No More Gagging Please

DN Singh

It was a humble yet bold beginning by the media fraternity in Orissa in general and Bhubaneshwar in particular to aggressively push an agenda that, neither the people in power can continue to remain complacent with their acts of neglect towards the Fourth Estate, nor the police should carry on with its fixed mind-set to treat them with a prejudice that was manifested in a recent few acts of excesses. Also, the political executives should no longer choose to dismiss a scribe by a sidelong look. Be it booking a scribe on flimsy charges of lending support to Naxals or gagging someone else for taking up the causes of the people or harassing another for writing the truth, that time is slipping away and one cannot turn the state into a right-wing terror hub. It is always said that any critique shocks more where he/she is most accurate. Nowadays in Orissa, the political climate is somewhat similar. After electoral victories, in consecution, any critical observation by the media is often seen as an attack on the moral of the system that is purported to be the most sacrosanct, hence impeccable. The level of tolerance appears to be lower when bureaucracy enjoys the centrestage in a system and the result is, the people in power tend to draw sinister conclusions for making room for the shreds of comfort they are used to. That is where feigning impeccability becomes the buzzword. Flip Side Records indicate that attacks on the Fourth Estate can be traced back to the 1980s, when either a scribe was beaten to death or his wife was raped and murdered on a riverbed. In the late ‘80s, a forthright senior journalist, Swarup Jena was given such a thrashing by the police in the middle of the capital and in broad daylight. The scribe succumbed to his injuries within days of the barbaric assault. In 2007, a scribe, Bijay Dwibedi of Kalahandi was arrested under Section 214(b) for reporting on cholera. Charges like sedition are being slapped on journalists as if they are already in the list of the most wanted. Fairly recently three other scribes of a local channel were booked under Section 214. However, three recent incidents of attack have reminded everyone of the era of the Congress when the press was often driven to despair by official arm-twisting. A series of attacks, fairly recently, on the media people in Orissa has put a question mark on both the democratic mindset of the government and the moral equivalence between the two pillars. A journalist, Laxman Choudhry, was thrown behind the bars, rather indignantly, when some Maoists leaflets were found in his possession. He was soon branded a Maoist sympathizer and the cops lost no opportunity in levelling more allegations against him so that the scope for a legal buoy is reduced to the minimum. Another scribe from Puri had a close encounter with death when a group of hired political goons assaulted and left him invalid with a broken leg and several other injuries. Jagannath Bastia was merely cleaning Puri of the vices of politically backed land-grabbers, creating a shield against the deteriorating climatic condition there and showing the mirror to the hoteliers whose role in this game of pollution was visible. Two more scribes, Sriharsh and Kiran Mishra, from Jharsugda met first with ruthless behaviour and then physical assault just because they exposed a land-grabbing racket that was going on with administrative blessings! Shred of Success However, on the issue of Choudhry the scribes looked ahead to a solution from the political quarters and met the chief minister. He appeared very assuring in his reactions, rather advocating for press freedom during the two meetings that the scribes had with him. But, the power-that-be having little or no comprehension of the magnitude of the injustice to the scribe, constantly seemed to be closing any option of a re-look into the case as was desired by the big boss. So the scribe had to languish in jail for over a month. The chief minister nearly, as I can now pin-point, set a firm deadline for dropping the charge. Nothing happened and our frustrations grew with two subsequent assaults on the scribes. And that left the journalists of the city puzzled and soon everything shifted to high gear as we had to rise above the speculative stages of hope. There was an air of ambiguity for some time since our progress, as a fraternity, was palpably slow. But the failures, in fact, served as the inherent catalysts to reaffirm the resolve for unity, which we did. That was one thing that had kept many of us worried, at least the quest for a semblance of unity. At this juncture, neither I can take away credit from one of our senior media friend, Mr Sampad, nor I can fail in mentioning the doggedness with which he steered our till-then-faltering unity-apple-cart to a destination. Neither the professional work pressure nor age could deter him from the cause. But this unity or togetherness should not be read as a transformation of the situation where the power-that-be can be expected to lend the media a windfall of liberty. The journey of the media in Orissa was never a smooth one. In the midst of myth and reality in the governance, a scribe faces lot of imperious heat of disregard from the bureaucracy and its access to information always encounters suspect or blockades. Many ‘sarkari’ babus (including police) would love to grab the earliest opportunity to see a scribe tormented by ignorance and suffer the ignominy of disinformation. Here, in Orissa, it is a kind of hush-hush organization ruling us, enclosed within a water-tight compartment, where the chances of exposures remain limited. But, one cannot hide the reality for long and sometimes, a system suffers from inner convolution and bursts out into the open, with the latest being the mega mining scam. It was like a treasure hunt in which many had their fingers on the pies. All said and done, the assignment ahead for the scribes of Orissa is too big to allow us to be elated at the completion of the first ever show of strength, which was like a fragrance that may not last long. We had the fortitude to endure the insults inflicted upon us, now the resolve needs more frequency and intensity.