The Union government is now resorting to post-publication repression as an effective method of terrorising journalists, compared to the emergency era methods of pre-censorship, Siddharth Varadarajan, senior journalist and founding editor of The Wire, has said.
Under the new system, the boundaries are set by the police and other Central agencies of what is allowed and what is not, leaving everyone guessing as to the safe extent of the boundaries.
He was speaking at a seminar on ‘Gagging the Press: Freedom of Expression Vs Freedom After Expression in India’ organised by the Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom (DAKF), in the context of the arrest of Prabir Purkayastha, the founder of NewsClick, and others, as well as the crackdown using central agencies against the news platform known to be critical of the Union government.
Mr. Purkayastha had the misfortune of being targeted and arrested and jailed for a year during the emergency in 1975 and now getting arrested under the draconian UAPA, he said. “If the Supreme Court does not assert itself and stand up and defend freedom of press as enshrined in the Constitution, I am fairly certain that we could well be looking at a passage of a year or more before Prabhir is released on bail,” he said.
“We should not assume that the pressure on freedom of expression that is being exerted on newsclick or reporters in Kashmir, is confined just to the press. Across the board, freedom after expression is no longer a guarantee in the country whether you are a media organisation, an academic, a filmmaker or even a comedian A climate of fear has been created as to what are the boundaries of permissibility. Scholars will think a hundred times about the kind of research they would do after what happened to academic Sabyasachi Das of Ashoka University for his research on BJP’s electoral win in 2019. Comedians have had their shows cancelled or ended up in jail,” he said.
Mr.Varadarajan said that there is a broad spectrum of creative activity today where certain kinds of expression are not allowed while other kinds of dangerous expressions are encouraged and given tax breaks, citing the cases of the films Kerala Files and The Kerala Story, both of which have been accused of spreading hate propaganda.
“The media landscape today is such that virtually all the Noida-based National TVv channels are today platforms that serve the government’s interest. Some do it very blatantly, some go even beyond the brief that the government has given them, many of them openly espouse religious hatred and encourage communal polarisation and some believe it is the task of journalists to target the critics of the government. Media that is critical of what the government is doing is automatically labelled by those in power as the enemy,” he said.
Mr.Varadarajan accused the government of weaponising the IT rules 2021 to put pressure on news platforms and social media intermediaries to choke the public appetite to read, share or to contribute to discussions online against the government. CPI(M) leader and former Finance Minister T.M.Thomas Isaac presided over the seminar, in which several journalists spoke.
