In July 2024, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its annual report on the world press freedom (WPF) index. Of the 180 countries surveyed, India’s rank was 159, which was an improvement of two from the previous year, 2023. It is believed that this improvement in the rank was because some other countries had done so badly that their ranking had plummeted.
This report has been published annually by the RSF since 2002. It is based on certain parameters which do not include the quality of journalism or human rights violations in general. A country’s performance is evaluated on five distinct categories: political context, legal framework, economic context, social-cultural context and safety.
India’s performance has been consistently wanting. Its WPF rank, which was 140 in 2019, sunk to 161 in 2023. Its score in 2024 was 31.28, placing it in the ‘very severe’ category as far as deprivation of press freedom is concerned. Basically, bad news.
But then even worldwide, as the RSF noted, there was a discernible lack of political will to protect journalists.
The RSF further pointed out that notwithstanding the UN Security Council Resolution 2222 which urges member states “to create and maintain, in law and in practice, a safe and enabling environment for journalists, media professionals and associated personnel to perform their work independently and without undue interference in situations of armed conflict”, the Israeli security forces had, since October 2023 when the conflict with Palestine began, killed more than 100 reporters, and 22 in the course of their work.
In the monsoon session of parliament in July 2024, an opposition MP raised an unstarred question whether the Union information and broadcasting minister was aware of India’s poor WPF index rank?
Ashwini Vaishnaw’s response was disappointing. He discredited the RSF, saying that it had evaluated press freedom using a very low sample size with little or no understanding of India and its vibrant democracy. According to him, the RSF as well as its methodology were questionable and not reliable.
Vaishnaw proclaimed in parliament that India has a “robust and flourishing press”. He cited the increase in registered newspapers from 1,05,443 in 2023 to 1,51,734 in 2024 and the increase in private satellite channels from 821 in 2023 to 919 in 2024.
I
Free access to the internet
When I read what the I&B minister had said, I got curious. Although his response was in keeping with the government’s reaction to reports of other international bodies that paint an unflattering picture of our country – the HDI report, the Social Progress report, the World Hunger Report for instance – I said I should give him the benefit of doubt. Maybe we do have a robust and flourishing press. Maybe the RSF got it all wrong?
I picked one of the parameters mentioned. Is there a barrier to the free flow of information on the internet?
August 5, 2019, the date on which parliament abrogated Article 370, was acclaimed as a historic moment for the country. It was also the date from which a complete internet shutdown was ordered throughout the territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, which became Union territories.
This, among many other things, meant that the press there could not effectively function. Anuradha Bhasin, the editor of the Kashmir Times, a leading local newspaper, petitioned the Supreme Court (SC) in a writ petition questioning the legality of the measure. She was joined by others including Ghulam Nabi Azad, a leading politician in the region.
The question was whether the powers of the government under the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Service) Rules, 2017 (‘Suspension Rules’) notified under the Telegraph Act were properly exercised or whether they were, in terms of Article 19(2) of the constitution, an unreasonable restriction on the freedom of the press under Article 19(1)(a) of the constitution?
Secondly, was the state obliged to place the orders of internet shutdown in the public domain and were they amenable to judicial review?
Thirdly, could there be a blanket order under Section 144 CrPC to ban gatherings anywhere throughout the territory of J&K and Ladakh?
In what appeared at first blush to be a progressive judgment handed down on January 10, 2020, in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, the SC answered the second set of questions in the affirmative. It recapitulated the settled legal position that “the freedom of the press is a requirement in any democratic society” without which “there cannot be transfer of information or requisite discussion.”
It held that the right to free speech and to carry on one’s trade and profession on the internet were constitutionally protected under Articles 19(1)(a) and (g) of the constitution.
The orders under the Suspension Rules and under Section 144 CrPC were required to be made public and would be amenable to judicial review.
The question whether the internet shutdown orders were disproportionate and had a chilling effect on the freedom of speech was left open since the court was directing the review committee constituted under the Suspension Rules to conduct a periodic weekly review to examine the necessity to continue the restrictions.
