Pamela Philipose
It’s the death of irony when today’s jailors condemn yesterday’s jailors in the strongest possible terms; when those who are taking state repression to a whole new level, passionately condemn state repression during the Emergency; when people who have reduced the media into a state of servitude, loudly lament the treatment of the press under the Indira Gandhi regime.
This was Union home minister Amit Shah’s tweet of June 25: “On this day, 45 years ago one family’s greed for power led to the imposition of the Emergency. Overnight the nation was turned into a prison. The press, courts, free speech…all were trampled over. Atrocities were committed on the poor and downtrodden.”
One cannot grudge the Union home minister and his party the moral capital handed over to the Sangh parivar by Indira Gandhi, when her police herded thousands of RSS cadres and opposition leaders into jails in the early hours of June 26, 1975. It was like handing them a blank cheque and many of them successfully cashed this cheque repeatedly over the next four decades and more.
One can, however, question the alacrity with which the Union home minister and his government have replicated many aspects of Indira’s Gandhi’s Emergency prison model, and in the process “trampled” over “the press, courts, free speech”.
To better understand the parallels when it comes to the pacification of the media, it would be useful to go through The Wire commentary published on June 25, on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the Emergency, ‘India’s Free Press Is Still Tormented by the Laws Brought by the Emergency’, which refers to the “legal (but illegitimate) measures” undertaken to “emaciate” the press. Gripping it is to read how the Defence of India Rules, 1971, were “dressed up adequately to become the Defence of Internal Security of India Rules (DISIR)”; how censorship loomed large through a combination of external surveillance and journalistic subservience; how the Supreme Court more or less fell in line when it came to issues like passing the new censorship guidelines; how newspapers that displayed a streak of independence were punished by being deprived of government advertisements. The manner in which the ministry of information and broadcasting spearheaded this demolition of newspaper autonomy is particularly elucidative. A chart emerged that carefully classified newspapers according to whether they were “friendly”, “hostile”, “neutral” and then, further, whether they were “positively friendly”, “continuously hostile”, capable of shifting from “neutral positive towards positive side” or vice versa. It was on the basis of this calibrated calculation that the government of the day took decisions on whether to assist a particular newspaper financially or not.
Keeping this template in mind let us consider some moves that Amit Shah’s government has recently made. A censor in the newsroom is so 20th century! Now we have policies tuned to censor everything, including the use of tech through the use of tech. The Wire analysis, ‘From India to US, Forcing Proactive Policing of Online Content Is Censorship by Proxy’ (July 1), notes that “Indian tech policy has changed rapidly and arbitrarily in its attempt to serve two conflicting goals: that of encouraging innovation and complete control of public discourse”.
So if you, as a mediaperson, have a tendency to criticise the prime minister online or offline, it may not be long before the police is at your door (‘UP Police Books 4 for ‘Objectionable’ WhatsApp Posts on PM Modi, Amit Shah’, June 24; ‘Sedition Case Filed Against Man Over ‘Objectionable Remarks’ Against UP CM Adityanath’, May 29; ‘Scroll Editors Move Allahabad HC to Quash FIR Against Supriya Sharma’, June 27).
Meanwhile, laws are being designed to control the public narrative, much as they were during the days of the Emergency. The draft Press Registration Bill, now in a process of stakeholder consultation, has a new provision which could make registration of news on digital media mandatory (‘Draft Press Registration Bill Is Nothing But a New Collar on an Old Leash’, July 1).
The chilling effect on media content during the period the Emergency, which lasted from June 1975 to May 1977, is today very much in evidence, although in a more amorphous way since there is no formal declaration of emergency. With the sledgehammer of draconian laws being used against journalists and even a pandemic being weaponised to ensure conformity (‘55 Indian Journalists Arrested, Booked, Threatened For Reporting on COVID-19: Report’, June 15), it could be argued that the carceral threat is far more expansive today than at any time earlier. If we were to bring the Kashmir media into the frame, the full extent of Shah’s “trampling” comes into view (‘Use of UAPA Against Journalists is Last Nail in Coffin for Press Freedom in Kashmir’, April 26).
Coming to the fine gradations of media behaviour made during the Emergency, the Shah government has no use for such finesse. It classifies all media roughly into two categories: “For Us” and “Against Us”. Prasar Bharati was recently tasked with the responsibility of bringing the Press Trust of India (PTI) to heel (‘Irked by China Interviews, Govt Gets Prasar Bharati to Turn Heat on ‘Anti-National’ PTI’, June 27) for having the temerity to quote a statement of the Indian ambassador in Beijing that appeared to contradict Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that no one has intruded into India in the Galwan Valley. It was intriguing indeed to come across Arvind Gunasekar’s tweet of June 28 alerting us to the fact that the last time this happened was during the Emergency in 1976, when All India Radio (AIR) served notice on PTI and UNI on the imminent withdrawal of subscription. Prasar Bharti, unlike AIR, is supposedly autonomous, but what of that?
We don’t have an Emergency today? Re-examining this proposition may be worth our while.
(Pamela Philipose is journalist and researcher, currently working on social media and social movements. This article has been extracted from a longer article in The Wire published on 4 July 2020.)
