Opinion Punjab’s AAP govt should stop hounding the messenger

There are times when history repeats itself not as tragedy or farce, but as a troubling combination of both. Since last week, the political conversation in Punjab has been dominated by reports of attacks on businesses associated with the proprietors of the Punjab Kesari group, including notices for excise violations at a Jalandhar hotel, withholding of government advertisements, and police deployment at and around the presses where the newspaper is printed and dispatched from. The owners of the media group have written to Governor Gulab Chand Kataria, alleging that the Punjab’s government’s actions carry an “extraneous motive to intimidate the press”. The state’s Aam Aadmi Party government maintains that the freedom of press doesn’t extend to excise violations, and its actions against Punjab Kesari followed due process. Ironically, a similar back-and-forth defined the final days of AAP rule in Delhi. When its top leadership was jailed for excise violations and corruption, the party, justifiably, claimed that it was being targeted.

Punjab Kesari’s proprietors allege that the AAP government’s battle with the group began after the newspaper carried a report on the Opposition’s accusations about the party’s national convenor, Arvind Kejriwal, on October 31 last year. Unfortunately, this is not the only time the Bhagwant Mann government has faced allegations of intimidating voices it sees as critical of it. Last month, the Ludhiana police filed an FIR against 10 people, including RTI activist Manik Goyal, after the latter raised questions about who was using the CM’s chopper when Mann was on a foreign trip. In November, police checks on newspaper delivery vans for “drugs and weapons” disrupted newspaper supplies across the state. No contraband was found. There is no question that media houses and business outfits of their owners are subject to the law. Yet, the selective application of rules and the timing of the raids lend credence to the accusations of a witch hunt.

Advertisement

Unlike in Delhi, the AAP government in Punjab is not curtailed by Raj Bhavan’s veto. What is the party’s “Punjab model”? Is it to mimic the overreach it regularly accuses the BJP of? With just over a year to go in its term, the AAP would do well to showcase a governance model for the state, and beyond. It needs to come up with a politics that is not defined by attacking the messenger.