On the third aspect, it held that the power under Section 144 CrPC cannot be used to suppress the legitimate expression of opinion or the exercise of democratic rights; that such orders would be amenable to judicial review and that repetitive orders under Section 144 CrPC would be an abuse of power and such. Thus, no real immediate relief was given to the petitioners.
Four months later, in May 2020, the Foundation for Media Professionals (FMP) again approached the SC stating that none of its directions in the Anuradha Bhasin judgment had been obeyed by the government.
This time the court was lukewarm in its response. The list placed before it by the solicitor general of the terrorist attacks that had taken place since August 5, 2019 seemed to weigh heavily with the court. It merely asked a review committee to examine whether the internet shutdown orders were required to be continued. No one was hauled up for contempt of court.
Even three years later, when a fresh application was filed by the FMP complaining of non-compliance, the court refused to entertain it. It appeared to be an instance of judicial abdication. The court was reluctant to implement its own orders.
Internet shutdown orders are now almost routinely issued throughout the country. Farmers’ protests, the Manipur violence and even during exams! These orders are not in the public domain and so remain inaccessible and unchallenged.
India, Iran, Myanmar and Ukraine were among the countries with the highest number of internet shutdowns in 2022 and 2023. According to an Access Now report, 2024 saw 296 internet shutdowns globally and India accounted for 84 of these at 28%. Clearly the RSF report cannot be dismissed as being unreliable or based on a questionable methodology.
II
Safety of journalists
I next turn to the aspect of the physical safety of journalists, a parameter highlighted in the RSF’s report.
On May 3, 2024, World Press Freedom Day, the India Freedom of Expression Initiative, an alliance of press freedom NGOs, released the ‘India Press Freedom Annual Report’. The report pointed out that in 2023 alone five journalists were killed. Of the 226 others targeted, 148 journalists were by state actors and 78 by non-state actors that included politicians and criminals.
Delhi reported the highest number targeted by state agencies – 51. Twelve were women.
The forms of targeting were arrests, detentions, the registration of FIRs, being summoned for questioning, the impounding of passports, the raiding of dwelling places. Twenty-six were physically attacked, threatened or harassed by the police. Almost half of the 28 journalists killed in India since 2014 have been those covering environmental issues – they had invited the ire of the sand mining mafia and criminal networks.
2024 has been no better. On February 10, Jyotiranjan Mohapatra, a reporter with Bada Khabar TV in Odisha, was brutally attacked for his reporting, resulting in severe injuries to his head and hands. One day earlier, Nikhil Wagle’s car was attacked by ruling party workers while he was travelling in Pune to speak at a programme. He had been critical of the prime minister and the former Deputy Prime Minister [L.K.] Advani after the latter was awarded the Bharat Ratna.
Vinay Pandey, a journalist based in Nagpur, received on May 31, 2024 a beheading threat for reporting on the Gaza conflict. On May 23, reporter Ankur Jaiswal was attacked by a politician and his cronies for publishing material that exposed their activities.
Stopping journalists from travelling abroad at the last minute while they are set to board a plane has also been happening with regular frequency. While Rana Ayyub could get the Delhi high court to come to her rescue when she was set to travel to Europe to deliver talks on violence against women journalists, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, a Kashmiri photojournalist who won a Pulitzer Prize, was in October 2022 stopped at the Delhi airport despite having a valid US visa and prevented from receiving the prestigious award in New York. No reasons were given.
Fahad Shah, Sajad Gul, Aasif Sultan and Majid Hyderi are some of the other Kashmiri journalists who have faced arrests under draconian criminal law provisions, including the Public Safety Act, and have been released after long periods of incarceration, sometimes in jails far away from J&K. They were simply doing what any other journalist there would be expected to do: reporting on the current situation.
