What then PM Manmohan Singh told I&B minister about media approach

Then prime minister Manmohan Singh's brief to his new information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari on what should be the government's approach to the media was simple -- it should be an essay in persuasion, not coercion.

The anecdote was narrated by Tewari during an interaction at PTI as he stressed the need to fix the "completely flawed" revenue models of the media and asserted that the The Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, 2024 was not the answer to the problems plaguing the flow of news and information.

Tewari, who was the Information and Broadcasting Minister in UPA-II from October 2012 to May 2014, said that when he became the minister he asked then prime minister Manmohan Singh what should be the government's approach vis-a-vis the media at a time when the government was at the receiving end of the "most ghastly, irresponsible and malicious" media coverage at that particular point in time.

"So I asked him what should be our approach to the media and he said that 'it should be an essay in persuasion and not an essay in coercion'. And he added that, 'If you were to put yourself in the shoes of the Opposition and if let us suppose coercion becomes the order of the day, how is it that you would feel'," Tewari said.

"I have reflected on this statement at length over the past 10 years and I come to only one conclusion that you need to have an inherently democratic temperament to be able to maintain the equilibrium, notwithstanding what you are being subjected to in terms of an all out assault at times of unverified and malicious allegations, a campaign of calumny and innuendo," the Congress MP from Chandigarh said.

Tewari said he believes that intrinsically Manmohan Singh, who headed the United Progressive Alliance-I and UPA-II government from 2004-2014, had imbibed the basic fundamentals of what running a democratic State is all about.

Asked about the proposed Broadcasting Services Bill, Tewari said curtailing freedom of speech in the name of fixing aberrations is not the solution as the real problem lies somewhere else.

"Ten years have gone by but the time that I spent in the information and broadcasting ministry gave me a chance to see the back end of the media upclose. I believe that the solution to the problem at hand is not the broadcast bill," he told PTI.

"If you remember when Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi was the information and broadcasting minister, a broadcast service regulation bill was brought in. The biggest issue and I am not talking about any particular organisation is that the revenue models of the media are completely flawed."

"Till you do not fix those revenue models you cannot fix the front-end problem for which you want to bring in this regulation architecture that will not achieve its objective," he said.

Asserting that TRPs were a flawed index, Tewari said if one decides advertising of Rs 25,000-30,000 crore on a flawed index then you have ensured that the medium of information and publicity is based on dog-eat-dog principle. "The real challenge is to work with the media industry to somehow fix the revenue models of the media industry," he said.

Tewari said it was for this reason that the ministry under him had brought in the entire process of digitisation with the objective to mitigate some of these problems and the revenue model gets fixed.

"Unfortunately that has not happened in the past 10 years," he added.

The government had earlier this month said it would hold further consultations for preparing a fresh draft of the broadcasting bill, amid concerns in some quarters over restrictions on social and digital media space in the proposed law.

The draft Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, circulated by the government among a few stakeholders, drew criticism from media bodies such as DigiPub and the Editors Guild of India which claimed that digital media organisations and civil society associations were not consulted on the move.

The Congress leader asserted that unfortunately in the past 70 years of India's democratic experiment "we have not really made a transition from the mai-baap sarkaar to a belief in the participatory form of democracy".

"You go down to any district of the country, the deputy commissioner is the lord and master of everything that he or she surveys. There would be a very courageous journalist to challenge the diktats of that lord and master," Tewari said.

"If you look around India especially South Asia. There seems to be something intrinsically feudal in our DNA. That manifests itself in various ways. Look at Pakistan, sending the PMs to jail is a national pastime out there. You look at what's been happening in other parts of the neighbourhood. So fundamentally may be because the democratic experiment if you measure it in the relativity of time, is very nascent," he said.

Tewari said the prevailing feeling of intimidation is not limited to journalists and as a columnist, he also cannot write in as carefree a manner as 10 years ago.

"Not because I fear the government or any person but when you create a climate whereby everything critical is going to land up in some court of law through a defamation matter... it does have a chilling effect on free speech," he said.

"That oppressive feeling of the big brother watching you and by extension forces which are inherently or intrinsically illiberal having the upper hand in the larger public discourse thereby being able to stifle a contra opinion is the product of a culture that we have created," he said.