R. K. MISRA: Media Gag And Mulish Drag (Modi and censorship)
What was hard to endure is sweet to recall. Union Home
Minister Rajnath Singh who assured Parliament that the Nirbhaya documentary,’
Storyville-India’s Daughter’ would not be aired in the country or abroad,cut a
sorry figure. BBC ignored the notice,disputed the Information and
Broadcasting ministry’s claim and aired it. Downloaded extensively, it was
available across viewing platforms.
Why did the Narendra Modi- led BJP government wade
into the issue all guns blazing knowing fully well that it would leave their
flanks vulnerable? More so after a series of mistimed manoeuvres have paled the
image of their prime mover and party as well, in the post- Delhi poll period.
It may be hard to endure but is sweet to recall that BJP
leaders including those in power today, had literally made a career out of
their opposition to Indira Gandhi’s 1975 Emergency and the curbs on
freedom of expression imposed thereon.The present Prime Minister who spent a
fair amount of the Emergency period underground in the house of a pro-RSS
ONGC official at Ankleshvar has, in the period thereafter, gone hammer and
tongs on the issue and made a killing for himself. Once in power, it is the
same dictum,’If you don’t like the message, kill the messenger’.
Conveniently lost in the self-righteous stance of the Modi
government is the forthright stand of Nirbhaya’s father for the need to show a
mirror to an ailing society. Incidentally, the same newspaper also
carried the report of a mob lynching a rape accused in Dimapur while
another report elsewhere earlier spoke of a man having unnatural sex
with a cow injured by a train.The very next day Ahmedabad came alive with a man
in his early twenties attempting to rape a six year old girl and inserting an
iron rod in her privates after she raised an alarm, seriously injuring
her. Are these not symptoms of a lingering malaise? Is the media wrong in
airing these news or the misogyny of demented males?
A near similar approach had marked the official reaction to
the Patan rape case disclosures in Gujarat in 2008. The initial attempt was to
brush the entire affair under the carpet but when the clamour grew the
government was forced to beat a hasty retreat. The shocking incident came to
light on February 4, 2008 after a 19 year old Dalit student of government-run
Primary Teachers Training College confided to her parents about the repeated
sexual assaults by six of her teachers over six months. A fast track court in
Patan in north Gujarat sentenced all six teachers to life imprisonment in 2009.
The Gujarat High Court upheld the imprisonment of five and commuted the
sentence of the sixth teacher to a ten year jail term. Activists of the NGO,
Navsarjan which took up the cause of the girl, have bitter tales to narrate
about the effort to thwart justice in the case.
The over 12 year long- Modi rule in Gujarat stands out for
the concerted attempt that was systematically made to thwart free collection of
news particularly in the Secretariat. Bureaucrats down the line were
discouraged from interacting with the media and summary transfers were the
order of the day if there was the slightest suspicion that information was
being passed. Fear was all pervasive. Sometimes it bordered on the comical as
when the state health secretary was shunted out after he hit global headlines
when he called on a bed-ridden Chief Minister and came out with viral
infection .
At other times it tipped into the domain of the
farcical when the government pulled out all stops to keep the deal
given to the Tata’s for shifting their plant from Singur in West Bengal to Sanand
in Gujarat, under wraps. A senior secretary whose signatures were necessary for
clearance of the project was woken up from sleep at the dead of night by an IAS
officer who carried the file in person and got it appended. Though some
of the legacies of the Modi era still endure, there is a marked relaxation in
the general atmosphere prevailing in the state Secretariat in Gandhinagar
today, after he left the state to take over as the Prime Minister. Over
150 cops in the state capital who formed part of his security detail round-
the- clock,are amongst the greatly relieved.They can breathe easy now.
Recently, the Gujarat government admitted in the Vidhan
Sabha that a sum of Rs 55 crores had been spent over the last five years
in printing of a government magazine ‘Gujarat’. Though the government has
it’s own printing press the printing of this magazine was handed over to
private printers. The much tom-tommed Diwali annual issue of the magazine had a
print run of 30,000 copies of which 21572 copies were being distributed free.
Perhaps no other state has the dubious distinction of
the government orchestrating the printing of a four page pull-out with fonts
resembling those of a leading Gujarati newspaper which was critical of
the government. The pull-out which carried ‘puff’stories praising
the administration was forcefully distributed as part of the
popular newspaper. What was this, if not a thinly disguised, official
con- job on the public?
Pygmies standing on the shoulders of yesteryear
giants don’t become taller. They only look so.
