Opinion Forty Years Ago, November 2, 1977: Shukla before Shah

Front page of Indian Express on November 2, 1977

V.C. Shukla came to the witness stand again to “amplify his (earlier) statement”, but in fact corrected the admission he made that force was used to make the four news agencies capitulate and merge into Samachar. Shukla retracted much of what he had said. He told Justice Shah: “It would not be in the fitness of things” to say that the hasty union of the agencies was accomplished in one month and 11 days, as the judge had put it. The former I&B minister also said nobody had been forced to merge. He had agreed to Justice Shah’s suggestion that the merger was rushed through using inducement, persuasion and compulsion. Shukla claimed the motivation for seeking the merger was “to advance the cause of press freedom”. Romesh Thapar, editor of Seminar, the magazine forced to close down during the Emergency, was critical of the government’s brutal application of censorship when he appeared before the Shah Commission, but also lambasted journalists for not standing up for press freedom the Emergency.

Boosting Gandhis

Instructions were sent out to the official media during the Emergency that Mrs Gandhi was to portrayed as “the supreme and beloved leader of the country” and Sanjay Gandhi as “an up and coming leader in his own right”. All India Radio was given instructions to play up Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi, S.C. Bhatt, director of the news services of AIR, told the Shah Commission.

UP CM to go

Advertisement

While the Janata Party is unclear as to who should be the next chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, it is certain that Ram Naresh Yadav will give up the reins of the government. This is evident from the deliberations of the party’s parliamentary board which met in Delhi to decide on the nominees for the by-elections to the assembly seats falling vacant in UP and some other states.