Media Gag And Mulish Drag
BY
R. K. MISRA
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.
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