Arnab Goswami’s arrest isn’t about freedom of press, it’s about the state’s misuse of power

 Broken News

Published on November 5, 2020

 

Link:https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/11/05/arnab-goswamis-arrest-isnt-about-freedom-of-press-its-about-the-states-misuse-of-power

What should one make of the unexpected and sudden concern expressed by union ministers, ranging from home minister Amit Shah to textile minister Smriti Irani, about the freedom of the press in India? Invoking images of the Emergency, they are telling us in the media that not speaking out against the arrest of a journalist is equivalent to supporting fascism.

Their concern is obviously not for just any journalist. It is, as Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath called it, for "a leading journalist of the country”, namely Arnab Goswami, editor-in-chief of Republic TV. Clearly, journalists not as prominent do not merit the same concern, given that under Adityanath's watch, journalists have been bullied, harassed, beaten up and arrested just in his state.

The ministers and prominent members of the Bharatiya Janata Party expressing their distress at Goswami's arrest have never been bothered about the dozens of men and women in the media, literally from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, who have been targeted while doing their jobs as journalists. So, excuse us for not being moved by this concern for press freedom and the rights of journalists.

Goswami was arrested on November 4 by the Mumbai police for a case of abetment to suicide that had been closed in 2019. His arrest triggered a debate amongst journalists about whether this constitutes an attack on the freedom of the press.

On the face of it, it does not. Journalists are also citizens. If they are arrested for crimes unrelated to their journalism, then it is difficult to assert that it is linked to freedom of the press. Do we support journalists charged with sexual harassment, or sexual assault, or murder?

At the same time, journalists who become a thorn in the side of the establishment, irrespective of its political colour, can be harassed by way of cooked-up cases that are not linked to their journalism. Such actions are not unknown.

In Goswami's case, the arrest is for abetment to suicide. Anvay Naik, an architect, and his mother died by suicide in 2018 in Alibaug after leaving behind a note that said the reason was the money owed to them by Goswami and two others. The case was closed in 2019 when the BJP was in power in Maharashtra. It has now been reopened, reportedly at the behest of the family.

That is what the Maharashtra government and the police would like us to believe. Yet, clearly it is not that straightforward. There is a motive. And that is to try and teach Goswami a lesson after his concerted attacks in recent months on members of the current state government and against the Mumbai police. In his now famous hectoring style, Goswami has run a virtual campaign on his channel that has led to several cases being filed against him. None of that has apparently deterred him.

While it is impossible to condone Goswami's style of what he chooses to call "independent" journalism, we cannot also back police action at the behest of their political masters. After all, it is precisely this kind of police action against journalists doing their jobs, and without the profile of a person like Goswami, that is regarded as the real threat to press freedom in this country.

An example is India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh. In the last six years, since the BJP took office at the centre and in the state, multiple journalists have been charged, assaulted or arrested. During the Covid lockdown alone, there numbers were 55 across India until June, of which 11 were in Uttar Pradesh. The latest was a journalist from Kerala, Siddique Kappan, who was picked up on his way to Hathras to cover the gang rape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in September. Not only was he arrested, he has been charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and sedition.

The Uttar Pradesh police would not have taken this action without the consent of the chief minister. No union minister tweeted that this arrest was a strike at the freedom of the press. Yet Adityanath also joined the chorus of union ministers in support of Goswami.

What I am arguing is that while one must condemn the manner in which the police is used by the politically powerful to arrest and harass anyone who is inconvenient to them, including journalists, all such cases cannot be seen purely as an attack on freedom of the press.

Siddique was on his way to perform his duty as a journalist. Hence, his arrest is linked to the rights of a journalist. Goswami has been targeted by the Maharashtra government and police for his personalised attacks on them and it would appear that the arrest, in a case not linked to his journalism, is motivated by that. It is part of an ongoing political battle between the BJP and the Shiv Sena-led Maharashtra government, as this editorial in Indian Express points out.

What is common in both cases is the way the police, and some provisions of the law, are being routinely misused against citizens — activists, academics, students, journalists and many others. And that it is not just the BJP but even parties ostensibly opposed to it, such as those that have come together to rule in Maharashtra, who use the same tactic. We cannot and should not forget that it is this very Maharashtra police that played a part in foisting cases under UAPA against more than a dozen men and women in the Bhima Koregaon case, people who continue to be imprisoned without bail for more than two years now.

What we should also question is the misuse of the provision of "abetment to suicide" by the police as and when it is convenient. While in this case, there was a note naming three individuals, we know that the absence of a note, as in the Sushant Singh Rajput case, or even earlier in the Sunanda Pushkar case, did not prevent the police from pursuing this strategy if it chose to do so. And in each instance, there was a political backstory to the decision to proceed, or not to proceed.

To come back to Goswami, he has few supporters amongst his peers, or amongst those working for him. In fact, it is unfortunate that thanks to his style of journalism, men and women who work for him have also attracted FIRs from the Mumbai police, an action that is deplorable.

Goswami has single-handedly lowered the tone and tenor of television news to the point that the credibility of all who work in that medium is challenged. His popularity — although that is now in question in the case of the apparent fiddle in ratings that is being investigated by the Mumbai police — has also resulted in mini-Arnabs on many channels, anchors who have adopted the same hectoring tone that is his trademark.

The Maharashtra government, and its police, has succeeded in making a martyr out of a man who has used his power in the media to target, and even demand the arrest of, many who had no voice. Think of students from JNU and Jamia, the women protesting at Shaheen Bagh, Sudha Bharadwaj charged in the Bhima Koregaon case, Rhea Chakravarty in the Rajput case, and many others.

