A date with press and pressure

At this event, according to a report in this newspaper, our Home Minister wiped tears from his eyes as he said, ‘‘I get emotional whenever I think of the Emergency. I feel very strongly about it. It was painful and also exhilarating that we all came out stronger out of it. It was a win for democracy.’’

When it came to the Prime Minister’s turn to speak, he described Indira Gandhi’s brief flirtation with dictatorship as a dark period in Indian history but added, ‘‘I am sure people of the country will never allow it to happen. Even at that time people displayed maturity and threw out the government.’’

This emotional rejection of dictatorship by these two titans of the Bharatiya Janata Party came on the very day that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided the offices of Tehelka.com. But clearly, the irony escaped them or they may have waited a day before ordering the raid.

The relentless attack on Tehelka.com and its main financier, Shankar Sharma, represents the most shaming assault on press freedom that we have seen in India in a long while. And, in more ways than one, it is more evil than the ham-fisted press censorship Mrs. Gandhi imposed during the Emergency.

Mrs Gandhi’s censorship was a crude, idiotic thing that harmed her more than it did the press. For those of us who worked in newspapers like the Statesman and The Indian Express it was, to use Advani’s words, an ‘‘exhilarating’’ experience, and democracy came out stronger because we fought it the whole way and were able to make it clear that we were fighting.

What has happened to Tehelka.com is a much more insidious, frightening thing and it saddens me that we of the Fourth Estate have paid it so little attention. What we have seen is a sophisticated, new form of press censorship which will, undoubtedly, be emulated by future governments because of its effectiveness.

Interestingly, the Vajpayee government itself used it again only recently in the case of Time magazine reporter, Alex Perry. His story on the Prime Minister’s health deeply upset the government but the normal response should have been to register a complaint with the magazine. This, the Prime Minister’s Office did in the form of a letter that was duly published.

The matter should have ended there but it did not. The Home Ministry went into quite astonishing overdrive to prove that Perry was not just a bad journalist but a criminal. Stories of his having more than one passport were leaked to the press and he was summoned to the Foreigners Registration Office (an institution that should not even exist in a democracy) to see if his papers were in order.

It was a pathetic, ridiculous response to a story that basically said the same things that the Indian press has been saying for months but I digress.

What happened to Perry was wrong but it was nothing compared to what has been done to Tehelka.com. From the day that Tehelka released its tapes showing us Bangaru Laxman and Jaya Jaitly collecting ‘‘party funds’’ from shady arms dealers, the Vajpayee government’s only concern has been to prove that the Tehelka expose was not journalism but a sinister plot to destabilise India. Shades of Indira Gandhi?

So, instead of cleaning up the corruption so evident in the Defence establishment that it almost does not even need an expose, and instead of making a sincere effort to legalise political funding the government has spent its entire time trying to destroy Tehelka by ensuring that nobody dares fund it.

The method used was to first destroy Shankar Sharma who dared fund it in the first pace. So he and his wife Devina Mehra, among our brightest, most successful entrepreneurs, have been raided more than 25 times, Shankar has been arrested and jailed despite no evidence of cheating on taxes being found, his bank accounts have been frozen and his life taken away.

Naturally, Tehelka.com has found it impossible to raise more funds so it barely survives and has not paid salaries for five months. The latest raid, ostensibly under the Wildlife Protection Act, is only the latest attempt to prove that it is not a bona fide media organisation but a den of criminals.

The message from the government is clear. Any journalist who dares expose corruption in defence deals, or even tries to point out that the Prime Minister’s health is not as good as it should be will be treated as a criminal if not as a traitor. Beat that for censorship. But, spare us at least any more prison reminiscences.

And, since the Prime Minister likes poetry he might appreciate this line from a poem by Majrooh Sultanpuri: Hum kucha, kucha dekh rahey hain alam-e-zindan tumsey zyada. In the streets (of our country) we learn more about the atmosphere of a prison cell than you ever will.

Respond to tavleensingh@expressindia.com