Author: Vir Sanghvi
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: February 10, 2002
Introduction: there is also a strong
case for excluding proprietors and investors from the protections afforded
by freedom of the press. Once we declare that freedom of the press is guaranteed
to anybody who happens to own one, the consequences are far-reaching.
On Tuesday, Ram Jethmalani and Shanti
Bhushan addressed a press conference that Tarun Tejpal described as 'historic'.
Of course, Tarun is hardly a disinterested observer: the purpose of the
press conference was to defend Shankar Sharma, the head of First Global
and an investor in Tehelka who has been pursued by the authorities ever
since Operation West End was made public.
Even allowing for Tarun's biases,
it was hard to deny that the sight of two former Law Ministers condemning
the government for a witch-hunt was impressive.
Not having studied the matter in
detail, I will make no comment about Sharma's guilt or innocence, but I
do know that the government believes that Tehelka was no more than a front
for Sharma's stock-market manipulations. However, this charge has yet to
be substantiated. Moreover, the current pursuit of Sharma is over issues
unrelated to Tehelka and there is evidence to suggest that regardless of
the rights and wrongs of his actions, he did not act alone. Yet, Sharma
is the only one being pursued; the other cases have been ignored.
Given this background - the press
conference by former Law Ministers, articles in support of Sharma by top
columnists etc. -the Shankar Sharma case should have been a cause celebre
by now. Every opinion poll has demonstrated that the middle class is fully
behind Tehelka and regards Tarun Tejpal as a hero.
So, when Tarun says that Sharma
is being victimised only because of his investment in Tehelka - and when
this claim appears to have some merit - the case should become a rallying
point for all those who believe in freedom of the press. The country, as
a whole, should view the persecution of Shankar Sharma as Tarun expects
us to: as a witch-hunt against Tehelka by a vindictive government, eager
to settle scores.
But here's the funny thing: nobody
really cares about Shankar Sharma and his alleged persecution at the hands
of the authorities.
Oh yes, there will be the odd press
conference by an out-of-power politician and the angry edit page piece
by a former editor. But that's about all. The great bulk of journalists
remain curiously unmoved by Sharma's plight. They don't really care what
happens to him. And they certainly don't see this as a freedom of the press
issue.
More significantly, there is no
widespread public outrage either. Despite Tarun's protests that Tehelka
is being victimised and that the government is destroying Sharma's life
only because of his Tehelka connection, there is no sense of middle class
indignation and no public anger against the government.
How does one explain this curious
lack of concern?
I would argue that two factors have
prevented the Shankar Sharma case from becoming the cause celebre that
Tarun thinks it should be.
The first has to do with journalists.
Nobody with any experience of the Indian press would argue that it does
not value its freedom. Any assault on our independence, whether it is from
vindictive governments, thug-like politicians or ad-hungry managements
has journalists up in arms. As Arun Shourie says, "any government that
raises its hand against the press, always ends up burning that hand."
But there is an important distinction
and it is one that even some editors fail to grasp: no journalist believes
that a criminal charge against a newspaper proprietor is a freedom of the
press issue.
For instance, there is no doubt
that the Enforcement Directorate's pursuit of Ashok Jain, the late Chairman
of the Times group, was a complete travesty of justice. The charges were
flimsy and at least one of the officers who persecuted Jain has now been
charged with corruption by his own department.
Yet, not one journalist - to the
chagrin of the Jains - was willing to accept that there was any link between
Ashok Jain's guilt or innocence and his ownership of The Times of India.
Many people - myself included - wrote articles condemning his persecution
but we regarded his investment in The Times as being irrelevant to the
central issue of his criminal culpability.
More recently, when Rajan Raheja
of Outlook was raided, Vinod Mehta, Outlook's editor, blamed the rest of
the press for refusing to regard Raheja's problems as a freedom of the
press issue. Despite the esteem in which Vinod is held, most editors stuck
to the position that as long as Raheja had other business interests, we
would not see him as representing the freedom of the press. If Vinod had
been held, or an Outlook journalist arrested, then most of us would have
gheraoed the police station till they were released. But proprietors do
not count as journalists.
