Inside Track: Emergency Tactics
This June marks the 50th anniversary of the Emergency, a black mark in India's history when Indira Gandhi used sledge hammer tactics to silence the media. Even before the Emergency proclamation was signed, electricity supply to Delhi newspapers was shut off. Censorship was imposed and guidelines were so rigid that not a line on the mass arrests of Opposition politicians, censorship and shutting down of publications could be carried. When The Indian Express displayed a blank space in its editorial column to convey subtly to the readers the ugly reality behind the scenes, the censor decreed that in future, no blank spaces or quotes of famous personalities would be permitted in editorials.
Nothing could be published on Parliament, except statements on behalf of the government, and the name and affiliation of the MPs who spoke. I & B Minister V C Shukla had police inducted into the Central Information Service to keep a close watch on journalists. Foreign correspondents were told to either sign a document to adhere to the government's media guidelines or leave. National Herald editor Chalapathi Rao, after a meeting with Shukla and his fellow editors, remarked to Sharda Prasad, Indira's media adviser, 'I have not seen such a performance of toadies even at the height of the British Raj.''
A question often posed is, can India have an Emergency-style repression of the media again? A total blackout of news, as happened between 1975 and 1977, is no longer possible since sources of information dissemination have multiplied. During the Emergency, there was only one government controlled TV channel, Doordarshan, and a few hundred newspapers. Fifty years on, the print media is just one segment in the huge spectrum of news operations. There are over 400 privately owned TV news channels. The Internet is crowded with messages from bloggers and vloggers on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook et al. The WhatsApp universe is available to anyone with a cell phone. Today, no matter how powerful a government and the number of media advisers, spokespersons and trolls — the equivalent of yesteryear censors — the narrative cannot be controlled if the facts do not match up. Even during the Emergency, news spread by word of mouth. But that has not deterred governments from attempting to control news dissemination, although the methods employed are more subtle and sophisticated, not in-your-face as with the Emergency.
In my long years as a journalist, I have discovered one rule of thumb, that the more powerful the leader, the more ruthless he or she is likely to be in suppressing uncomfortable facts. For instance, towards the end of Rajiv Gandhi's tenure, I worked for a newspaper started by a major business house which was wound up practically overnight, ostensibly sold to a vernacular newspaper chain, because the coterie around the PM decreed that the daily had crossed the line in its investigative reporting. When governments are weak, particularly when they survive through shaky coalitions, which was largely the case between the regimes of PM Narasimha Rao, from 1991, to PM Manmohan Singh, ending in 2014, the media was particularly spunky. Incidentally, while the mild-mannered Singh as PM was often targeted by journalists, most of them refrained from offending the Congress's first family. There have been godi media in all regimes.
Today we have the most powerful PM since Indira. If the yearly listing of Reporters without Borders is to be taken seriously, India has been pegged a lowly 151 on the World Press Freedom Index, down from the 80th spot in 2014. The opaque methodology of rating is highly suspect. It is based on subjective opinions of anonymous individuals, many with a deep suspicion of the BJP's Hindutva nationalistic agenda. Can India, with its plurality of opinions, news outlets and cacophony of critical voices even in the midst of a war, really rank lower than countries like Qatar, Rwanda and Congo?
My own methodology to assess the index of media independence is based on three factors. The media should be financially stable and not dependent on government largesse. It should not be a stakeholder in business interests which could conflict with its role as a purveyor of truth. (It is therefore troubling that India's two richest men, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, have expanding media empires.) The chill factor is another impediment to a free press. The media sometimes self-censors for fear of reprisal from the state which has been known to book journalists under non-applicable laws. The third indicator for a healthy press is the degree of the government's accessibility to the media. We may be better positioned today as regards media freedom than during the Emergency, but is that good enough? Do we fully reflect Tagore's immortal poem, 'Where the mind is without fear…''
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