In Manipur too, senior journalists have been arrested. But then, journalists elsewhere in the country, who have been and are fearless in their reporting of events, have been subject to arrests and secret surveillance by the state apparatus, as the Pegasus episode revealed. It is getting even more difficult to ignore the RSF report on India press freedom.
The legal framework
The legal framework under which the media operates in this country includes the formal statutory body, the Press Council of India (PCI) that is headed by a former judge of the SC.
The PCI entertains complaints from the press against interference with its freedom by an authority or complaints against the press by individuals for violation of the code of ethics. The PCI exerts high moral authority but is sadly by and large an ineffective oversight body. When its website prominently displays the prime minister’s Pariksha Pe Charcha programme urging viewers to ‘join the event and get unique tips’ from him, it raises eyebrows.
The other body that is a self-regulatory one for the electronic media is the News Broadcasters & Digital Association, which has drawn up a Code of Ethics and Broadcasting Standards expected to be binding on its members, which are 27 news broadcasters comprising 125 news and current affairs channels. Although it does adjudicate complaints and pass orders, these are often not complied with, making self-regulation a meaningless term.
III
The media needs an independent judiciary
When I survey the terrain of the courts and the media, three broad themes emerge.
The first is that in order to be truly free and independent, the media in a democratic polity needs an independent judiciary.
The second is that for an independent judiciary to remain effective in a democracy, it requires a free media.
The third is that the frequent use by the courts of the contempt jurisdiction has had a chilling effect on the freedom of the press.
The first amendment to the constitution sought to add restrictions on the freedom of speech under Article 19(1)(a) of the constitution, which by then was recognised as including the freedom of the press.
The amendment was triggered by two decisions handed down by the SC in 1950, the very first year of its functioning. The first in Romesh Thapar lifted the ban imposed by the Madras government on Cross Roads, a newspaper critical of Nehru’s government. The ban cited danger to public order.
The second decision in Brij Bhushan Sharma struck down an order by the police commissioner under the East Punjab Public Safety Act whereby the Organiser, a mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, would have to submit its issue in advance for a pre-publication censorship. Here too, public order was cited as a reason.
The consequential amendment to Article 19(2) in 1951 expressly introduced ‘public order’ as an additional restriction on free speech. Later in 1963, ‘sovereignty and integrity of India’, the security of the state and friendly relations with foreign states were added.
The SC has been consistent in upholding the freedom of the press in matters challenging government measures to control the price of newspapers, the levy of excessive customs duties or even the issue of ejectment orders alleging the violation of building laws or lease conditions. The SC clarified in the Cricket Association of Bengal case that the right to communicate included the right to communicate through any media that is available whether print or electronic or audio-visual.
In 2023, the SC set aside a Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MIB) order January 31, 2022 revoking the permission granted to Madhyam Broadcasting to uplink and downlink a news and current affairs TV channel ‘Media One’ because of the denial of security clearance. This denial was purportedly on two major grounds that were highlighted by the Intelligence Bureau in a ‘sealed cover’ which was opened by the SC and its contents discussed in the judgment.
One was that Madhyam had been taking an anti-establishment stance. References were made to its reports on the UAPA, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, development projects of the government, encounter killings, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the NRC, the NPR, the Indian judiciary’s alleged “double standards in terrorism cases” and the alleged portrayal of security forces in a bad light.
The second was that members or sympathisers of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind had invested in shares in Madhyam.
Both these grounds were negatived by the SC, which reiterated that an independent press was vital for the robust functioning of a democratic republic. It said: “The press has a duty to speak truth to power, and present citizens with hard facts enabling them to make choices that propel democracy in the right direction.”
Also, the critical views of Media One on the policies of the government could not be termed ‘anti-establishment’. The use of such a terminology in itself, represented an expectation that the press must support the establishment.
The denial of security clearance was viewed as producing a chilling effect on free speech, and in particular on press freedom. The SC emphasised that the “criticism of governmental policy can by no stretch of imagination be brought within the fold of any of the grounds stipulated in Article 19(2).”
