There has been an uproar over the central government’s decision to ban NDTV for a day for allegedly revealing the country’s ‘sensitive and strategic information’ during a news telecast. The issue has been debated ad nauseum, as to whether the charge is correct, does it stick, and if it does then does it apply only to NDTV and have other television channels committed similar transgress. The ban has even been described as selective an even illegal.
An important aspect that seems to have been lost in the commotion is the timing of the ban. The alleged indiscretion by NDTV took place several days ago, but can it be said that it is a mere coincidence that the ban came barely days after the channel raised very precise and probing questions over the alleged jail-break by eight terror accused from the Central Jail in Bhopal and their killing by security forces barely a few hours later on the outskirts of the Madhya Pradesh capital? Representatives of the government – ministers and top officials alike – were visibly and clearly uncomfortable facing questions from NDTV correspondents and anchors and gave pretty unconvincing explanations about the sequence of events in the Bhopal jail-break. Indeed, one anchor on the channel visibly had difficulty suppressing his laughter when one Madhya Pradesh minister claimed that the inmates had escaped after making ‘keys from spoons’!! This was when other channels were going overboard with how the government had handled the crisis efficiently and had acted quickly.
Indeed, as one commentator has pointed out, NDTV has been … in the cross-hairs of the current establishment for quite some time (because) it has remained sober and balanced … (and) did not get into the everyday rant invoking patriotism, national security and the army to gloss over other issues.
For the record, the Programme Code of TV Network Rules of 1994 says, in effect, that no channel will show any live coverage of anti-terrorist operations by security coverage. As it has been already pointed out, NDTV only reported about anti-terrorist operations; it did not show ‘live’ coverage. Even Justice (retired) Markandey Katju has pointed out that the ban was illegal.
So why? The answer seems to lie in the tragic fact that we as a nation have supposedly adopted democracy, whereas in fact we still remain a feudal society with a feudalistic mindset. We have only replaced one set of rulers/authorities by another. One simple example will drive the point home: A District Collector (in fact, all government employees and officials) are technically ‘public servants’, but can any common citizen simply walk into his office and air his grievance? He cannot; he has to pass several hurdles, the first one being the peon (‘messenger’ in politically correct terms), then some clerk, then some senior clerk, the personal assistant and so on before he can even hope to get an audience with the officer. It is actually more likely that he will be diverted to some lower official in some other office. In what system in the world does a ‘servant’ behave in such a snobbish manner?
The whole system reeks of feudalism, and that is the mentality that has clearly brought NDTV into trouble. No one – absolutely no one – in authority likes to be asked questions. In modern times, retaliation cannot be immediate but has to be camouflaged as formal action; it usually comes over flimsy grounds but the immediate provocation is actually something else; often, the real reason totally different and might have been simmering totally unknown to the victim.