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Indian Express
12 hours ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
From Emergency to now, how censorship became a competitive sport
When the Emergency was declared in 1975, the Hindi newspaper Vir Pratap, like most Indian media, had an editorial problem. First, they tried to leave the editorial space blank. The government said that it was not permissible. Nor were they allowed to fill it with inspirational quotes, even from icons like Mahatma Gandhi or Rabindranath Tagore. This was not a time the government wanted anyone to reiterate Tagore's 'Where the mind is without fear'. 'They said you cannot leave the editorial blank. You have to fill it up,' says Chander Mohan, who, along with his daughter Jyotsna, authored the book Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper. 'That's when my father started writing his life history.' His father, Virendra, had quite a checkered history when it came to speaking truth to power. Accused of making bombs, he had been imprisoned with Bhagat Singh. The Urdu newspaper Pratap had been launched by his father, Mahashay Krishan, in 1919 in Lahore two weeks before the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Two days after its launch, the British shut it down for a full year. 'The paper was blunt and we were frequently shut down; the editors, my father and grandfather, were imprisoned and fines were imposed repeatedly,' recalls Mohan. As long as the British were ruling India, the narrative was straightforward: Good guy desi Davids taking on bad guy sahib Goliaths. After Independence, it got murkier. The good guys and bad guys now looked the same. The boundaries of freedom of expression felt less clear in free India. The Emergency was lifted in 1977, but the issues of censorship have morphed into a shape-shifting monster. Now, everyone competes in taking offence and banning books and films they deem offensive, the most famous example being the then Congress government's preemptive strike on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. That set off the 'Big Ban' Theory of everything. Satanic Verses recently returned to Indian bookstores, but that doesn't mean freedom of expression is in fine fettle. The battles, as Alice said in Wonderland, are getting 'curiouser and curiouser'. For example, the Central Board of Film Certification stalled the Malayalam film Janaki vs State of Kerala because it feels a woman who has been assaulted should not be given the name of someone revered as a Goddess. The irony is that Sita from the Ramayana is also a survivor, someone who was kidnapped and endured an Agnipariksha to boot. Instead of acknowledging the parallels the CBFC wants to draw a Lakshmanrekha as if to seal off all possible names of Sita, and one presumes, every other God and Goddess in the pantheon, from possible fictional contamination. That's a slippery slope. Can an out-and-out villain never be named Ram or Lakshmi henceforth? Would a modern-day CBFC take filmmaker Satyajit Ray and novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay to task because Durga in Pather Panchali steals a necklace? And how could a Durga be shown dying anyway? Sometimes names are chosen to make a point. Salman Rushdie deliberately named a bad-tempered bulldog in The Moor's Last Sigh as Jaw-Jaw after Jawaharlal. It upset the Congress, but little came of it. All of this harkens back to an old controversy about Deepa Mehta's 1996 film Fire, where angry protesters felt she had deliberately named the lesbian characters Radha and Sita in order to take an unsubtle dig at Hinduism. Now, taking offence and demanding censorship has become a competitive sport across the political spectrum. Most people protesting books have never read them. It's just a shortcut to political fame. And it does not require a state of Emergency because it's always open season, whether it's for a stand-up comic like Kunal Kamra or an Instagram influencer like Sharmishta Panoli. Even an apology and a deleted post are not remorseful enough. The issue is not really what they said. It is the political dividends to be gained by making an example of them. On the other hand, everyone knows that in an age of e-books and VPNs, a ban is hardly a hurdle for a book from reaching readers. And more Indians are now aware of a Malayalam film called Janaki v State of Kerala than ever before, thanks to the CBFC controversy. Meanwhile, the censorship story has an odd new avatar. According to media reports, the CBFC directed the makers of the new film Sitaare Zameen Par to include an inspirational quote from the Prime Minister in its opening disclaimer. 'Let us all build a society where no dream or goal is impossible,' says the Prime Minister. 'Only then will we be able to build a truly inclusive and developed India.' It's a fine sentiment and a laudable aspiration. It's just that at one time, censorship was about what one could or could not say. The new twist is that the censor board can now also tell one what one must say. Roy is a novelist and the author of Don't Let Him Know
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Business Standard
30-04-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: Ageing gains, trade, and the promise of renewal