Separately, the SC found that there was no material to conclude that the investment by Jamaat-e-Islami Hind sympathisers would affect India’s security or even to prove that Madhyam’s shareholders were its sympathisers. The MIB was asked to renew the permissions for up-linking and downloading the Media One channel.
And yet when individual journalists who have been subjected to the criminal law processes have approached the SC, its response has been inconsistent. Some have received protection from arrest or bail, in good time. Some have had to wait for long. Some have not been given any relief at all.
A satirical comment in this context by a stand-up comic that some litigants were more privileged than the others invited contempt of court proceedings being sanctioned against him by the attorney general. What seemed to have precipitated the move was the gentleman retweeting a cartoon that suggested executive dominance over the judiciary.
In an era dominated by social media, news first travels invariably from mobile phones to the electronic media and then to the print media. The morning newspaper is not how the day of the young Indian starts. It is the WhatsApp forward or Facebook page. The last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. Anything that is more than a three minute read can wait. Only headlines, and within those only the ‘breaking’ news. The algorithm makes sure you read only what it thinks you wish to read. It tells you what to think and how.
There is a spate of AI tools unleashed. Can you be sure that the journalist filing a report is not a machine or that the report itself is not AI-generated?
We live in unsettling times. Two processes are working in tandem. Robotising humans and humanising robots and machines that are learning at a rapid speed.
In this chain, at the first level, there are no real filters. The screening policies at Facebook, X or YouTube are at best vague and unreliable. Social media then is fertile ground for disinformation, misinformation and fake news.
Since there is a rush to be first with the ‘news’, TV channels vie with each other to transmit whatever sensational ‘news’ emerges from tweets, Facebook and Instagram pictures and messages without verifying their source or veracity.
If the TV channel is one that is aligned with the establishment, and these days they are in large numbers, there is next to no oversight and no consequences for the harm done. Hate speech and spewing venom on TV are quite commonplace. The TV screen in an Indian news channel is not merely noisy, but is a chaotic cacophony where any attempt at rationality or truth-seeking gets buried deep. Even a die-hard cynic might be difficult to accept this as entertainment.
But worse, there is a virtual news war out there on the net. The fact checkers have a tough time keeping track of fake news and dealing with the troll armies that deploy social media handles and bots, some of them created by the IT cells of political parties. This is a whole new game. A free for all, where sanity is a scarce commodity.
This is the age of ‘influencers’ both good and bad. The damage is done first, and since the internet does not forget, in an irreversibly substantial way.
The 2025 Global Risks Report brought out by the World Economic Forum has said that for a second consecutive year, India is among those countries which are at a high risk of misinformation and disinformation. The report points to the affinities between “Censorship and surveillance, societal polarisation, misinformation and disinformation and online harms, highlighting the confluence of these risks in the digital ecosystem”.
The reaction to this chaos is unfortunately not well thought through. Take-down orders and gag orders by the state and by the courts, at all levels, have become commonplace. Ironically, fact checkers who call out fake news are accused of spreading harm! And the establishment has no hesitation in invoking draconian criminal law provisions against them.
Investigative journalism is under threat of concerted attack through civil and criminal defamation proceedings in courts. Some by the powerful corporates and politicians. These brave reporters are then scurrying between lawyers’ offices and courts seeking protection from arrest or bail or defending SLAPP – Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation – suits.
It would however be a mistake to argue that because of its potential for immense harm, social media should not be accorded the same degree of protection as free speech in electronic and print media. That would then be facilitating the stifling of genuine dissent, and the public critique of institutions, by the state and powerful entities like multinational corporations and large corporates.
The Bombay high court has rightly held as unconstitutional the government’s attempt to statutorily empower itself to be the exclusive fact-checker for matters relating to it. The issue awaits the final word from the SC.
IV
Criticism of the government is not anti-national
The US Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan recalled that criticism of the government and those in administration, even by factually inaccurate statements, would not be actionable unless made with malice.
