Notices to ABP, NDTV and India Today for questioning Memon judgement. Did they not see the other channels doing the same?

The rules it seems are different for different news channels.

WrittenBy:Arunabh Saikia
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What we know: On August 8, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry hit out at three news channels because it claims they violated three clauses of the Cable Television Network Rules, 1994 with their coverage of Yakub Memon’s death sentence.

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What we do not know: Why were only these three channels meted out this special treatment by the ministry?  First, the programmes were hardly ground-shatteringly original.  Second, if a dissenting voice was the problem, every news channel had one in some form or the other.

Here are the facts: NDTV was served a notice for a debate show, which had Yakub’s former lawyer, Shyam Keswani, as one of the panelists. So what do you think he said?  He, like any professional lawyer, took his client’s side.

Then the ministry got into a twist about a phone-in interview with gangster Chhota Shakeel, ABP News and Aaj Tak aired. And hey!  Much to the government’s surprise, during the interview, he didn’t exactly sing paeans to India’s justice mechanism.

So what were the news channels in trouble for exactly?  Here are the three clauses of the Cable Television Network Rules that the programmes violated in the I & B ministry’s opinion:

Section 1(d) – No programme with any “obscene, defamatory, deliberate, false and suggestive innuendos and half-truths” should be aired.

Section 1(e) – Cable channels should refrain from broadcasting programmes “likely to encourage or incite violence or contains anything against maintenance of law and order or which promote anti-national attitudes.”

Section 1(g) – Channels should not carry anything, which “contains aspersions against the integrity of the President and Judiciary”.

Clearly this is all about subjectivity, perspective and interpretation of the said clauses.

The media cannot even review judgments now? We don’t live in North Korea under Kim Jong-un, do we? And if presenting the other side to the story amounts to being anti-national, obscene or distrustful of the judiciary, every other news channel did it too. So for a government, which keeps changing its mind on everything, flip flops on this and that, we should also get used to the fact that uniformity is something we cannot expect from it.

If interviewing a gangster is not allowed, did this interview with Yakub Memon that India Today TV must have aired at least a dozen times – and with much gusto  – escape the government’s notice?  

NDTV seems to have got an even worse deal.  Keswani, whose presence in one of its debates irked the ministry, was present in at least four more shows on other news channels, which are ABP Maza, Asianet News, ABP News and MI Marathi.

Here, Keswani claims the CBI had urged him to apply for Yakub  Memon’s bail on the grounds that he had helped India with investigations, only to backtrack later, citing “Delhi’s orders”.

In this one-on-one interview, Keswani contends that Yakub Memon was being targeted because Indian authorities couldn’t get hold of his brother, Tiger Memon.

This debate has Keswami contending that a life sentence would have been “more than sufficient”.

Here, the lawyer again argues that Yakub should have been given a life sentence instead of capital punishment.

Did all of these shows escape the watchful eyes of the Electronic Media Monitoring cell that monitors channels 24/7 from the 10th floor of the Soochna Bhavan?

There were scores of other shows where the judgment was questioned – and people said not-so-savoury things about the Indian judicial system. None of them, though, seemed to have upset the government. Here are a few such shows that the government seems to have missed.

Here, N Ram argues against capital punishment and questions its place in a democracy.

 
In this interview, Asaduddin Owaisi suggests, and not very subtly, that Yakub was being selectively targeted while many other convicts had been pardoned.

If questioning the court’s judgment is equivalent to contempt of court, the government should perhaps just get news channels to stop airing debates.  The last time we checked, the point of a debate is to let people on both sides speak – an idea that the government is issuing increasing discomfort to.  Perhaps we should all remember Arun Shourie’s warning:  Since the Emergency, any government, which has clamped down on freedom of expression has been singed.  

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