Fake news is a problem but I&B Ministry’s ill-thought out solution was rightly nixed by PM
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swift annulment of the I&B Ministry’s order stripping journalists of their accreditation for allegedly purveying fake news scythed through any risk of alienating the fourth estate in an election year. And showed that he would not let neither the party nor his individual Ministers stir up more ego-driven controversies, games of institutional one-upmanship and damage the image of his Government, which is fast thinning out given the mass impact of the brutal deaths of Indians at Mosul and the distress to a vast majority of young Indians following the CBSE exam leak. His aggressive public intervention, with a categoric insistence that the Ministry must not interfere or give directions in a sphere where the Press Council of India was fully empowered to take action against fake or misreported news, was intended to convey a deep distress and disappointment about the increasing perception of the BJP being just as bad as the Congress of the Emergency era in manipulating and enslaving the media. Add to this the embarrassing duel between the I&B Ministry and the autonomous Prasar Bharati over official broadcast policies, arbitrary appointments in the Press Council itself and the recent deaths of grassroots investigative journalists, and you know why the gathering storm of being seen as a muzzle monster needed to dissipate before it could acquire gale force. At a time when the communication bandwidth has become more widespread with a combination of print, TV, digital and social media, the war of perception is won or lost in a flurry of quicksilver opinions. Nobody understands this better than Mr Modi, who has from 2014 crafted a monolithic and purpose-driven image of himself, one that could wrest chaos single-handedly. By distancing himself from overt media management, he has been able to posit himself again as doing the right thing while assigning the wrongdoing to another and showing he could arrest it just as effectively. Part of the action also followed the embarrassing reality of 13 of his ministers tweeting a link listing fake news items, which was found to have some association with Exam Warriors, Mr Modi’s book on encouraging youth, thereby priming doubts about whether the gag order had his endorsement too in the first place. Understandably, he had to come clean as some of the reports listed in the link related to print media news based on documentary evidence and raised brows over whether journalists had any right to ask any questions of the government at all.
The BJP, which has been constantly pitching Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and Rajiv Gandhi’s anti-defemation Bill of 1988 as being detrimental to liberal and inclusive discourse, has clearly gone a bit knee-jerk in its reactive strategies to the Congress’ resurgent propaganda. While the Congress has been arrogant with the media even post-Emergency, particularly during reportage of Bofors, the BJP would have to be doubly sure that it doesn’t clone that behaviour even remotely. If only the I&B Ministry had learnt from the Vasundhara Government’s rollback of the gag order that sought to protect judges and public servants from media coverage, then things would not have come to such a Trump-era caricature. Amid this fiasco, the real issue is how to identify and eliminate fake news, which has now weaponised social media as a political tool. While countries like Germany and Philippines are drafting laws that make the American tech giants like Facebook and Google culpable, self-regulation in a democracy is all about restoring trust of what makes news. In our country, the print media has largely been responsible and is respected as a disseminator of authenticity. Other media have to be as stringent. The fight against fake news should not become an alibi for squashing dissent and controlling the right of differing ideas to co-exist. That leads to cynicism of which the ruling dispensation is usually the recipient. And no amount of damage control can dilute that.