In the Derbyshire County Council Case the House of Lords held that if institutions of government were permitted to sue for libel, it would place an undesirable fetter on the freedom of speech.
This principle has been adopted by our SC too. And yet, it is not being followed in practice.
Three instances will suffice to make the point.
In 2023 the BBC broadcast a documentary that examined the present prime minister’s actions during the Gujarat riots of 2002. The MIB immediately invoked the emergency provisions of the IT Rules and ordered it to be taken off the air.
Was it a mere coincidence that this was soon followed by income tax personnel conducting surveys of the BBC’s offices in India? The official spokesperson of the ruling party held a press conference in which he railed against the BBC as the most corrupt with a history of working with malice against India. He re-christened the BBC as the Bhrasht Bakwas Corporation.
The reasons for the take-down order remain secretive till date. A petition questioning the government action is yet to be heard and decided by the SC.
Another batch of petitions, now on the back burner, is the one concerning the use by the Union government of Pegasus spyware to place under surveillance the mobile phones of politicians, journalists and even judges.
The committee set up by the SC, headed by a former SC judge, submitted a report more than two years ago. The committee said that the Union government was refusing to cooperate. The report remains in a sealed cover in the SC. After a long gap, the SC has now agreed to hear the case in April this year.
The third egregious instance is the government blocking the entire website of Ananda Vikatan, a renowned and popular Tamil magazine, only because it carried a cartoon showing the prime minister in shackles seated next to Trump during his recent visit to the US. This angered the BJP state unit president, on whose complaint the MIB acted with alacrity.
The Madras high court ordered the lifting of the blockade but unfortunately made it conditional upon AV taking down the cartoon. This is totally contrary to the settled legal position that mere criticism of the government, even if ill-informed, is not anti-national. It cannot result in a chilling effect on free speech.
The defence of this measure by the additional solicitor general in the high court made curious reading. He cited friendly relations with foreign states – a ground of restriction under Article 19(2). It is hard to imagine Trump looking at that cartoon in AV and deciding to break off diplomatic ties with India!
But then, the reaction of the BJP spokesperson in Tamil Nadu was stranger. He thought the freedom of the press did not extend to “making fun of the country and its 140-crore people”! The nation wants to know why in the times now, in our republic, in India today, it is so hard to tolerate a healthy sense of humour, the ability to laugh at oneself or take a dig at the government?
V
The courts need an independent media
On January 12, 2018, a press conference was held by four of the senior-most judges of the SC, after the chief justice of India (CJI). They went public on how the then-CJI was acting arbitrarily in the matter of the allocation of cases. The judges said that with the independence of the judiciary and the future of democracy at stake, they had “no other choice but to communicate to the nation to please take care of this institution.”
When asked why now, the senior-most of the four is supposed to have said that they did not want any wise men to say 20 years later that “Justices Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Lokur and Kurian sold their souls and did not take care of the interests of this illustrious institution.”
It is quite another matter that the next CJI, who saw much value then in both independent and noisy journalists and judges, was only too eager to gag the media when presiding over a bench on a Saturday morning on April 20, 2019 to address threats to the independence of the judiciary. He used this occasion to discredit his lady staffer who accused him of sexual harassment. He appealed to the wisdom of the media not to report on it.
The courts regularly use the media to carry their press releases on the judiciary’s achievements, the disposal of cases in Lok adalats. Incoming and outgoing CJIs give interviews to a few select journalists. A few correspondents are favoured by some of the CJIs, and sometimes other judges, with exclusive scoops about the institution’s inner workings. Not infrequently a garrulous judge holds forth from the dais making gratuitous comments, wanting them to be relayed through the press.
Post COVID-19, with hybrid hearings and the live-streaming of court proceedings, judges are in the public eye even if the press isn’t watching. Social media has exposed many more dimensions of the judiciary.
