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Silence of the Paper Tigers

How would the Indian media react if the Emergency were to be declared at midnight tonight, and if the Freedom of Speech and Expression guaranteed under Article 19 of the Constitution were to be suspended?

If witch-hunts were launched against magazines that refuse to parrot the establishment line…. If flimsy cases were foisted -- and dossiers built up -- on pesky newspaper journalists… If trouble-making publications were so harassed that they wouldn't be able to function much less survive… If foreign correspondents were summarily ordered to leave the country for filing not-so-glowing reports… If television channels were banned for showing the other side of a story… If small newspapers were dis-empanelled so that they wouldn't receive government advertising…

The good news is that it is a hypothetical question. The brazenness (and the eventual electoral backfiring) of Indira Gandhi's Emergency is still too fresh in the minds of our political masters to attempt a similar misadventure 27 years later. The bad news is that a subtler, more sophisticated method of muzzling the media has been mastered by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government.

Each of the 'Emergency' possibilities listed above -- and each of which had the votaries of Free Speech up in arms in 1975 -- has been (or is being) played out in news and board rooms across the country without so much as a squeak in protest. Guess who is the loser?

In silencing Outlook magazine with raids on its promoters (after it had exposed the Prime Minister's Office); in hassling Alex Perry over his passport (after his profile of Prime Minister Vajpayee in Time); in arresting Iftikhar Geelani under the Official Secrets Act and allowing him to be bashed up in Tihar Jail (after a published document on India's military presence in Kashmir was found on his laptop); in virtually driving Tehelka.com out of business by choking its funds-flow (after it sullied the BJP's clean image through the defence scandal); in ordering Al-Jazeera's India correspondent Nasir M Shadid to get out (after his reportage on Gujarat and Kashmir); in threatening a ban on Star News in Gujarat (after its coverage of the Muslim victims in Gujarat); in removing 3,000-odd small newspapers from the DAVP (Department of Audio Visual Publicity) list, the NDA has achieved all that Indira Gandhi did with none of the backlash.

Newspapers, magazines, television channels, web-zines… a peevish and paranoid NDA has clicked a perverse 'convergence' of punishment.

Thankfully, prior censorship of editorials, cartoons and news reports is still not upon us, but who needs that when all these retrograde measures have successfully signalled to reporters, editors and proprietors of the recalcitrant publications to fall in line, or else. Worse, this top-down approach -- by targetting the big English media vehicles in the urban centres -- has sent a message down to the smaller players lower down of what lies in store should they stray. Self-censorship is the order of the day; the emasculation is complete. Any wonder that, although we have been a free country for 55 years, 'Freedom House' terms our media only 'partly-free'?

Remember Thomas Jefferson? 'I would prefer a free press without a government than a government without a free press.'

That all this is happening in a regime whose No 2 famously said during the Emergency (the real one) that 'The Press crawled when it was asked to bend' should not escape notice. But what is even more troubling is that it is happening when an obscene number of journalists (real and alleged) are in its ranks as ministers, MPs, advisors, and what not. As a Delhi journalist, who is rumoured to be one of six scribes on his newspaper on whom dossiers have been readied following their attacks on the government, put it recently: journalism's gain is the NDA's loss. But, spare a thought for the wolves who had been ravaging journalism's vitals before they jumped fence.

World over, governments and their spin surgeons want a rosy picture to be painted in the media regardless of everything. So, the BJP-led government, which essentially believes in governance by media management, cannot be accused of doing something that others elsewhere have not. But it is the method that exposes the madness that has gripped its media-minders.

Heaven knows that we in the Indian media are not a perfect lot. Far from it. We accuse, allege, attribute, communalise, defame, exaggerate, glamorise, libel, play up, play down, slander, sensationalise, trivialise, twist, without a care in the world. But what is the correct way to correct that? To harass, intimidate, hunt us down and hound us out like ordinary criminals? Or to seek redress in the courts and in professional bodies like the Press Council? The answer should be obvious in a democracy; evidently it is not in the alliance of a party whose foot soldiers remind us of their contempt for the rule of the law every few days.

If you have a problem, confront us openly, sue us, take us to court, but stop this subterfuge. Was it Voltaire who said: 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it?'

