Andhra Pradesh has given bureaucrats the power to sue journalists. What does it mean for press freedom?

On October 30, the Andhra Pradesh government empowered top bureaucrats to sue journalists and media houses for “false, baseless, defamatory news” published with “malafide” intention.

The decision, driven by Chief Minister YS Jaganmohan Reddy, vastly expands such powers granted to the bureaucracy by his father YS Rajasekhar Reddy in 2007, when he was the chief minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh. While YSR, as the late leader was popularly known, had empowered the Special Information Commissioner alone to take such action, his son has authorised all department heads to monitor the news, issue rejoinders and file cases. Moreover, the 2007 directive covered print and electronic media, but the latest order applies to social media as well.

The new order has caused outrage from journalists as well as the civil society, just as the 2007 directive had. 

Jaganmohan Reddy’s crackdown on the media is an extension of the political feud that’s raging since Rajasekhar Reddy took power from the Telugu Desam Party of Chandrababu Naidu in 2004. YSR perceived the Telugu media as being largely loyal to the TDP. Not without reason: media barons such as Ramoji Rao of Eenadu Group and Vemuri Radhakrishna of Andhra Jyothi publicly supported Naidu. YSR reportedly believed the media barons were hostile towards him because they belonged to the Kamma community, the core supporters of the TDP. 

The Kammas are one of the two dominant caste groups in Andhra, the other being the Reddys, who traditionally supported the Congress but shifted to the YSR Congress Party, which Jaganmohan Reddy launched in 2011 after splitting from his father’s party. The Kammas and the Reddy have long battled for political and economic dominance in Andhra.

When YSR took over as chief minister, he felt hounded by a hostile media. He made his displeasure known in the Assembly and elsewhere, and began investigations into chit fund and financial services businesses of the Eenadu Group. One such case against a group company, Margadarsi Financiers, went to the Supreme Court, where prominent journalists N Ram and Kuldip Nayar impleaded themselves to defend press freedom. The court, though, refused to stay the investigations. “When the chief minister commits a mistake you pointed it out. Similarly, when you did wrong, the state government has acted. Your client is wearing two hats. One as a newspaper owner and the other as a proprietor of chit fund company,” the court told Ramoji Rao’s counsel. “It has nothing to do with the freedom of press. It’s only a financial business.”

It was during this battle with the media barons that YSR attempted to gag the press through the 2007 order. When it didn’t have the desired effect – in large part thanks to criticism from journalists across India – his son launched Sakshi newspaper in 2008, followed by Sakshi TV. YSR publicly said they needed their own media outlets to counter the hostile coverage. The Sakshi group was soon engaged in a confrontation with Eenadu and Andhra Jyothi.

After Naidu returned to power in 2014, he paid back in kind. The Sakshi group and its journalists had a hard time getting information from the state government, they were prohibited from attending official press conferences, and even threatened. Cable operators, many of them politicians, would not carry Sakshi TV. And just as K Chandrashekar Rao’s government had denied any responsibility for Telangana cable operators’ boycott of TV9 and Andhra Jyothi in 2014, Naidu denied having any hand in the Sakshi group’s difficulties.

Now that Jaganmohan Reddy is in power, Andhra Jyothi, Eenadu TV and TV5, which is owned by Bollineni Rajagopal Naidu and Bollineni Ravidranath, are back on the government’s radar, facing hostility from state-friendly cable operators. 

Justifying the new order, K Ramachandra Murthy, a journalist of repute who serves as special advisor to Jaganmohan Reddy’s government, said, “Some channels and newspapers are spreading blatant falsehoods about the new government and its policies. When there is a deliberate, malafide project to defame the government, we are only asking the media to follow journalistic ethics and publish verified information and not rumours. How is filing cases to defend our reputation illegal?”

Information and Public Relations Minister Perni Venkataramaiah said, “We are not targeting reporters. Media ownership is making them do it. News should be written based on evidence, one cannot simply manufacture the news for sarcastic, rhyming headlines, and demean individuals while hurting their dignity or their political reputation.”

The debate sparked by the Andhra government’s order seems to be broadly divided between two views. One is that the media has gone rogue and needs to be brought to heel. The other is that free speech must be unfettered for the rogue media as well. Both views are anchored somewhere in the belief that democratic space for public interest must be protected.

Political philosopher Chantal Mouffe argues that democratic discourse is not about consensus. Conflict is unavoidable, and necessary, to constantly renegotiate and course-correct. However, citizens are being trained through mainstream and social media to see politics as a fight-to-finish the “enemy”. The enemy is anyone who does not agree with their view. Democratic politics is about creating an agonistic space, according to Mouffe, where individuals are able debate diverse ideas, and are merely adversaries when they disagree.

In India today, the media is actively used to create antagonism, and enemies instead of political adversaries. Enabling an environment of adversarial contestation (not antagonism) in politics requires that all those involved believe in the democratic values of equality and justice for all. Such belief is sorely missing in both the political class as well as the media which serves as an instrument of this class.

The media owned or patronised by business and political elites has played the game to enrich their benefactors. The enthusiasm for free speech dissipates when their own friends are in power. This does not bode well for democracy, or for the rest of the media that’s doing its job.

Yet, the order issued by the Andhra government essentially legitimises the state’s intervention in the functioning of the media. As with surveillance, whose purported purpose is to tackle terrorism but it is often targeted at those who speak truth to the power, legitimising curbs on the media in any form will damage real journalists more than those jostling for power. This order must be opposed despite the severe damage done to democratic and journalistic values by sections of the Indian media.