The Tamil Nadu government’s move to approach the Supreme Court seeking a review of its recent judgment barring the use of pictures of political leaders in government advertisements is retrograde and unnecessary. The court’s verdict restricting the list of dignitaries whose photographs are permissible on government advertisement material to the President, the Prime Minister and the Chief Justice of India, is a significant step in eliminating the partisan use of government resources to gain political mileage. Indeed, if there is a flaw in the judgment, it is in the exception made in favour of the holders of these three offices. Even though it says the President, Prime Minister or CJI could themselves decide on the inclusion of their pictures in advertisements, there really is no need for anyone’s image in such material if disseminating information is the sole purpose. The Tamil Nadu government has argued that there should be parity between the Centre and the States, and that the judgment, by privileging the dignitaries at the Centre, violates the principle of federalism. It is indeed an attractive argument if one contends that the same privilege should be extended to the Governor, Chief Minister and Chief Justice of the High Court so that there is Centre-State parity. However, the spirit of the verdict is to take government advertising out of the domain of partisan politics. In course of time, the apparent disparity should also give way to a universal prohibition of the use of pictures of any dignitary.
It is disappointing that the court did not accept a key recommendation made by a three-member committee that there should be special curbs on government advertisements during election time. This could have been an important guideline that would further purify the election process. The court may be confident that if the government adhered to norms there will be no need to adopt special, election-eve restrictions, but it should have taken note of the propensity of the political class to seek to gain mileage by delivering politically loaded messages using the official machinery during election time. In a democracy, the main reason for a government to issue advertisements is dissemination of essential and useful information about its functioning, its schemes and projects and their benefits. There is no real need to confer on any individual the privilege of being projected in official publicity material to give the impression that a scheme or measure owes its existence to the generosity of that individual. One can discern in the Tamil Nadu government’s review petition only an eagerness to overcome any legal impediment to its known penchant for projecting the ruling party leader as the sole benefactor behind its welfare programmes.
