Today’s times can’t be exaggerated as Emergency: N. Ram

The current times shouldn’t be in comparison with the Emergency as there have been nonetheless areas the place one may air robust opinions and combat repression, N. Ram, Director, The Puucho Publishing Group, mentioned on Saturday.

He was talking in a webinar organised by Live Law on “Criminalising Journalism and Cinema”.

Mr. Ram mentioned uneven implementation of legislation, and the upper judiciary, on multiple event, have failed to guard press freedom. “The recent arrests and filing of criminal cases against several journalists and also other creative persons, has exposed and widened the fault lines in our Constitution. We used to think we have pretty good protection, but actually we don’t. There are many escape clauses in law which is aggravated by executive overreach and failure of the judiciary to adequately protect.”

India, he acknowledged, had regressed by way of freedom of press. “There was a time when, in terms of freedom of press, India was in an enviable position among the developing nations. But that was 40 years ago, we had just come out of the dark chapter of Emergency. Political scientist Robin Jeffrey, in a book dealing with the Indian language press, called it India’s newspaper revolution. Today if I were to claim that we are in an enviable position, then I will be accused of spreading fake news,” he noticed.

One should not fall right into a temptation of exaggerating at present’s times as the Emergency. “I wouldn’t say that this is like an emergency. That would be a mistake. I have lived under Emergency, when there was total censorship, detention of journalists. Let’s not rush out to conclusions. There are still spaces where you can express vigorous opinion, strong condemnation of the acts of the executive, criticise the judiciary and so on,” he famous.

Far extra sinister: Akhil Sibal

Senior Advocate Akhil Sibal mentioned what was occurring was way more sinister. “There is a larger narrative that is being orchestrated, which is to attack freedom of speech as a value and a concerted effort is being made to promote a competing value of so-called nationalism. And, therefore, those who dissent are being branded as anti-nationals and terrorists.”

Agreeing with Mr. Ram, Mr. Sibal mentioned, “we may not have reached the stage of Emergency, but we are definitely on the way. What we are seeing should be something which alarms us at a deeper level and we must not be dismissive about it as something which is just a temporary blip, but see it for what it is”.

Screenwriter Jyoti Kapoor mentioned that particularly after the controversy over internet collection like Tandav, display writers had been a susceptible lot. “Producers are now making the screenwriters sign undertakings that there is nothing in the script that could be blasphemous, libellous, defamatory towards any religion and so on,” she identified.