On the backfoot, Congress wants to gag media
That the Congress is intolerant of institutions, including the media and the judiciary, when things begin to go wrong for it, is a historical truth. The Emergency is a good reminder of that. It's no surprise, therefore, that the party has come out against opinion polls, all of which have been recently predicting a defeat for the Congress in the coming Assembly and lok Sabha elections. Faced with adverse reportage, the party now wants to muzzle the media by seeking to wipe off opinion surveys. But gagging the media is not going to change the ground reality, which is that the Congress is sliding down with every passing day as election time approaches. The Congress is woefully in error if it believes that an end to opinion polls will shore up its electoral fortunes. It must look back at its earlier and more recent moves to manipulate public opinion and the outrage that they elicited. None of that has left the party with a greater degree of credibility. On the contrary, the measures have additionally contributed to the Congress's declining image. It appears that the Congress does not want to learn from the past. For instance, the UPA Government it leads had vainly threatened media sites such as Facebook, Google and YouTube for allowing “objectionable” content against the party to be published. Also, the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which took the lead in warning these sites, has refused to amend or scrap the controversial Section 66A of the Information Technology Act which criminalises the act of ‘causing annoyance or inconvenience' online. The demand for the provision to be either scrapped or rewritten rose after authorities began rounding up people for supposedly breaching the Act. The Congress does not want to let go of a provision that it can use to arm-twist people on social media who are inclined to support the Opposition or who voice their displeasure against the Congress-led UPA regime. In yet another act of intolerance to free speech, the Ministry recently shot off an ‘advisory' to television channels, for having ‘denigrated the status of the Prime Minister'. What had the channels done to invite such a grave chargeIJ They telecast Mr Narendra Modi's speech on August 15 and had the gall to compare it (rather favourably) with that of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Independence Day address from the Red Fort!
The Congress-led UPA is clearly telling the media what the latter should report, and how. Only recently, one of the party's younger members, who had been supposedly hand-picked by Mr Rahul Gandhi, had atrociously sought to introduce a Private Member's Bill in Parliament that recommended curbs on the freedom of the Press. That the move eventually fizzled out is because the Government came up against stiff opposition from many quarters.
Such setbacks, however, have never lessened the party's appetite to control institutions. Going back in time a bit, the Congress had made the Election Commission of India its handmaiden before Mr TN Seshan took over the Chief Election Commissioner of India in the early 1990s and changed the game for all time to come. The party must realise that it is no longer functioning in an environment where it can suppress the media and artificially craft public opinion.