension of advertising. But, now, there is nothing the journalists or their associations can do about it. The battle for ‘openness’ and ‘freedom’ is, by definition, reserved against repressive state machineries with vested interest in denying ‘freedoms’. But when johnny-come-lately media moghuls -- who also now style themselves as editors-in-chief -- get into the act to define the prime concern of their brands as "sunshine" or "froth", or "celeb leisure" or "food-and-fuck" stories, there is nothing journalists can do anymore except silently participate or, equally silently opt out. In my personal case too, this was one assault on my sensibility that I could protest against only by resigning -- when the Bennet Coleman group management pushed to redefine my role as ‘arts editor’ to some sort of a loosely defined ‘glamour editor’. Characteristically, in such cases, there was absolutely no support from anyone in the editorial fraternity of the group, except the three young colleagues in my department who resigned en masse. Unlike on earlier occasions, this was a bloodless exit. A journalist colleague explained it to me: "The media is no longer a brave vehicle for free information. Today its prime business is ‘selling space’. So it is the owners who will decide what they will sell in that space. It’s like as if from a shop where I used to sell religious literature till yesterday, I suddenly begin to sell pornography. Only, I might spend some time and money to project pornography as truly spiritual material." So, if media satraps device strategies for mopping up ad revenues from global cosmetic giants through a blatant projection of semi-clad models, beauty queens and luxury life-styles on the front pages and, even more aggressively, in the glossy, multi-colour supplements, it really heralds the end of an era in which information and informed opinion/ comment/ analysis was held sacrosanct. It signals a full-blown commoditisation of information, which is directly antithetical to the press’ claims to freedom. As for ‘arts’, we should not forget that the first freedom of the media too is its freedom NOT to be a business. Once media barons opt to treat news and ‘intelligent’ coverage on a par with candyfloss confectionery, it follows they too are liable under laws of trade and commerce (like MRTP or quality control) and should not be sympathised with in the name of ‘press freedom’. One would be hard-pressed today to defend most mainstream media vehicles on grounds of championing the cause of an open society. If at all, they are only busy narrowing (even restricting) space for dealing with issues of vital concern to our society. It is this form of ‘internal censorship’, galloping like a virulent cancer through the entrails of our media, that I find more deadly and devastating today. It is contributing to a voluntary flight of concerned writers/ thinkers from the mainstream media which is, maybe, more pernicious than jailing journalists. Prisons and draconian laws we can fight through political, legal and syndicalist equipment. But we seem to lack the equipment to fight the rapid -- and deliberate -- moronisation of the media. The old form of censorship only stamped across the paper. This one stamps across the practise, the very soul, of the media. Obviously, a new form of non-profit minded media ownership has to emerge before we can even begin to postulate ‘freedom of expression’. [GO TOP]
Sashi Kumar Their
Television and The development of television in India, ever since the advent of direct broadcast technology in the mid-eighties, seems to proceed along two contradictory lines. On the one hand there is the palpable fact of the globalisation of the technology and a homogenisation of form and content. On the other, there is the democratising impulse again innate in the technology and the way it is played out as well as in the manner in which the content is received and assimilated. The MNC image of television that is being consolidated and the corporate cultural values the media therefore becomes subject to, are reflected in names like Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner who have wrested it from its regional or ‘national’ moorings and vested it with a standardised quality-tested character. Indeed, ‘Murdochism’ in this sense is a throw-back to the ‘Fordism’ that was the hallmark of American industrialism. Henry Ford’s car factory was to exemplify the assembly-line production method and organisational principle of twentieth century industrialism, so much so that even Stalin relied on this model in the industrialisation of the Soviet Union, even if Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant caricature of it (as the worker programmed to fix nuts and bolts on the assembly line in Modern Times) betrayed its non-creative and dehumanising character. Ford’s famous dictum that ‘any customer can have a car painted any colour as long as it is black’ is further indicative of the notional choice such a dispensation affords. In much the same manner Murdochism, in a generic sense, sets the agenda and the menu for television today. There is a make-belief of choice in the fare purveyed while the reality is that a set of stereotypes, which emphasise cosmetic ‘commonalities’ of a virtual class of global television-viewers and ignore or wish away the ground reality of ‘differences’ in cultural context and experience is perpetuated. This homogenising thrust is reinforced by the ongoing ‘convergence’ of the three broad sectors of (a) broadcasting and the movie industry, (b) newspaper and the publishing industry and (c) computer and cyberspace, all of which could in the not-too-distant future be delivered to the consumer on a single screen. In a post-cold war unipolar world the so-called globalisation of the information sector is tantamount to the accession and celebration of an Americanised world-view which incorporates regional variants to the extent that they subscribe to the larger scheme of things. Indeed the process by which that larger scheme is forged in the United States itself has been meticulously argued in the path-breaking work by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, tellingly titled Manufacturing Consent. There is in the US, the authors argue, an implicit nexus between the mainstream media and the administration in ‘manufacturing’ consent on crucial matters of war and foreign policy which safeguard the American-centric global agenda: The acquisitions and mergers that mark the telecommunications industry, the Hollywoodisation that has virtually killed or subsumed every other cinema in the world, the neo-colonial drive by the US into new information markets (south and south-east Asia and China), in the information age. Seen against this background the emerging television landscape in India makes more sense than as just a welter of channels and mushrooming cable TV operators. Programming types fall into slots of various mimetic types: desi versions of the sitcom, chat or talk or game show, glamorous mannequin-like news presentations and reportages with little depth and less breadth interspersed staccato-like with the unavoidable ads, promos and fillers. Intelligence, let alone information in a substantive sense, is at a low premium in all this exercise aimed, it would seem, to wrap the viewer reassuringly in a cocoon of self-deception. In a simplistic elaboration of participative -- some even call it interactive -- television, a host of tele-quiz type shows are unleashed across channels where the intent of garnering the maximum involvement of the most numbers translates into posing such challenging questions as "Who is the President of India?" or "What is the capital of the country?"