Some mornings, when the city hasn't quite woken up, and even the news alerts hold their breath, do you hear them — birds scripting messages in a dialect of rustled wings and stretched silences. Watching them trace invisible sentences across the clouds, like they're trying to teach the sky how to speak in sighs. And in those murmurs above, do you sometimes think the world is trying to make sense of itself? That's what today's stories feel like, exhales in quiet codes. Let's dive in. Take the IMF's new view on ageing — the economic winds might now be an updraft. India's older generation, it turns out, is not retiring quietly. With 70-year-olds today cognitively matching 53-year-olds from two decades ago, the report nudges us to imagine workplaces filled with silver-haired problem-solvers and elder mentors in AI-equipped health hubs, notes our first editorial. It's a future where longevity is not a cost but capital. A continent away, another breeze shifted direction. Canada, newly under the leadership of Mark Carney, is learning to rephrase its diplomacy. Gone is Trudeau's standoffish tone; Carney's cautious yet hopeful notes suggest a change. After the deep freeze of 2023, when allegations over the Nijjar killing all but shattered bilateral ties, we might be witnessing the first syllables of a fragile reconciliation, as highlighted in our second editorial. Student visas, trade deals, Indo-Pacific strategy — all waiting for the skies to clear. Meanwhile, the world's trade thermals have grown choppy. Janak Raj writes that the US-China tariff squall may slow India's momentum in the short run but could also propel it into a stronger 'China-plus-one' orbit. It's like finding lift from turbulence — if India plays it right, this storm might push its textiles and tech into wider skies. But as Sabyasachi Saha points out, we can't just glide on someone else's wind. India's trade and tech ambitions need deeper wings — stronger R&D, tighter IP strategies, and a new pact between state and enterprise. The skies are wide, but to fly well, we need to build engines, not just kites. And then there's Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper, the newspaper that once roared from Lahore in Urdu's elegant script, now resurrected in pages by Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan. Vipul Mudgal reads it as a love letter to a paper that once spoke boldly when others whispered, a bird that sang even through prison bars and Emergency's silence.
Scroll.in
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Scroll.in
‘Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper': A thrilling account of a persistent voice of dissent in India
Chandar Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan's Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper opens with a tense and unfortunate moment in the history of Pratap, when its Jalandhar newspaper office became the target of a parcel bomb on June 24, 1983. Chandar Mohan had dismissed the tightly packed, difficult to open parcel when the peon first brought it into the office: 'Thinking that it must be the usual propaganda stuff that newspapers were being flooded with in those days'. However, 'The package had exploded – three employees were grievously injured, two of whom died in the nearby Civil Hospital'. Receiving a parcel bomb at a newspaper bureau was unprecedented, and the Pratap office became its unfortunate first victim. However, this terrible incident was immediately coded in the language of sacrifice. The authors record that Indresh Kumar, one of the employees who died, said on the way to the hospital, 'Sir, I have also made a sacrifice for the country.' This poignant snippet sets the stage for the book that presents the Urdu language daily Pratap and its Hindi language counterpart Vir Pratap as two of the most persistent voices of dissent in both pre- and post-partition India. Revolution and freedom The book's authors, journalists Chandar Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan, are very much part of the history of the newspaper that they set out to recount – Chandar Mohan ran the newspaper till it closed down in 2017, and his grandfather, Mahashay Krishan, established it in March 1919 in Lahore. Pratap' s story is interwoven with the story of the city's anti-colonial struggle. Mahashay Krishan's son Virendra was a college-going student when he encountered the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA). HSRA was a prominent revolutionary organisation boasting strident members like Chandra Shekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh and Raj Guru, revered household names today. The authors recount HSRA events from the point of view of Mahashay Krishan and Virendra. At several points in the book, the authors paint the figure of the revolutionary as exceptional – 'Indian revolutionaries led a life less ordinary'. However, the book's specific contribution lies in situating Virendra's story: he was one of the relatively minor protagonists in the constellation of glistening HSRA figures whose stories are often better documented and celebrated. Virendra was part of the sea of dissenting figures who grieved Lala Lajpat Rai's death following the brutal lathi charge in Lahore. He was also one of the students who was immediately arrested after prominent HSRA members carried out the murder of John P Saunders to avenge Lala Lajpat Rai's death. He was apparently taking an examination when Saunders was killed, but was immediately locked up as one of the perpetrators who carried out the murder. Here, the authors signal at another experience, far more common perhaps, of the revolutionary who, like Virendra, was many times young, able-bodied, never lacking in zealous anger or energy, but 'exhibiting the distance between their passion and experience'. Historians like Kama Maclean, Daniel Elam and Aparna Vaidik have in recent years engaged with the potent idea of uncertainty, tentativeness, and failure embedded in the anti-colonial revolutionary impulse: not all went to plan, yet it was significant and mattered. Virendra himself went to jail nine times in the anti-colonial struggle for freedom. The book brings to life some other vivid details of unknown almost-heroes and almost-foiled plans. The authors recount a plan that Virendra