Bid to tame free media

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Modi government last week ordered a Hindi news channel to cease transmission for 24 hours this week for contravening the year-old broadcast guidelines on live coverage of terror attacks. 

The unprecedented action has the making of a surgical strike calculated to tame sections of the media which have been reluctant to go the whole hog with the government and its Hindutva supporters who constantly invoke national sentiments for partisan purposes. 

The channel which has been handed down the punishment is NDTV India, a Hindi channel belonging to the oldest and arguably the most professional of the private national networks. The cause of action, ostensibly, is a report it telecast during the terrorist attack on the Pathankot air force base in January.

According to the government, an inter-ministerial committee found that in a near-live telecast on January 4 NDTV India “revealed strategically sensitive details.” Its report had said, “Two terrorists are still alive and they are next to an ammunition depot, And the jawans who are under fire are concerned that if the militants make it to the ammunition depot it will be even harder to neutralise them.”

This information was given to the media earlier by security officials themselves, and other channels and newspapers too had reported it. However, NDTV India was singled out for punitive action.

The inter-ministerial committee rejected the channel’s contention that other media too had carried similar reports on the specious ground that it had mentioned the exact location of the terrorists with regard to the ammunition depot.

As Information Minister, the task of defending the action against the channel fell on M Venkaiah Naidu, who has an infinite capacity to confuse issues in the guise of clarifying them.

Within 24 hours of the government order against the channel, the Editors Guild of India condemned the action, describing it as reminiscent of the Emergency of 1975. Naidu dubbed it a belated response and an afterthought.

He said that during 2005-2014 the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government had directed various channels on 21 different occasions to suspend telecasts for periods ranging from one day to two months. The comparison was odious for they were penalised not for airing any news reports but for showing obscene or violent movies.

There could be no UPA precedent for the Modi government’s action since the rule relating to live telecast of anti-terrorist operations did not exist in its time. It was brought in by the present regime last year through an amendment to the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act of 1995.

The entire opposition and the entire media barring the government’s partisan supporters raised their voice against the action against NDTV India. That, however, didn’t prevent Venkaiah Naidu from claiming that the people were broadly with the government on this issue.

India is perhaps the only country which does not have a law to regulate the working of the electronic media. After it came to light that the live telecasts of the 2008 Mumbai attack had provided the terrorists’ handlers in Pakistan with valuable inputs on real time basis, there was general agreement in the country on the need for a law to curb irresponsible competition-driven coverage. At that stage, two groups of channel owners set up separate bodies of their own to look into complaints against their coverage. This was done to forestall the creation of a regulatory mechanism by the government. 

The self-regulation experiments have been a failure. The arbitrary and ham-handed manner in which the government has acted against NDTV India reveals the dangers inherent in vesting the regulatory power in the government. 

The action against NDTV India has come more than 10 months after the indicted report. Viewed in the context of calls by ministers to journalists to put national interest above freedom of expression, it can be seen as a not-so-subtle attempt to send a message to all media.

The attempt to juxtapose national interest with freedom of expression is mischievous as there is actually no conflict between them. The government’s discomfort arises from the conflict between its own political interest and exercise of freedom by the citizens and the media.

On Saturday, in a bid to ward off criticism that NDTV India has been singled out for punishment, the government announced that a regional channel of Assam has also been asked to go off the air for 24 hours --for revealing the name of a minor who had been tortured.

On Monday, following a protest meeting by journalists in New Delhi and the filing of a petition by NDTV in the Supreme Court challenging the order, the government put it on hold pending a review of the decision.

A mechanism is needed to regulate the working of channels. It is not a task that can be left to politicians and bureaucrats. A credible statutory mechanism with due representation for media professionals is needed.  -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 8, 2016.

