The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Former vice-president of India and veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader M. Venkaiah Naidu said on Sunday, April 16, that current-day politicians are becoming increasingly intolerant of criticism. He advised them to gracefully accept brickbats coming their way.
“Politicians may not agree with the entire viewpoints of the journalists but must take criticism in their stride, and journalists should feel free to criticise politicians and public figures or else democracy will be in danger,” he said at a function held at the Press Club of Hyderabad on Sunday to present the Gora Sastry Award for Journalism to A. Krishna Rao, who is a veteran journalist, Sahitya Akademi awardee, and poet.
Lately, Naidu said, the number of politicians who are accommodative to multiple viewpoints has been decreasing. He also “deplored the growing tendency of journalists to colour news with their views”, reports The Hindu. He praised what he termed as Rao’s “dispassionate news coverage and neutrality”.
Telugu newspaper Andhra Jyothy reports that Naidu said that he had often been criticised in articles written by Rao and the paper, but “the first characteristic of democracy was to accept criticism”.
Naidu’s remarks got a back-handed compliment from Congress leader Jairam Ramesh when he praised them on social media. Taking to Twitter, Ramesh said:
Press freedom in India has increasingly been under the scanner and has seen a drastic fall in the Reporters Sans Frontiers’ globally maintained World Press Freedom Index, since 2015 and is currently in the bottom 30 of the 180 countries surveyed.
The Information Technology Rules for information online have attracted criticism and are under challenge in Indian courts. The most recent set of rules for online platforms notified on April 6, to ensure that only the news vetted by the Union government’s fact-check units will be allowed to stay online has caused a stir. India being the world Internet Shutdown capital in the world makes it the only democracy in the world with such a bleak record.