Author: Arvind Lavakare
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: April 17, 2001
It was simply waiting to happen.
And now, buoyed by the Tehelka tempest, Dileep Padgaonkar has actually
done it -- spat and scorned at the Press Council of India.
Writing in his Sunday column of
April 8, 2001, the executive managing editor of The Times of India believes
that "Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj would do a good
turn to the Indian media if she throws out the PCI lock, stock and barrel."
Padgaonkar's venom is essentially
aimed at the PCI chairman, Justice P B Sawant, whom he dubs as "arcane,
misguided," "plainly authoritarian" and "a Marxist apothecary." Those pejoratives
are, mind you, against someone who was once a judge of India's Supreme
Court.
The outburst is strange for an editor
who has docilely suffered the queer designation conferred on him by a management
whose philosophy -- so says poet-cum-playwright-cum-ad visualiser, Arun
Kolhatkar -- is to put news and views in the spaces left unoccupied by
an avalanche of advertisements.
Leaving aside his personal attack
on Justice Sawant, Padgaonkar's arguments against the PCI are:
1. It is the smaller publications
rather than the big newspapers that have come under fire for blackmail,
sensationalism and other misdemeanours.
2. Nowhere in the world, excluding
perhaps Australia and Sweden, has any press council been able to function
effectively.
3. The self-regulatory mechanisms
of media organisations should be trusted to uphold journalistic standards.
The above is evidence that Padgaonkar
must have been consumed by wrath rather than rationale when he penned his
column of April 8. First, since he accepts the guilts at 1 above -- even
assuming for the moment that the big newspapers are pure as angels -- his
advocacy of self-regulation is as much meaningless as the continuance of
the PCI is meaningful on that count itself.
Further, if press councils haven't
been effective in the rest of the world, it doesn't mean that India's cannot
be; in fact, the argument is as faulted as saying that since democracy
has worked only in the capitalistic world, it shouldn't have been allowed
in "socialist" India.
Even Padgaonkar's acquittal of big
newspapers from misdemeanours is a flawed verdict. In this writer's last
column, it was seen how Mid-Day newspaper had violated the provisions of
the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986. Now Mid-Day
is hardly a "small" newspaper and what it was found guilty of by the PCI
was hardly a minor misdemeanour.
The Times group is itself not "small."
And yet wasn't a reporter of the Marathi newspaper from the group caught
red-handed recently while accepting a bribe from a legislator? Was that
a misdemeanour or not? And in February 1999, the PCI passed severe strictures
against The Times of India itself for asking its editor to protect its
chairman, enmeshed in FERA violation cases, by lobbying with political
leaders and writing articles in his support -- wasn't that a misdemeanour,
Mr P? Is that also the reason why you are now hurtling those pejoratives
at the PCI chairman when he is just some weeks away from retirement?
Paradoxically, Padgaonkar seems
to forget that the PCI -- first set up in 1965, abolished in the Emergency
and re-established in 1978 under the Press Council Act, 1978 -- was itself
conceived as an agency of self-regulation. That is precisely why law-makers
must have denied it the power to mete out punishment of any kind to the
offenders. Consisting primarily of working journalists, managers and owners
of newspapers, the PCI's avowed objectives are preservation of the freedom
of the press and improvement in the standards of Indian newspapers.
The editor of a leading newspaper
itself has accepted that there is indeed much scope for improvement. Writing
in The Indian Express of January 28, 1999, the paper's editor-in-chief,
Shekhar Gupta, confessed, "It's difficult to defend the English media at
the best of times. God knows we do commit crimes each day, on each page,
including the rape of Queen's English."
Now the rape of English is something
that we old-aged readers have come to accept, often amusingly, just as
we do the not-infrequent appearance of the same news report on two different
pages of the same edition. But blatant bias? Grave accusations without
evidence? Insulting innuendoes? Must we accept all of that again and again
and again? Must we accept them without any redress for us and any punishment
for them?
Consider Gupta's confessions in
that same article at a time when the English media was shredding the Sangh
Parivar for attacks on Christians that had become the talk of the town
the world over. Reacting to the charge by the BJP and its supporters that
with regard to the Jhabua rapes, the Gujarat incidents and the Staines
killing, the entire media, aparticularly the English language media, were
indulging in enemy action, Gupta confessed that --
1. ".there has indeed been no evidence
yet that anybody from the Sangh Parivar was involved in the rape of the
nuns."
2. ".despite all the commotion and
outrage in the media and the world, not a single Christian has been killed
in Gujarat yet."
3. "There is no evidence yet that
Dara Singh was actively involved with any Sangh Parivar organisation."
4. "On facts therefore, it would
seem that we in the English language media have something to answer for."
That rare confessional from one
of its leading lights was all that the media had to suffer for the considerable
defamation it had wrought on the saffron crowd as well as the entire Indian
nation. There was absolutely no punishment coming from the PCI or anyone
else for what had truly been a gross perversion of the truth. It was a
classic case of facts as well as comments being free, scot-free, for our
"self-regulating" media.
Things haven't changed a wee bit
since that confessional. Thus --
1. Red carpet coverage is given
to the Pope even as he claims, on our soil, that Christianity is the only
route to man's salvation and that Asia needs to be evangelised, but the
singing of Vande Mataram at a ministers' conference is vehemently lambasted.
2. Articles projecting the Kumbh
Mela as mere bathing by naked sadhus are splashed on the front page but
those citing the UN's support for a uniform civil code are peremptorily
thrown out.
3. Astrology being made a graduation
discipline is ridiculed no end but not a word is published against the
fundamentalism taught in Muslim madrasas.
4. Plebiscite in Jammu & Kashmir
is advocated by by-line correspondents ignorant of the UN resolutions and
other facets of history.
5. Intruding terrorists from Pakistan
are labelled as "militants" but Mani Shankar Aiyar is permitted to dub
our resigning defence minister as a "terrorist."
6. Pervez Musharraf is interviewed
by our journalist over two and more full pages as though he were our best
friend.
7. Separatist Hurriyat leaders are
allowed to call our prime minister all manner of names in chats and interviews.
All of the above is done in the
name of freedom of the press that is oh-so self-regulatory, so honest and
honourable.
There then is a point for Sushma
Swaraj to note as she goes about with her plan to establish a media council
covering the print and television activities. What Sushmaji should remember
is that old saying she must already know as a mother: spare the rod and
spoil the child.
Tailpiece:
The All India Newspaper Editors
Conference is said to have evolved a 15-point code of conduct dealing exhaustively
with all aspects of media coverage including attachment to truth, fairplay
and obligation to national interest. Excellent, but why is the media concealing
that code from us the public? Fear, is it?