Sex, sting and videotapes

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

 

Sex crimes have emerged as a major challenge in India. Varied as the social landscape is, the nature of crimes against women and the attitudes of the authorities and the public also differ vastly. The death of a young paramedical student following gangrape in a moving bus in New Delhi last December made headlines around the world. The protests that followed in the capital and elsewhere in the country received extensive media coverage but that has not helped to reduce the crime rate. Against a total of 706 sex crimes in Delhi in the whole of 2012, as many as 806 were reported in the first six months of this year.

Currently public attention is focused on a complaint by a young journalist of Tehelka that her powerful editor-in-chief, Tarun Tejpal, had sexually assaulted her when they were both in Goa recently for an event hosted by the magazine. The case has raised questions about goings-on in the corporate world in general and the media in particular.

In the absence of a specific law to deal with sexual harassment at the workplace, the Supreme Court, in a 1997 judgment, had laid down certain guidelines based on the provisions of the Convention for Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), an international document India had signed and ratified. These guidelines required all authorities, public and private, to set up committees, which include women and representatives of non-government organisations, to receive and investigate complaints of sexual harassment.

Early this year Parliament enacted a law incorporating the court’s guidelines. It defines sexual harassment so widely as to include any unwelcome act or behaviour towards a woman like physical contact or advance, seeking sexual favours, showing pornography and creating hostile work environment or posing a threat to her employment status.

When a young law intern, in a blog, revealed that a Supreme Court judge had sexually harassed her about a year ago, it came to light that the apex court itself had failed to set up a complaints committee.

Tehelka took the first step towards the formation of a complaints committee immediately after the Goa incident in an obvious attempt to settle the matter internally with Tejpal tendering an apology to the woman for his conduct and stepping down from the top post for six months. The Editors Guild of India frowned upon the move, saying Tejpal could not be his own judge.

The in-house settlement plan has collapsed with the Goa police launching an investigation, invoking the new law which makes sexual assault a cognisable offence, and dispatching a team to New Delhi to interrogate Tejpal and possibly arrest him. During the weekend it took the testimony of Managing Director Shoma Chaudhuri, to whom Tejpal had handed over charge of the magazine. The police is also said to be examining whether she attempted to cover up the scandal.

Since the cause of action took place in Goa, the state police is the competent authority to handle the case. However, since the Bharatiya Janata Party rules the state there is ground to suspect political motivation. The BJP was the target of two major sting operations conducted by Tehelka, which has a firm reputation for investigative journalism.

In 2001, soon after its launch as a portal, Tehelka came out with videotapes showing Bangaru Laxman, then BJP president, and Jaya Jaitley, president of Samata Party, the BJP’s partner in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government, accepting money from its reporters, who, posing as arms dealers, had offered them bribes to secure defence contracts. Laxman had to resign the party post. Last year a trial court sentenced him to four years in jail.

In 2007, Tehelka released secretly recorded conversations in which some leaders of the BJP and other Hindutva outfits spoke of their role in the 2002 Gujarat riots.

“Fallen Heroes: the Betrayal of a Nation” was the title under which Tehelka published its very first investigative story, which exposed a cricket match-fixing scandal. It led to then Indian captain Mohammad Azharuddin’s lifetime ban from the game. In 2009, Azharuddin was elected to the Lok Sabha on the Congress ticket from Uttar Pradesh. Last year the Andhra Pradesh high court quashed the ban imposed on him.

Tejpal, whom The Guardian once identified as a member of India’s new elite, has now joined the ranks of fallen heroes. He had worked with India Today and Outlook before founding Tehelka, with Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan and writer Khushwant Singh as non-executive members of the board of directors. Three years ago the India chapter of the International Press Institute presented him with an award for excellence in journalism.

The possibility of a just resolution of the matter appears to be slim. The complainant has already resigned her job. Some of her colleagues too have quit in protest against Tejpal’s conduct. Whether or not the scandal ruins the magazine and draws the curtain on Tejpal’s journalistic career, he may have a future as a writer. He is the author of three novels, one of which was nominated for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award given for “the worst description of sex scene”. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 26, 2013.