The echo chamber next door

Nepal’s media professionals, in contrast, are being tested every day and a considerable number of them have continued to defy the royal writ in some of the most innovative, radical and imaginative ways ever devised by the media anywhere in the world. Newspapers have carried blank editorials and skillful parodies on the state of affairs in their country by elucidating with scholarly depth on the need to wear socks without holes and to desist at all times from felling trees. Journalists have fearlessly courted jail terms, editors have consciously deleted their names from the mastheads of censored publications, reporters have defied the censor’s will by setting up their own websites and blogs. Journalists’ associations have been running hotlines to monitor the well-being of colleagues and attempted to provide legal education to members in order to help them better resist the attempts to gag them. Recently, those working for a radio station that was shut down by the authorities even took to broadcasting to large crowds at regular intervals by means of a loudspeaker. Their feisty resistance has even stirred the Nepal Supreme Court recently into issuing notice to the royal government on its order banning private FM channels from airing news.

It is curious to see such commitment to the media in a country that had, after all, got itself a Constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression and right to information only in 1990. With the ushering in of multi-party democracy, the entire nineties saw an unprecedented expansion of the media along with significant changes in the laws governing it. For instance, in 1991, the Printing and Publication Act was revised to simplify licensing procedures. Two years later came the New National Broadcasting Act, which allowed the entry of media channels and radio stations into what was a closely guarded space. This expanded the field in unimaginable ways. In 1991, the number of registered newspapers stood at 456, by 2003 it had touched 1,879. Many of these publications were not regular or even well established, but they nevertheless became platforms for debate and discussion.

Similarly, the state-owned Nepal TV was joined by four private channels and some 25 new radio channels became part of the media scene. Together they helped to create a public sphere out of largely illiterate, impoverished and scattered communities living in inhospitable terrains and at a time when democracy was still a fragile, nebulous thing. The tragedy, of course, was that before this process could be consolidated, Nepal was sucked into a black hole of random developments. The palace murders of June 2001 and the emergence of the tyrannical Gyanendra coincided with growing Maoist blood-letting in the countryside.

Today, the world is far more conscious of King Gyanendra’s methods than they were when he first declared an emergency in late 2001. In fact, that first interregnum was the dress rehearsal for the crackdown which came this February. He set in place a regime of zero tolerance for media freedom through the expedient of ratcheting up the Maoist threat. The mainstream press was forced to recycle military communiques and palace statements as news.

The culture of targeting the media became endemic precisely during the period when general levels of violence rose dangerously. One estimate puts the total number of journalists abducted in 2003 alone — either by Maoists or the military — at 26. Since that year, many more have been arrested and at least two are known to have been killed. Some simply disappeared. Many were subject to intimidation, even torture. As news mutated into propaganda, the shadows over the kingdom darkened. The damage perpetrated during the earlier period of emergency and its role in encouraging violence, palace impunity and Maoist coercion has never been properly assessed. In the growing anarchy, information became a caricature of itself. The military’s claims that they were on the verge of decimating the Maoists were as much an exercise in mendacity as Maoist claims that the fall of Kathmandu was imminent. It was the ordinary citizen, at the centre of this vast echo chamber, who was the biggest loser since it became increasingly difficult to report even on issues of ordinary social concern and quite impossible to expose the innumerable violations of human and democratic rights.

Today, the emergency has been lifted but the palace’s coercive apparatus remains on overdrive. As recently as a month ago, the police arrested nearly a hundred journalists protesting their continued intimidation and coercion. The fact is that even without the umbrella of an emergency, King Gyanendra has a fine array of intimidating legal instruments to use against the media. They include the Offence Against the State and Punishment Act of 1989, the National Security Act, 1989, which prohibits the spread of terror and the Terrorist and Disruptive Acts (Control and Punishment) Act, which was brought in as an ordinance in 2001 and is now the law of the land.

Of course, political regimes the world over, whether in Washington or New Delhi, have used or tried to use the threat of terror to beat down the media, but King Gyanendra has gone one step ahead by labelling as “terror” general public anger against his regime. When he proclaimed the emergency, he also let the media know that “any interview; article, news, notice, view or personal opinion that goes against the letter and spirit of the Royal Proclamation of February 1, 2005, and that directly or indirectly supports destruction and terrorism” is banned. You don’t get clearer than this.

If any meaningful multi-party democracy is to return to Nepal, it will have to begin with the rehabilitation of the Nepalese media. A gagged media is synonymous with Nepal’s fractured public sphere.