Putting Up a Fight for a Free Press in India

Washington - Rajmohan Gandhi ( http://www.rajmohangandhi.com/homepage ) is preaching for press freedom and press responsibility. The freedom is vital in any democracy, he says, and the press has to work against threats to that freedom.

Gandhi is a grandson of Indian independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi. His other grandfather, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, known as Rajaji, was also a leading figure in the independence movement. Gandhi has had a career as a democracy and peace activist, a member of India's parliament, a journalist, a historian and a biographer.

Since 1997, Gandhi has been a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ( http://www.illinois.edu/ )'s Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; his latest book, A Tale of Two Revolts, compares the Indian Revolt of 1857 with the American Civil War of 1861-1865. But in an appearance June 9 at the National Press Club ( http://npc.press.org/ ) in Washington, Gandhi focused on a more recent period of Indian history and the importance of the fight for a free press.

India has had a free and competitive press since independence in 1947, noted Myron Belkind, a longtime Associated Press correspondent and an officer of the press club, "with the exception of what is considered a dark period." From June 1975 to March 1977, the government of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a state of emergency that severely curtailed press freedom, among other issues.

Belkind, who covered India during the emergency, added, "Despite that clampdown, many Indian journalists continued to do their best to fulfill their professional obligations in the face of threats and imprisonment from the government." And Rajmohan Gandhi was among them, he said.

Gandhi (no relation to Indira Gandhi) recalled that the state of emergency was set off by a court challenge that arose after the prime minister's election in 1971. A state court ruled that her election was illegal, and the Supreme Court of India put off a decision until it could hear the case in its fall term, saying the prime minister could remain in that office in the meantime but could not be a member of parliament.

Press freedom was quickly curtailed once the emergency order was signed, he said. "In the middle of the night, the printing presses of the newspapers in New Delhi were all switched off; there was no electricity sent to them. There is one street in New Delhi which has 10 major newspapers, so the electric connection for all those buildings was removed. In the middle of the night, several hundred political figures, members of parliament, were arrested. In the subsequent days, thousands of people were arrested, and censorship was imposed," he said.

Under the first phase of censorship, "everything that was to be published in newspapers had to be approved by a censor." That proved unmanageable, Gandhi said. Pre-publication reviews were removed, but "a great many newspapers just succumbed" to the continued strict guidelines about what could or could not be printed, he said.

Others, though, chose to fight the censorship. "Quite a few people in different parts of India played this type of a role - in the large newspapers, but of course, as you can imagine, it was somewhat easier to do this if you had a smaller newspaper," Gandhi said.

Gandhi's newspaper, a weekly named Himmat that he and some friends had founded, was one such paper. "We decided that we would as far as possible defy the law, as far as possible out-trick the censors and then fight the way we could," he said. "When it appeared that the removal of pre-censorship gave us more opportunities, we took those opportunities and published quite freely."

Defying the government came with costs. Air India, then a government-owned company, had advertised in Himmat every week since its first issue, but it and several banks cut off their advertising. The newspaper also lost its printing contractor. Gandhi, editor of the Himmat, was also targeted: "I was asked to pay a large fine, which I refused to pay," he said.

The defiant press even worked to Indira Gandhi's benefit, he said. "Different people from all over the world would visit India and call on the prime minister, and they would all ask about the emergency, the lack of democracy in India," he said. "So she would pull out of her top drawer two or three copies of journals like Himmat to show how free the press in India was."

When Indira Gandhi called for elections and ended the state of emergency, Indian voters turned her out of office. "To Indira Gandhi's credit, she did apologize for the emergency," Rajmohan Gandhi said.

"That was a terrific period where many people enjoyed fighting for press freedom," he said. "I should also admit that because people like Myron and many other journalists from the rest of the world were present in India, that gave us courage."

Today, with a vibrant free press still the norm in India, Gandhi said a new threat faces journalists - the competition for readers amid a noisy, "glossy" media market. "Today there is no emergency and there is no censorship, but moneymaking, lifestyle news, Bollywood news, entertainment news continues to black out news from the media in India," he said.

Still, Gandhi said the culture of press freedom remains an essential part of India. And he praised as "very inspiring" the vigorous free press that has grown in neighboring Pakistan.