Goswami's arrest will make no difference to the state of media freedom in India, which has been battered and assaulted by the government in Delhi and in many states in India. What it does is to send out a message yet again: that ultimately the state will not tolerate anyone who is inconvenient and is politically on the other side. That even journalists with powerful political backers are not immune. It is this misuse of power by the state that threatens freedom, including freedom of the press.

Government should view journalists as allies, not adversaries. Especially in a pandemic

Broken News  (May 21, 2020)

https://www.newslaundry.com/amp/story/2020%2F05%2F21%2Fgovernment-should-view-journalists-as-allies-not-adversaries-especially-in-a-pandemic?__twitter_impression=true
 

 

Phase four of the national lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19, announced on May 17, also marks several important developments on the media front.

On May 19, the Supreme Court granted Arnab Goswami of Republic TV, a three-week extension from arrest in cases filed against him for his remarks about Congress president Sonia Gandhi on his television channel. Multiple FIRs had been filed against him in different parts of the country. The court vacated all the cases except the one in Nagpur that was shifted to Mumbai. At the same time, it turned down Goswami's request that the case be referred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The significance of this interim order lies in some of the remarks made by the judges. According to the Indian Express, here are some of the court's observations:

“India’s freedoms will rest safe as long as journalists can speak truth to power without being chilled by a threat of reprisal” and “free citizens cannot exist when the news media is chained to adhere to one position.”

“The petitioner is a media journalist. The airing of views on television shows which he hosts is in the exercise of his fundamental right to speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a)”.

“The exercise of that fundamental right is not absolute and is answerable to the legal regime enacted with reference to the provisions of Article 19(2). But to allow a journalist to be subjected to multiple complaints and to the pursuit of remedies traversing multiple states and jurisdictions when faced with successive FIRs and complaints bearing the same foundation has a stifling effect on the exercise of that freedom”.

“This will effectively destroy the freedom of the citizen to know of the affairs of governance in the nation and the right of the journalist to ensure an informed society”.

The court also quoted the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari when he said,  “questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question”.

These observations must be viewed against the reality of what the Indian media faces today in India. While Goswami has been granted relief, there are several journalists still facing serious charges including under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) as in the case of the journalists in Kashmir, under sedition as in the case of the journalist in Gujarat whose apparent crime was to report that the Gujarat Chief Minister might be on his way out, and several others including the founding editor of The Wire Siddharth Vardarajan who faces charges filed by the UP government. Journalists are unable to "speak truth to power" in India because of the way the law is used to attempt to silence those who do.

The International Federation of Journalists, in its recently released report on press freedom in South Asia, documents the assaults, killing and legal cases against scores of journalists across India and argues that this does not augur well for press freedom.

The court also spoke of the "freedom of the citizen to know of the affairs of governance". This is another aspect of press freedom, perhaps less noticed, that has been dented during the current Covid-19 crisis.

If you read newspapers or watch television, you will not necessarily be aware of this.  Every day, we are bombarded with statistics, as well as human interest stories that leave you numb -- of the continuing plight of the lakhs of workers and their families as they struggle to return to their homes, or of the afflicted who struggle to find a hospital bed in some of our better served cities.  There are dozens of such reports that can be cited but here and here are two such stories.

But behind this abundance of data and reports there appears to be a deliberate effort to fudge data, or at least to prevent access to accurate and verified data. Above all else, citizens want transparency from those who govern at a time like this. And yet, that is precisely what is being denied by the cover-up taking place in various forms.

One hint of this was evident recently when a report in the New Indian Express was taken down.  According to Priyanka Pulla writing in The Wire, the report observed the sudden absence of representatives of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) from the daily press briefings held by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare since April 23.  It wondered if this was connected to the bungling of the import of antibody test kits from China by ICMR that were found to be sub-standard and costly.  The reported also mentioned the unexplained disbanding of an expert panel on Covid-19 within days of it being constituted as also experts and scientists being disuaded from speaking to the media. The newspaper gave no explanation for why the article was taken off the website.

Pulla also points out that the absence of scientists from the daily press briefings has meant that no clear answers are being given to specific questions, such as when we expect to hit the peak with Covid-19 infections.  Such a question can only be addressed by a scientist who is conversant with the data and not a bureaucrat.

On the new digital platform, Article 14, Mridula Chari and Nitin Sethi go further when they argue that the decision to ease the lockdown is based on "a flawed data base". The article, a detailed long-read, points out that while state governments have always relied on data by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), the Centre had stipulated that only data by ICMR would be used.  As a result, there are several evident discrepancies between different lots of data.

Even if you are not interested in the minutiae, there is more than one reason to suspect that we are not getting the full picture of the spread of Covid-19. For instance, despite the rapid spread of the disease in the dense urban poor settlements in Mumbai, the government continues to insist that there is no community transmission.  Similarly, the percentage of workers returning to their home states who are testing positive is much higher than the percentage of infection in the cities from which they left.  How do we account for this? Did they pick it up enroute, or were they already infected but not detected in the cities where they worked?

Even if one gives the benefit of the doubt to the government that this is not deliberate, it certainly speaks of mismanagement. Because when there is a crisis of this proportion, the response must necessarily be based on accurate data from the ground up, about the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the availability of beds for people at different stages of the disease.  If this is not available, how can people in-charge plan effectively?  And how are citizens to feel confident that the crisis is being managed well?

Compounding the confusion on data was the unexplained decision to suspend the daily press briefings since May 11, that have only just restarted. As a result, journalists were unable to even ask routine questions, even if the answers consist of a substantial amount of obfuscation. This surely comes in the way of "the right of the journalist to ensure an informed society”, as mentioned by the Supreme Court. 

This government, like many others around the world, appears more anxious to prove how effective it has been in dealing with the pandemic rather than acknowledging the challenge it poses. A free and questioning media can be an ally at these times; it should not be seen as an adversary.