It is not my case that journalists
are right to hold this position. Certainly there are good arguments against
this stand. In the Outlook case, Vinod argued that the government had recognised
that it would be too blatant to raid Outlook itself. So the raid on Raheja
was a way of delivering a message: ask your publication to lay-off or you'll
get it in the neck.
But equally, there is also a strong
case for excluding proprietors and investors from the protections afforded
by freedom of the press.
Once we declare that freedom of
the press is guaranteed to anybody who happens to own one, the consequences
are far-reaching. Subhash Chandra has had his problems with the Enforcement
Directorate. Do we treat these as an assault on the freedom of the press
because he owns Zee News? Ramesh Gandhi of Calcutta's top rated TV news
show Khas Khabar has been arrested and the TV show's offices raided. Should
this be treated as a press freedom issue even though the charges against
Gandhi were unrelated to any news story? What about Subroto Roy who has
frequently had problems with the UP government? Should we relate these
problems to his ownership of the Rashtriya Sahara newspaper? And to take
an extreme example, did ownership of the Observer group give Dhirubhai
Ambani any special immunity from investigations?
The answer that most journalists
have intuitively arrived at is this: yes, it is true that the government
can put pressure on publications by targeting their proprietors and investors.
But if you extend freedom of the press to cover any industrialist who invests
in media, then every businessman will fund a dot com or a newspaper to
acquire this immunity. On balance, therefore, we cannot afford to get agitated
about the prosecution of proprietors who have other business interests.
Sometimes this may work against
freedom of the press - as Vinod Mehta argues it did in the Outlook case
and as Tarun claims is true of Shankar Sharma. But, on the whole, it is
the only principle we can adopt if we are to prevent freedom of press being
used as a fig leaf by any businessman who wants to cover up his shady dealings.
If that explains why Tarun and Shankar
Sharma have not got the favourable press coverage they regard as their
due, there is a second reason why even the public at large (the people
who swear by Tehelka) don't care about Sharma's fate.
If you were to conduct a poll among
the middle class and rate professions in order of integrity and respect,
my guess is that stock broker would come somewhere between pimp and politician.
This is sad and it is unfair but alas, it is the truth.
Even since the first Harshad Mehta-led
stock scam of the early 1990s, the middle class has regarded the stock
market as a casino where the mob fixes the tables. Hundreds of thousands
of ordinary salaried people have lost their savings in the market (and
in mutual funds which they were told were 'safe') while hundreds of brokers
and stock market operators have made crores.
It has got to the stage now that
when we hear of somebody who went into stock-broking as a professional
and emerged as a multi-millionaire, we no longer say "Wow! What a financial
wizard!". Instead, we say "My God! What a crook!"
There is now absolutely no sympathy
for anybody accused of any kind of stock manipulation. We may not understand
what he did, we may not know enough to see why it was right or wrong, but
we are predisposed to treat the accused as guilty even before the trial
begins.
Thus, Ketan Parekh's lawyers may
go blue in the face telling us that he has done nothing wrong but nobody
feels even a tinge of sympathy when KP is frog-marched off to prison. Likewise,
most of us have no idea what crime PS Subramanyam of UTI committed. But
we know that we lost our savings in UTI so we feel a glow of satisfaction
when he is denied bail. Even Harshad Mehta, whose recent death is directly
attributable to an overdose of police, evokes no sorrow or pity.
I suspect that Shankar Sharma has
lost out on middle class sympathy because in the public eye, he is just
another stock market operator. The qualities he probably values in himself
- smooth, pushy, aggressive, able to make millions out of nothing - are
precisely the qualities that make him so suspicious to the public at large.
When the government says, "Never mind Tehelka, he's guilty of market manipulations,"
most people respond: "He's made millions on the financial market so, who
knows, there may be something to the charges?"
At the end of the day, Shankar Sharma's
best hope lies in the legal system. If he is innocent - as I suspect he
might well be - the courts will throw out the charges. But till that happens,
I doubt if any number of press conferences or edit page articles will provide
him with any short-cuts to freedom. The press will not see him as one of
our own and the public at large will see him as just another stock market
millionaire.