When the Prime Minister’s Office’s social media handle shared the video clip of the prime minister doing aarti at the ganesh pooja at the CJI’s residence, it naturally became viral. Video clips of comments made by judges not just inside the courts but outside too are available within a few minutes to an entire social media audience across continents. Judicial vanity, judicial peeve, judicial wit, judicial anger are all on full display.
VI
Courts controlling the media
So what then of contempt of court? One senior lawyer termed the practice of the law of contempt in India as an instance of the paradox of the love-hate relationship between the press and the judiciary. They need each other, but the judiciary would like to tell the press where it gets off.
BeerBiceps wasn’t expecting that with the court protecting him from arrest, it would also admonish him to behave on his show. Thankfully, the court self-corrected. It is not unusual though for the court to tell a politician while granting him bail that he will not address meetings and so on.
The SC does have a system of the accreditation of journalists for the print and electronic media. But then in the age of live-streaming and live-tweeting, there are numerous news purveyors, not just journalists. In fact, if one visits the press room today in the SC, you find journalists watching the monitor rather than jostle for space in a crowded courtroom to report on the happenings.
The press has to watch out for contempt action in two contexts. One is interference with court proceedings. The other is scandalising the court through personal attacks on the motives of judges as opposed to critiquing institutional performance.
In the first category falls trial by media. The media campaign run in 1961 by R.K. Karanjia’s tabloid Blitz in support of Col Nanavati, who was being tried for the murder of his wife’s paramour, is only too well-known. It turned the jury in favour of Col Nanavati. This led to the disbanding of the jury system.
The Sahara case, the Nupur Talwar case and more recently the Rhea Chakraborty case witnessed high-pitched shouting matches on TV screens of news channels that were acting as prosecutor and judge.
The guidelines framed in the Sahara case that an injunction could be granted where the reporting on a case might interfere with the right to a fair trial could be both overbroad and subjective. Judges in trial courts are vulnerable to intense public glare that social media facilitates. It is necessary and prudent for judges at all levels to be cautious in engaging with social media.
Courts do cordon off trials from the media citing security reasons. Where the standards are vague, it is bound to have a chilling effect on the media, which then undermines the freedom of the press.
The court has thankfully not yet placed any restrictions on social media reporting on trials. After all, the criminal justice system is premised on public trials and the press plays an important role in observing and reporting on the process.
The second area is of commenting on the court, its performance, its judgments, its judges. In the US, the contempt power is rarely used against the press. In the UK, the Daily Mirror could get away with depicting the photos of the three judges who granted an injunction in the Spycatcher case upside down with the screaming caption YOU FOOLS!
In November 2016, the Daily Mail on its front page depicted the photos of three of the judges of the UK Supreme Court with the caption ‘Enemies of the People’. That court had ruled that the UK government could not bypass parliament to begin the Brexit process.
Neither instance attracted any notice of contempt.
Way back in 1978, in a somewhat similar vein, Justice Krishna Iyer postulated the Mulgaonkar principles to govern contempt proceedings. One of those was that the court will not be prompted to act as a result of easy irritability. Indeed, occasionally the SC has said that its shoulders are broad enough to shrug off ill-informed criticism.
However, that is not quite how the judiciary as a whole has responded to public criticism. It has bristled with indignation. Arundhati Roy spent a day in Tihar jail for criticising the court’s muzzling of dissent over its judgment in the Narmada dam case.
Patricia Mukhim, the editor of the Shillong Times and her publisher were held guilty of contempt for suggesting that a judge had improperly acted in his own cause when on the day of his retirement he passed a judicial order directing the state to provide retired judges with a slew of benefits. Apart from sentencing them to stand in one corner of the courtroom till the end of the working hours, Milord slapped a fine of Rs 2 lakh, loudly stating that this would shut the newspaper.
Thankfully, the SC stayed the order.
Recently when Wikipedia opened a page to report on the case between ANI and itself in the Delhi high court, it invited a notice of contempt. In an appeal by Wikipedia, the SC is reported to have questioned why the high court was being touchy about court proceedings.