-- and the winners, of course, are drawn by lots given the deluge of correct answers. Current affairs or topical issue-based discussions and chat shows are more body than mind language so that the recall you have of the programme is how so and so gestured rather than what so and so said. The first flush of independent television experience in the country was, and still is to a large extent, dominated by feature films and film-based programmes, whose ‘Indianness’ was a common denominator, even if a low one. The pushier channels stepping out of this domineering influence of the cinema seem far more mired in an identity crisis. Even the romanticised image and idea of an India that is left out there in the dark, but where the overwhelming majority of its people live and struggle, which the average Indian cinema gave us, is fading out as the channels try to move out of such cinema-based fare and depend more and more instead on American programme stereotypes. The idea of an Indian television identity is thus a chimera given the vast scale and fast pace of hybridisation. Indeed it has been argued that the very concept of nationhood, more than just as a geo-political entity, stands subverted by the pervasive and borderless reach of television. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc as well as of the Berlin wall had been hastened as much by these signals from the skies as by the contradictions on the ground. However different the social and cultural context in India, the fragility of a system that denies basic necessities to the vast majority of the population even as consumerism on television further alienates its miniscule beneficiaries from that silent mass cannot be overstated. Coke and Pepsi and washing machines and cooking ranges cannot be the norm of life even as in numerous villages across the country women trek long distances to fetch drinking water or gather firewood. There is thus a fractured reality, in a televisual sense, both in terms of the notion of the nation as well as in terms of a greater alienation of its people. The sheer plurality of national channels over the last decade has not meant any real democratisation except in a purely structural sense, nor any real advance in terms of evolving an Indian identity of diversity. What we see is more of the same, with the American television idiom taking over to boot: an idiom which, as former managing director of the BBC, John Tusa, points out, is expressed in a series of antitheses -- of "more choice but less diversity; more information but less knowledge; more action but less news; more gratification but less satisfaction; more viewers but fewer audiences; more entertainment but less engagement; more immediacy but less depth; more in the present, less in the past; more up to the minute, but less tradition; more on demand, less to wait for". If these antitheses were to reflect the future trend of broadcasting, Tusa goes on, "then television and radio would have largely ceased to be media of expression and communication as we have come to know them, and would instead have become more like any other public utility. TV and radio on tap; programmes on demand; running hot and cold information, entertainment and education. ... Gas, water, electricity, the media -- all will be just a question of guaranteeing a safe, reliable and massively increasing supply at ever-decreasing cost." The only space yet relatively untouched in India by this process of acculturation is that occupied by the regional channels. The fact that what we mean by regional channels is until now the channels in the south is another matter and a comment on the weightage that the north-as-nation enjoys. The southern channels do continue to maintain a distinctive identity, are local and target-specific in their concern and language of communication and are willing to experiment with forms that are derived from the folk subconscious. There is a sense of belonging which evades the so-called national channels. Participative programmes with real people speaking out their minds in their own setting are a sobering contrast to the inbreeding ritual of overfamiliar faces saying the same things over and over again. Not that this area is not in danger of erosion. The global players are eyeing this regional market and it is difficult for the local media to resist their acquisitive commercial drive, especially in a situation where the state seems to adopt an unconsidered but studious hands-off policy. But it is a moot point whether the special demands of this regional mileau can be met as easily as in the case of the more amorphous national channels. If television and its experience, present and future, in the country seem a transnational trap from which there is no escape, there is some hope in the redeeming nature of the technology itself. Because at a subliminal level it also alters the way we see and draw meanings in contemporary reality. If the traditional way to think of a decisive action was articulated around the three tenses -- past, present and future, the television state of consciousness propels us towards a two-tense system -- real time and differed, or replay, time. The segmentation of perceived reality through television because of the multiple channels and channel switching and zapping replaces our conventional sense of ‘flow’ of information with one of simultaneity of grasp. Such segmentation moreover defies textual hierarchisation and total authorship of text. The consumers or viewers constantly redefine the information purveyed so that the intended message is often not the received message. Newer modes of anchoring and presentation also make for a degree of self-reflexivity ( as when, say, the DJs on Channel V or MTV speak to the cameraperson or the recordist behind the camera) so that a space for critical rethink is engendered. There is with the increasing habit of television and the natural urge to critically assimilate it, a growing contradiction between television’s status as ‘authored text’ and its apparent ‘unwrittenness’ that allows the viewer access to the author’s role in meanings. In this sense reading television between the lines becomes both a necessity and an inevitable consequence of continued participative viewing, thereby making for a media of semiotic democracy and an agent of diversity and difference. [GO TOP] |
