MANORAMA HORTUS

From 'hobby journalists' to bulldozer terror, Sainath outlines gagging as a governance tool

Kozhikode: In 2020, when India's Press Freedom Index fell to 142 from 140 the year before, the Union government protested and formed a 13-member Index Monitoring Committee to improve India's ranking and come up with its own ranking. The members included officials from the ministries of Information and Broadcasting and External Affairs.

Veteran journalist and founder of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) P Sainath, nominated to the committee by the Press Council of India, said none of the points he raised during the sittings made it to the report. He was speaking on 'governance by gagging and the valorisation of inequality' at Manorama Hortus, the three-day literary and arts festival organised by Malayala Manorama, at Kozhikode Beach on Friday.

"But whenever I made a point, the chairman of the committee would say 'he is raising an important point, please note it'. I made around 30 points which the chairman said were very important." None of them figured in the report.

"There was another popular (news) anchor who cannot keep quiet for four minutes during (TV) discussions but kept mum for four hours during the meetings," Sainath said. Then, he pleaded his inability to attend the IMC meetings. The chairman, Sainath did not name Kuldeep Singh Dhatwalia, Principal Director General, Press Information Bureau (PIB) and the anchor was India TV's Rajat Sharma, who was also nominated by the Press Council of India.

Sainath said when he raised omissions with the chairman, the committee was disbanded in four days. In another three days, the committee's email ID became invalid. "I gave a dissent note in the end," he said. In 2024, India's Press Freedom Index is at 159.

"Speaking truth to power is a cliche. Much more important for journalists is to speak the truth about power. My hero in journalism is the child who said the emperor is naked," he said.

The governance by gagging did not begin in 2014 or with Narendra Modi, said Sainath. "What they did was take it to the stratosphere. It exploded under their rule," he said.

The veteran journalist outlined five forms of gagging: 1) by law, 2) by outlaws or bylaws, 3) by corporate interests and big money, 4) by big money and inequality, and 5) through self-censorship. "All five forms of gagging are possible because of the multiple inequalities in our societies," he said.

India did not have even a dollar billionaire in 1991. On July 15, 2024, the country had 200 dollar billionaires and today, it has 211 dollar billionaires. "We are minting them one every seven days," he said. "These 200 billionaires are 0.000014% of India's population but own wealth equivalent to 25% of the country's GDP," he said.

He shared a provocative quote that went viral on social media to make his point: "If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to see what is wrong with it. When humans exhibit this same behaviour, we put them on the cover of Forbes magazine".

He said Mukesh Ambani spent more than $500 million on his son's wedding in a state where the government found three lakh families in six districts could not afford the wedding of their daughters. "It is one of the several reasons for suicides in Maharashtra," he said. However, he argued that Ambani’s lavish spending was less an act of obscenity than a calculated business move, bringing together cabinet ministers and top bureaucrats to remove hurdles during future resource negotiations.

On gagging by law, he cited the example of the High Court of Delhi ruling 'Inquilabli Salam' (Revolutionary Salute) and 'Krantikari Istiqbal' (Revolutionary Welcome) as incriminating per se and inflammatory to deny bail to student activist Umar Khalid, who has been in jail for over four years.

Sainath described "bulldozer terror" — what some in the media label as "bulldozer justice"— as a form of gagging by outlaws. Even Nobel laureate Prof Amartya Sen was gagged with threats from Visva-Bharati Vice-Chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty to bulldoze his compound wall to reclaim around nine cents of land, he said.

Earlier, only Dalits and Adivasis were familiar with the criminalisation of dissent, he said. Under Modi, it has reached the middle class and the upper middle class, he said.

Sainath said that corporate and big money help build a censorship of media. During the Covid pandemic, media houses laid off 3,500 journalists and 15,000 non-journalist media workers. The government did nothing about it though Narendra Modi declared media as an essential service when it announced the lockdown, Sainath said.

Over the past decade, Delhi newspapers have adopted unusual methods for hiring journalists, he said. New contracts require recruits to sign an undertaking stating they are not journalists by vocation or profession but are engaged in journalism as a hobby. "They are now known as ‘hobby correspondents.’ Tomorrow, when the media houses sack them, there is nothing they can do," Sainath said.

The environment of fear and insecurity leads to self-censorship, which is different from newsroom censorship, he said. Journalists on 11-month contracts and EMIs to pay cannot be heroes, he said. "I won't blame them."