MEDIA MATTERS
Growing intolerance
SEVANTI NINAN
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Keeping up with trends in South Asia, assaults on the press have been on the increase in India too.
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Photo: AFP
Paying a heavy price: A Pakistani journalist beaten up during a protest rally.
India is succumbing to what has been a malaise all around her: frequent assaults on the press. Sri Lanka has had a rough year so far, so has Nepal, which averages an incident a week. Last week, a district court there ordered a compensation of Rs. 10,
000 for a journalist beaten up two-and-a-half years ago, while deciding that his assailant, a police inspector, did not merit any punishment. Pakistan saw 11 incidents in June of attacks on CD shops and media persons, mostly the former. There have been a total of 61 incidents there this year, recorded by the Pakistan Press Foundation, most of them expressions of fundamentalist ire at television and video. Such attacks as are there on journalists are violent: seven have died in the first six months of this year, several have been injured.
So seven developments relating to press freedom in India in June may be outrageously high by India standards, but par for the course if you compare with our neighbours. South Asia has helped to keep press freedom organisations in the West in business for some time now, it is regarded as one of the most dangerous parts of the world to work in. Now, with a little help from some of our Chief Ministers, the world’s largest democracy is contributing its bit to those dismal statistics.
Last month’s tally saw two threats to journalists or writers emanating from Gujarat, two from Maharashtra, one incident each in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala and one development from UP which indicated that there had been pressure from the State Government on two newspapers there, both from the same group.
A new morality
Each incident asserts that freedom of speech, extended to writing, is not to be tolerated. If you write exposes against a police chief, he will slap various charges against you — defamation, criminal conspiracy, sedition. If you criticise a section of the population for its politics of hate in an edit page article, the police register a charge of criminal offence against you. If you speculate that all the problems in a State must have been solved since it has chosen to embark on a mammoth statue building project in mid-ocean, your home is attacked. If you criticise another leader for dynamiting structures and statues that were built at a cost to the exchequer, you risk her wrath with all that entails. If you write of a dalit political organisation that it has “hired leaders” and “hired agitations”, your office is set upon by goons. If you retaliate by beating an effigy and burning it, you are arrested by the police. And most ironic of all, if you so much as land up to cover political groups attacking each other in a public place, they turn on you and beat you up.
The message is that the agents of State, be they politicians in power or policemen, have a low threshold of tolerance for criticism. They will hit back with violence and arrest. End of argument. Don’t kid yourself about the power of the pen, they don’t recognise it. Politicians are discovering they don’t need the press. Mayawati won an election without it, pretty much. They find that they can become the press themselves. My son has a multi-edition newspaper that reaches all corners of the State, Andhra Chief Minister Rajasekhara Reddy will say. Why do I need you?
Growing irrelevance?
Constitutional guarantees then, are up against a new political morality. If the lawless can become lawmakers because they have been voted into power, they don’t need the support of the press. And if they don’t need them they don’t need to tolerate them either when they become pesky.
(Of course, sometimes this new morality rebounds. When you become the press yourself you too face intolerance of your media practice. One of the two incidents in Maharashtra last month concerned the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna. It caricatured Narayan Rane on its front page and had to suffer attacks on its office and burning of its copies from Rane’s supporters.)
The irony is that in the long run we might have to be grateful for these assertions of intolerance. The more serious danger is not that freedom of the press is under threat, but that the press, free or otherwise, could become increasingly irrelevant. Corrupt and criminal politicians get elected, and re-elected. News organisations have been discovering that for their audience corruption is no longer an issue. That is why they serve up crime, astrology and god men. People don’t care about exposes any more. When nexuses are in place and cannot be shaken, media exposes are like water off a duck’s back. People simply accept that they have to negotiate new realities.
It is worth asking why there is no genuine public outcry against periodic attacks on the press. Because there is too much media around for it to seem endangered? Or because “media” no longer connotes what the word press used to?
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