Mr. PC Sethi is not one of those Congress (I) leaders who believe that one of the quickest and most effective ways of endearing themselves to the Prime Minister is to condemn the press. It is, therefore, sad that faced with a difficult situation arising out of publication of documentary evidence which shows that the government went ahead with the recent elections in Assam despite warnings by police officials of a possible communal bloodbath, he, too, should have criticized the press. But his action is not particularly surprising. For, Mrs. Gandhi’s government seems to operate on the assumption that the press has no business to expose its failures and the misdoings of its members. In its view, while it is bad enough that newspapers and magazines should dig up cases in which vital decisions are taken on extraneous considerations, it is much worse that they should investigate holocausts such as the one in Nellie in Assam and publish their own findings. And, of course, the crime of the press becomes all the more intolerable if the publication of derogatory material coincides with an event like the non-aligned summit last March. For, in that case, the press is guilty of nothing less heinous than tarnishing the country’s image abroad and creating foreign policy problems for the government.
Journalists themselves are not agreed whether or not pictures relating to the Nellie massacre should have been published. This disagreement has nothing to do with the fact that leaders of non-aligned countries were then due to assemble in New Delhi. It is the result of an old convention that newspapers should not carry pictures of bodies. But whether one agrees or disagrees, a powerful case can surely be made for ignoring this convention when a carnage like the one in Nellie takes place. And there can be little doubt that those editors who decided to publish the Nellie massacre pictures took the view that they owed it to their readers and the general public to do so. Pictures speak louder than words. They provide evidence which is not easy to controvert. So they embarrass the authorities more than reports and articles, especially on a sensitive occasion like the non-aligned summit. But it is about time that Mrs. Gandhi and her ministers recognise that such exposures cannot be avoided in a democracy.
No government in the world is insensitive to the image problem, not even the one in the United States which has sired what is called exposure journalism. But the reaction of every government depends on its character. While Pravda could not expose Stalin’s crimes or Khrushchev’s “harebrained” schemes while he was still in office, American papers and magazines revel in disclosing the doings and misdoings of their government. Almost all disclosures regarding the CIA have, for example, come from US journalists. The same can now be said to be true of India, though investigative journalism here is still in its infancy partly because the Indian government is not quite the sieve the American administration is and partly because we in this country have nothing like the first amendment and the right to information act. On a surface view, this damages the nation’s image. But such a proposition is based on the misconception that the government and the nation are synonyms. They are not. Exposure of the government is a tribute to the society in question. A free press is an expression of the health and self-confidence of a community. One reason America commands the respect of the world is that its press is so daring. The same advantage will accrue to us if we persist in our present ways. And, for the advantage of Mr. CM Stephen, who recently left the Union government after a display of competence no one can possibly envy, we might add that patriotism is not the monopoly of those who happen to be in or near office and that vague charges and insinuations are more appropriate to regimes which survive by terror and not to democratic ones which derive their mandate from the people in free and fair elections. India is a great democracy not just by the size of its population but the quality and strength of its institutions. No one has a right to cast doubt on this remarkable achievement.
Similarly Mr Sethi was on weak ground when he turned down the demand for a commission of inquiry into the Nellie horror. The opposition’s plea in this regard was wholly legitimate. Judicial probes have been ordered into much smaller tragedies than the one in Nellie, the worst since the partition riots in 1947. And Mr. Sethi cannot seriously believe either that an administrative inquiry is sufficient in this case, or that those hardliners who pushed the election through will permit a fair inquiry into their conduct. A cover-up operation is on and Mr. Sethi knows it. He is acquiescing in it even if he has [not] approved it.