and his friends Durga Das and Ranbir made to bomb the ballroom at Lahore's Lawrence Gardens. They did the recce, found the execution too ambitious, and decided to target instead the Governor of Punjab. Of Virendra and friends, the only one who knew how to shoot was married with a one-year-old child, which disqualified him. The friends then recruited a student of Law at Punjab University called Kamala to do the deed. Kamala volunteered to learn shooting, but they ultimately dropped the plot because of Durga Das' misgivings: 'The three revolutionaries…would be branded cowards for using a woman for such a dangerous mission – more so if she were to name them'. The authorial voice turns sardonic here with respect to women's roles in these revolutionary spaces, writing: 'The time had not yet come, after all, for Bhagat Singh's female counterpart to rise'. Kamala remains entirely anonymous: she went by her pseudonym and promptly got married after this incident: 'the chapter of the mysterious Kamala ended there'. Witnessing history Another meaningful recovery the book makes is its lingering focus on language politics, particularly significant given that in contemporary Indian imagination, Hindi and Urdu have been neatly divided along religious lines. This is a book about pre- and post-partition Punjab and makes an evocative point about Punjab's relationship to Urdu, where it was widespread: 'In Punjab, if a report was not published in the Urdu press, it was not credible enough from an Indian nationalistic perspective'. Naturally, therefore, the Urdu Pratap came first, followed by the Hindi Vir Pratap. (It also must be noted that these newspapers are not related to Kanpur's better-known Pratap, under the editorship of Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi). The book is pieced together from a variety of sources: scholarly research, first-hand accounts, personal interviews, Virendra's memoir Ve Inqalabi Din (Destination Freedom) and Chandar Mohan's own memory of working in the company. One rich source is the newspaper/s itself, which readers can catch some tantalising glimpses of via accompanying images. For instance, Pratap 's editorials being left open as big blank white gaps during the Emergency serve as a spectacular source that palpably places Pratap 's protest against press censorship. However, given the undeniable access both authors possess to the primary archives, we find barely any information about what Pratap actually published through its century-long run. This gap should perhaps serve as an invitation to scholars and writers interested in an investigation of these newspapers. The book often reads like a thriller, with fearful twists and turns at every corner. It also reads hurriedly, as if it needed to be pieced together fast, and the narrative needed to run uninterrupted. It sometimes leads to giving us a strong sense of urgency about the time. This particularly holds true for the years a young Virendra was actively participating in revolutionary politics – his incarceration years make for poignant reading. At times, however, this urgent writing style also makes it difficult to follow. Overall, the book provides an accessible way to delve into the history of a notable newspaper house's anti-colonial struggle against the British in India.
Hindustan Times
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
The paper that roared: Book by Chander Mohan, daughter Jyotsna chronicles the legacy of ‘Pratap'
A compelling specimen of journalism as resistance, Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper traces the tumultuous journey of one of India's most fearless publications. Co-authored by father-daughter journalist duo Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan, the book turns the spotlight on the pivotal role of Urdu newspaper 'Pratap' and its Hindi counterpart 'Vir Pratap', which had a long and eventful history. Launched by Mahashay Krishan on March 30, 1919, and ably carried on by his son Virendra and later his grandson Chander, it was a torchbearer against the British Raj that covered all the major events during India's struggle for independence and after, until it wrapped up in 2017. In Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper, Chander and Jyotsna weave together the incidents and personal experiences of the paper's founder and editors, as well as landmark events of Indian history, from Independence to the Emergency and Operation Bluestar. 'The paper was not just reporting news; it was shaping the national conscience,' says Chander, who believes that the history of 'Pratap' and people related to it needed to be told. Asked if the authors see any parallels between the newspaper and contemporary journalism, they respond in negative. 'Not at all. Times have changed, readers have changed, and the profile of journalists has changed,' says Chander, who, along with his daughter, took more than two years to complete the book. Talking about the particular chapters that deeply resonate with him, Chander says, 'Though all chapters carry equal weight, two of them are important to me. The one that tells the story of the parcel bomb, which ripped through the Pratap's office in Jalandhar, claiming two lives in 1983, and the other one that explores the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Bhagat Singh.' For Jyotsna, the part of the book that delves into the period of militancy in Punjab is the one close to her heart. 'My grandfather's first-hand accounts were exceptional. And you know a good story when you hear one. It became pertinent to us to document those stories and bring them out for the people to read,' she adds. A tribute to the power of the press, Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper is available at local bookstores and Amazon.
