The fear of censorship in Indian media

Soutik Biswas Delhi correspondent

11 August 2015

George Bernard Shaw once said that "censorships exist to prevent anyone
from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions".
A recent outcry in India shows just how many fear this in Narendra Modi's
government after it accused three TV news networks of violating broadcasting
regulations by airing interviews that criticised last month's execution of Yakub
Memon, the man convicted of financing the deadly 1993 Mumbai bombings. It even
threatened to cancel the licenses of the channels for violating broadcasting laws.
Memon's execution was controversial - there were reports that he had been betrayed
by Indian authorities after being coaxed into surrendering. He had also spent two
decades in prison as legal proceedings dragged on. His execution triggered a debate
on the death penalty and "selective justice" in India. His mercy pleas were rejected
twice by the president and appeals to suspend the execution were discarded by the
Supreme Court, the last time in an unusual early morning hearing.
But in what many journalists see as a crude form of censorship, a terse directive was
issued by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, which has Orwellian echoes
in a country that prides itself as the world's largest democracy. It argued the broadcast
interviews contained content which "cast aspersions against the integrity of the
president and judiciary".
So what offended?
In one of the interviews, a former lawyer of Memon was quoted as saying that one
man charged over the blasts had been pardoned by the courts despite playing a bigger
role in the bombings than Memon himself. "If you show this pardon to any person
outside India - UK authorities or US authorities or the best brains in the world as far
as criminal law is concerned - they will laugh at you," the lawyer said. "They will
laugh at you. They'll say, "Is this justice"?
Another apparently disrespectful interview was with a Mumbai underworld figure
who is at large and described as one of the masterminds of the bombings. Chhotta
Shakeel called up the channel to claim that Memon's execution was "legal murder".
The networks lost no time in taking umbrage at the directive, saying that the
government's reasoning was "questionable" and that they had followed ample selfregulation in covering terror-related incidents.
India's cable network laws already limit media coverage of anti-terror operations to
"periodic briefings" by government press officers until the operation ends. Top lawyer
Indira Jaisingh says the government "cannot fight surrogate battles" on behalf of
the President and the Supreme Court. "Long years ago, the Supreme Court said the air
waves belong to us all, and that free speech cannot be curtailed by the denial of a
licence to broadcast - something the government is trying to do," she wrote in Indian
news website The Wire.

'March of the democratators?'

One of the great ironies here is that the broadcasting ministry is run by Arun Jaitley also the finance minister - who is seen as a moderate face of the government and who,
according to a senior journalist, "believes in live and let live".
As an opposition student leader in the 1970's Mr Jaitley spent 19 months in prison
when Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties during the infamous Emergency and
imposed the harshest clampdown on media in the history of Independent India.
"Media censorship is not possible today because of technology," Mr Jaitley told a
gathering at a launch of a book on Emergency in June.
So why is Mr Modi's government issuing such fiats?
Part of the problem, say many, may have to do with Mr Modi himself - he prefers the
formality of clipped and controlled social media messaging and radio dialogues to the
informality of open and frank media interviews. In some ways, say his critics, he
conforms to a pattern set by leaders such as Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoan,
who, according to Joel Simon, author of The New Censorship: Inside the Global
Battle for Media Freedom, use their massive mandates to govern as dictators or
"democratators".
But it is also the case that Mr Modi has long preferred to interact with the public
directly, unmediated by journalists, and it is a strategy that has served him well,
winning him the adulation of many young Indians who identify with such direct
contact.
Mr Modi's office is also seen as one of the most centralised in recent history. "That is
where things are going wrong," says journalist Neerja Chowdhury. "You can't run a
country like India if you centralise power."
Senior journalist Shekhar Gupta writes that the "first indication that a government
is losing nerve or grip when it starts blaming and targeting the media".
It is absurd, he says, for the government to believe it can control the media today's
pell-mell world of social media. "A war on the news media causes any government
terrible, often terminal damage. It does no real harm to the media," he writes.
India, already, needs more press freedom than many of its democratic counterparts.
This year, it ranked a lowly 136 out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without
Borders World Press Freedom Index. Its ostensibly thriving media can often be an
an illusion.
But the biggest mystery is why a government with one of the most comfortable
majorities in Independent India feels the need to flex its muscles this way. Could it be
an early sign of insecurity?