Cong’s gag report

Kapil Sibal’s recent brush with the internet media was in keeping with a hoary tradition of beleaguered governments. When in trouble, they have trained their guns on the media with not-so-subtle attempts to muzzle criticism. Congress governments have been more prone than others to try and gag the press with both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi falling prey to the temptation as their political fortunes dipped.
Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime (1975-77 ) is remembered for its unparalleled censorship laws that stifled all criticism of her government and her rampaging son, Sanjay, who had emerged as an extra-constitutional authority with unbridled power. Newspapers that attempted defiance were punished with cuts in power supply and other forms of harassment.
Indira Gandhi mistakenly believed that she could arrest her declining popularity by blocking unfavourable press reports. Most newspapers played along, leading BJP veteran L K Advani to remark famously, “Media began to crawl when they were asked only to bend.” Her ploy didn’t work, of course, as the results of the 1977 polls proved. Not only was the Congress wiped out in north India, Indira Gandhi herself lost.
Her son, Rajiv, didn’t learn from his mother’s mistakes. When the Bofors scandal peaked in a deafening media campaign, he tried to clamp down with the infamous Anti-Defamation Bill. Ostensibly drafted to provide protection against defamatory reports, its provisions were so harsh that the entire media industry was up in arms. Unlike the timid acquiescence of the Emergency , media owners and prominent editors came out on the streets to protest and Rajiv was forced to back off. He withdrew the bill. A year later , he suffered a stunning defeat in the 1989 polls.
The Congress and the media locked horns on two other occasions that are not so well-remembered . One was in 1982-83 when Jagannath Mishra, then chief minister of Bihar, attempted to draw red lines for the media through the Bihar Press Bill.The importance of the bill lay in the widespread belief that it was a trial balloon for a national law that Indira Gandhi’s government wanted to frame. She was by then neck-deep in the Punjab crisis and besieged by an increasingly hostile environment in the neighbourhood which was having its repercussions in India. The media put up stout resistance and the bill was quietly buried.
The Narasimha Rao government didn’t try anything as brazen but when Rao sank into a morass of corruption scandals, then Congress spokesman V N Gadgil moved a private member’s bill in Parliament which sought to legally bind newspapers into accepting a notion known as the right to reply. Gadgil justified it as necessary in view of “misreporting and misrepresentation ” by a section of themedia. His action was seen as motivated by the bad press Rao was getting after a series of scams.
The relationship between governments and the media tends to be an uneasy one because of the often confrontationist nature of the interplay between the state and a self-styled watchdog. Other parties across the political spectrum have also crossed swords with the press in troubled times. However, after the experience of the Emergency , most of them have desisted from clamping down with censorship when they have been in power and used other means to scuttle unfavourable coverage.