VII
Concluding thoughts
It is clear that when the I&B minster described Indian press as ‘robust and flourishing’, he could not have meant ‘free and independent’.
The media in India has had to fight for its independence and for its freedom. It is a fact, though, that much of the mainstream print and electronic media are either owned by large corporate houses or by political parties.
Both the print and the electronic media operate on purely commercial lines, dependent as they are on government advertisements, licences and permissions, corporate sponsorships, commercials. These very media houses also have their corresponding web versions. And as Joseph Pulitzer cautioned, once a publisher comes to regard the press as exclusively a commercial business, there is an end of its moral power.
Self-censorship, paid news, advertorials, large self-promoting ads of governments on several front pages, vying for greater TRPs at the risk of fudging data, are all now passe.
There is also the control through sponsorship of the independent press on the net by corporate philanthropies.
The big challenge then is to keep the news free.
Recently, I was sharing a panel with a senior lawyer who is also an MP of the ruling party. The moderator asked us whether it was a matter of concern that much of the corporate-controlled mainstream media was aligned with the establishment.
My fellow panelist’s response was ingenious. They were exercising, he said, their free choice to align with the government. He was in plain denial that there was any muzzling of the press.
For more than a decade now, the prime minister of the world’s largest democracy has not held a non-curated press conference to subject his government’s performance to scrutiny by the media, and yet there is but a whimper of protest.
In his memoirs titled Hidden Agendas, veteran journalist John Pilger says that when Murdoch took over a newspaper, the reporters there would self-censor. They knew that some stories would never go past the editor’s desk.
Walter Lippman warned that the threat to press freedom is not as much from the pressures and intimidation that they face, but from those of their ilk that are readily co-opted into the heady mix of politics with the reward of proximity to the corridors of power. When asked to bend, they crawl. They might do well to heed Benjamin Franklin, who said they who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
While we find ourselves engulfed by WhatsApp forwards, which tend to hide the real news, not everything about the internet and social media is only troubling. It has provided space to journalists, and influencers, to speak fearlessly, and carry their followers with them free of control by state agencies. It has also provided such journalists with a two-way communication channel, with a world-wide audience.
And occasionally, tucked away in the corners of the print and electronic media, there is space yet for the investigative and critically analytical pieces of fearless and independent reporters, some of whom are being honoured today. Their courage and conviction will undoubtedly inspire generations of reporters. They need not just our admiration, but importantly, our support. They are our hope for a free and independent press, an impartial and trusted media, in the India of the future.
What also is encouraging is that they are not alone. Growing numbers of such independent scribes have formed global coalitions. The Panama Papers exposed a clandestine world of offshore finance and provided evidence of how heads of state, billionaires, celebrities and business magnates used offshore structures to evade taxes, launder money and conduct illicit activities away from public scrutiny.
This was a result of a mammoth exercise undertaken by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which brought together a diverse coalition of over 370 journalists from more than 100 media organisations across 76 countries to probe through 11.5 million documents. It tells us that even amidst threats and pressures, there will be those who are willing to risk their all to uncover and uphold the truth.
As for the judiciary, it will have to develop the ability to receive criticism of its actions by the press, which performs the salutary function of holding it to account. Maybe the judges should recall what Lord Denning said in declining to proceed with the contempt case against Quentin Hogg:
“Let me say at once that we will never use this jurisdiction as a means to uphold our own dignity. That must rest on surer foundations. Nor will we use it to suppress those who speak against us. We do not fear criticism, nor do we resent it. For there is something far more important at stake. It is no less than freedom of speech itself. It is the right of every man, in Parliament or out of it, in the Press or over the broadcast, to make fair comment, even outspoken comment, on matters of public interest.”
Thank you.
This text of this speech – delivered as the B.G. Verghese Memorial Lecture on ‘Media, Courts and Freedom of Expression’ by Justice S. Muralidhar (Retd.) on Friday (March 21) at the India International Centre in Delhi – was lightly edited for style.
