BANGALORE: The Emergency remains the yardstick by which the freedom of the Press has come to be measured in India. Though the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had imposed Emergency using a provision in the Constitution, it was the media she feared the most, and this has been recorded by her close associates and biographers.

Delivering the Dr. Eapen endowment lecture on "Media, freedom and the Law", K.T. Thomas, former judge of the Supreme Court, said that the Emergency claimed its victims from the judiciary too, apart from political opponents who were being targeted.

Mr. Thomas recalled the stand taken by Justice H.R. Khanna, who delivered a dissenting judgment in the famous A.D.N. Jabalpur Vs. Union of India case, while the four other judges on the Bench were of a different opinion. Being the senior-most judge, he was to become the Chief Justice of India, and his dissenting ruling cost him this office.

After the Emergency was lifted, the four other judges had a hard time finding friends amongst their own fraternity, and the Bombay Bar Association had even decided to protest if any of them were to be appointed Chief Justices to various High Courts or the Supreme Court. Mr. Khanna has a singular honour — a bust of the judge who did not submit to the "law" of Emergency adorns a court hall in the Supreme Court.

Mr. Thomas, who regaled the audience with many anecdotes and tried to engage the young and the old with interesting trivia, said while taking oath on becoming a judge, he had to swear that he would fearless deliver judgments. But he greatly feared the media, and waited with bated breath to read the papers next day, to see what judgment he had delivered.

Dwelling on the freedom and restrictions on the media, Mr. Thomas said even in the U.S., Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers, had highlighted press freedom as integral to the freedom of all citizens.

In India too, freedom of the press cannot be presumed to be freedom to spoil a citizen's name, since each one is presumed to have a dignity of his own.

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