MEDIA MATTERS
Power play
SEVANTI NINAN
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In the confrontation between the State and the press, other businesses owned by media owners can become their Achilles' heel.
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Photos: Satish H.
Vulnerable: The Margadarsi premises being raided by government officials.
IN Andhra Pradesh, the slugfest between the Chief Minister and Ramoji Rao, who owns Eenadu, is in its third or fourth continuous month. Eenadu has been running exposes on the Chief Minister's property assets, on the Home Minister, and investigating actions of the government. The State government has begun to retaliate by targeting first the media owner's land acquisitions and now one of his finance companies, in response to a complaint filed by a Congress party MP. The Government of AP has also attempted a gag order on the press, which the Chief Minister subsequently hastened to disown. In the rest of the country, there has been an outcry in the media against Chief Minister Rajshekhar Reddy's moves against Rao, terming it an assault on press freedom.
Patterns to a fightback
Over the decades, there have been two patterns to conflicts between the State and the press. One is attempts by governments to introduce legislation that try to tame the press. Past examples of this are Mr. Chidambaram's effort to introduce a Defamation Bill in 1988 as a member of Rajiv Gandhi's government and there are three examples from Andhra Pradesh alone. As the Deccan Chronicle pointed out last week, the government order issued on February 20, 2007, designating the Commissioner of Information and Public Relations as the nodal agency for launching prosecutions and defamatory cases against the print and electronic media, has had precedents in the past. The Telugu Desam founder N.T. Rama Rao tried in 1984 to enact a bill to put curbs on the press in the guise of checking "yellow journalism". It was introduced in the Assembly but had to be withdrawn after there was an outcry.
Again in 1992 the Congress Government of N. Janardhan Reddy sought to restrain journalists from giving the oxygen of publicity to Naxalites by threatening to jail them under the AP Public Security Act. That too was fended off after there was an outcry.
The other pattern of confrontation between the State and the press has been on account of attempts by governments to focus on other business interests of media owners. Sometimes in retaliation, when publications criticise or investigate government actions, but not always. Either way the media calls it an attack on press freedom. In 1997 the Enforcement Directorate (ED) began to investigate alleged FERA (Foreign Exchange Regulation Act) violations by the proprietor of the Times of India. The Times sacked its editor who complained to the Press Council that he had been penalised for refusing to campaign editorially on behalf of the proprietor. The paper then began a front-page campaign against alleged human rights violations by the ED against violators of FERA.
In another instance, Outlook Editor Vinod Mehta has written about how the magazine's criticism of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 2001 triggered income tax raids on the magazine owner's group companies across the country.
The point is that if the media wants to be free to criticise the government of the day it has to ensure that its owners are not vulnerable on some count. Mr. Jain was vulnerable, so was Outlook's Mr. Raheja, and so is Mr. Ramoji Rao. The government-ordered enquiry into his finance company, Margadarsi Financiers, may have been motivated but the report observed that "a major chunk of deposits raised every year were going towards meeting the current losses and investments, thus weakening its ability to repay the deposits". Or as a blazing headline in the Deccan Chronicle put it, "Ramoji firm can pay only 49 paise of a Re."
Two hats
Though Mr. Rao filed a special leave petition with the Supreme Court, the latter declined to stay the inquiry ordered by the State government. One of the judges is quoted as saying to his counsel: "When the CM makes a mistake you pointed it out. Similarly when you did wrong, the State government has acted. Your client (Mr. Ramoji Rao) is wearing two hats. One is a newspaper owner and the other is a proprietor of a chit fund company..." And the Chief Justice is quoted as commenting: "Financial institutions are always in trouble. Why can't the State government intervene?"
What are the press freedom arguments? One is that you cannot raid Eenadu's office while searching for documents relating to Margadarsi Financiers. That is what the statement of the Editors Guild says. "But any move by the police to search the offices of the newspaper and its editor amounts to a direct attack on the freedom of the press."
The media is a self-appointed watchdog of the government. But other businesses owned by media owners can become their Achilles' heel. That is where the government will hit back. Media owners can make it an issue of press freedom. Or they can take care not to be vulnerable.
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