The Prime Minister owes a debt of gratitude to Congress MPs – Mr Jagannath Mishra, Mr Chimanbhai Mehta and, above all, Mr Nanje Gowda – who have spoken out against the Defamation Bill and he should acknowledge it by inviting them for a discussion with him. They have shown him a way out of the trap in which some of his ministers have imprisoned him. The key issue is no longer whether the infamous Bill should be dropped; it has to be dropped. The key issue is how and when it should be done. Ideally, the Prime Minister should have made the announcement last Sunday when he instead announced postponement of the proposed introduction of the Bill in the Rajya Sabha and formation of a seven minister committee to review its provisions in consultation with organisations of journalists. Such an announcement would have shown Mr Rajiv Gandhi to be duly sensitive to the susceptibilities of the print media and ended a confrontation with the journalists which can only hurt him. But thanks perhaps to the contradictory pressures to which he is apparently exposed, he let that opportunity slip. In the new circumstances resulting also from near-unanimity among the journalistic fraternity that the Bill must first be dropped before talks with the government can begin, it is difficult to think of a better way out of the trap than a demonstration of opposition to the Bill in the Congress party itself.
Such opposition does not need to be manufactured. It exists. It has only to be allowed to express itself. In taking the lead in the matter, the MPs listed above have facilitated the Prime Minister’s task. All that he is now required to do is to indicate that he approves of what the MPs in question have done. The rest will follow. Pent-up feelings against the Bill and its architects in the party will burst into the open. That would justify a meeting of the Congress Working Committee and adoption of a resolution by it to the effect that the anti-press legislation be jettisoned in toto. As it happens, there is a precedent. In January 1986 the government had unjustifiably raised the prices of a number of petroleum products. There was an uproar in the Congress party. The Working Committee met and asked for a review of the decision. It was suitably reviewed.
Assuming that the Bill will be scrapped, hopefully not before long, we can turn our attention to an even more disturbing problem which the episode spotlights. This relates to the kind of men who constitute the ruling group. There cannot be the slightest doubt that a small cabal sold the idea of a contempt Bill to the Prime Minister, drafted it in considerable secrecy and persuaded him of the advisability of rushing it through the Lok Sabha in one day. These are dangerous men who took advantage of Mr Rajiv Gandhi’s annoyance over the Bofors affairs with a section of the press, his other pressing preoccupations and his general disinclination to go into details. They are unlikely to own up the damage they have inflicted on the Prime Minister and resign. They will have to be asked to pack up if Mr Rajiv Gandhi wants to get rid of them. But the story does not end with them. The minister for information, Mr H.K.L. Bhagat, has publicly said that the Bill was approved by the cabinet before it was introduced in the Lok Sabha. We still do not know whether any minister brought the dangerous implications of the proposed measures to the attention of the Prime Minister. But it can be safely assumed that no senior minister objected to it strongly enough to make Mr Rajiv Gandhi reconsider the matter. We are, of course, not so innocent as not to know that the cabinet generally acts as a mere rubber stamp. But the Defamation Bill was no ordinary matter. Anyone with any experience in politics could easily anticipate the furore it would provoke in the country. It is just not possible to believe that any cabinet member, who even examined the Bill cursorily, would not have recognised its disastrous consequences for the Congress party in general and the Prime Minister in particular. So three possible conclusions follow. First, no one outside the cabal read the Bill. Secondly, those who read it did not dare to express their apprehensions. Thirdly, some of them did not care if Mr Rajiv Gandhi got into another mess potentially as damaging as the Bofors affair. None of these inferences can do any credit to members of the cabinet. Surely Mr Rajiv Gandhi has to reflect on the matter.