On the one hand, it stands to reason that a party (and its alliance) whose only rationale for every act of omission and indiscretion has been to point fingers at '45 years of Congress rule' should be following in the footsteps of the grand old party they revile so often. And, on the other hand, for a set of people who find it so convenient to clothe everything in the national tricolour, it perhaps comes naturally to them to see the media not as the eyes and ears of the people that both of them serve, but as allies, adjuncts, even partners to the cause of cock-eyed nationalism that is their only figleaf.

This astoundingly naďve world-view -- which accounts for everything from demanding that journalists disclose their sources as was envisaged in the draft Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO), to bringing newspapers under the Consumer Protection Act as was mooted in Gujarat -- reduces the NDA's media policy to a pathetic Bush-ism: 'Either you are with us, or you are against us.' So it follows that if we are not with them, we must be raided, discredited, lampooned, manipulated, spammed, pummelled, victimised, kicked around, even eliminated if need be.

Built into this perverse logic is the belief that some how the government of the day, and its sponsors and puppeteers, are not responsible for the relentless stream of corruption, communal violence, embezzlement, inaction, incompetence, ineptitude, nepotism, sleaze, that the world has been witness to but the media? Not us, them!

Assuming that every ruling dispensation must be expected to resort to such desperate tactics to ensure that the public hears only what it wants it to know, just what is the media doing to protect its mandate? Individually, of course, few media houses can be expected to stand up. Between Indira G's Emergency and Advaniji's, the stakes have gotten so higher, no media house wants to play the martyr. Moreover, as against titans like Ramnath Goenka and Nikhil Chakravartty and Romesh Thapar, all we have are a bunch of intellectual pygmies prostrating at the temple of power, pelf, and fluff.

Crucially, unlike in the past, today's media bigwigs are part of the very power elite they have to report and comment on. So, the incentive in confronting and exposing what is happening to the media -- and as a result to public opinion -- is very small. On the other hand, quiet acquiescence could land a Rajya Sabha membership here, an ambassadorship there, an advisorship someplace else.

At least during Indira Gandhi's Emergency, as Mark Tully and Zareer Masani write in From Raj to Rajiv, 'The Indian Press, now controlled by strict censorship, lashed out at the corrupt, the blackmarketeers, the inefficient and the idle.' In this undeclared emergency, guess who's having a ball as the page 3 people run amok on the front page and pinpricks on soft targets are projected as earthshaking scoops?

What are the professional bodies -- the Editors' Guild, the Indian Newspaper Society, the Foreign Correspondents Club, et al -- doing to ensure that media professionals are not completely stripped and paraded naked for the cardinal crime we are committing of carrying the message?

The blatancy of what the BJP-led alliance is doing and the smooth efficacy with which it has achieved its objective of silencing dissent and debate on crucial issues has two other pitfalls. One, it paves the way for future regimes to manage the media and manage minds. And two, and more importantly, it shows other parties and governments in the states that accountability is a bad word and that this is the way of ensuring no one asks uncomfortable questions. Already it is showing. In Jayalalitha's Tamil Nadu, reporters were barred from meeting Vaiko. In A K Antony's Kerala, television channels have been disallowed from covering legislature proceedings.

On the 27th anniversary of the Emergency in New Delhi in June, Prime Minister Vajpayee said: 'I am sure the people of the country will never allow it to happen again.' But given the smooth manner in which the Emergency's worst excesses are being duplicated with none of the outcry, do the people even know? Does the media even have the guts to tell them? If the BJP and its NDA partners had devoted as much time, space, attention and effort as they have in bringing the media to book on any one fundamental problem facing India, believe me, we would have emerged a far better country in the eyes of the world.

We need to sit up in alarm at what's happening because even as recently as the POTO standoff, the Law Commission was cited by the very people who have the least regard for it, to tell us that the rights and privileges of a pressman in India are no different from the rights and privileges of an ordinary citizen of India. If the media, with all its power and reach, can be treated with such disdain; if the media is not free to report what it sees and hears, unhindered; if the media is not free to seek accountability from the government of the day, how free is the ordinary citizen we serve? And how free is the democracy that hosts us all?

Krishna Prasad