Attack on press freedom

The Attorney General of India’s submission to the Supreme Court, later retracted, that the Government was considering action against The Hindu under the undemocratic and draconian Official Secrets Act (OSA) was unwarranted and awkward. Casting the legalese aside, the Government was seeking to shoot the messenger for publishing secret documents that questioned the Rafale deal. The AG could have sounded more credible if he had argued that the secret documents revealed by the media house were incorrect or irrelevant to the case. If these documents were not edited to tamper with the context or to further political or corporate interests, they remain valid.

Instead of arguing on the validity of the information put out in the public domain, the Government has given the impression of threatening journalists for raising uncomfortable or inconvenient questions.  The Editors’ Guild has rightly noted that any attempt to wield the Official Secrets Act against journalists is as ‘reprehensible’ as asking journalists to disclose their sources. If the aim was to stop the courts from looking at those documents merely because they were suspected to be purloined, the ploy failed.  Journalists have every right to obtain documents and publish them for greater public good. A journalist’s public-spirited attempt to bring out the truth should go beyond handout journalism and it can never be termed a breach of national security. The court has rightly turned down the AG’s plea not to look at evidence just because it was obtained through leaks. All great stories have been leaked out by some public-spirited official or the other.

Unless the Government proves that these documents have been planted on the newspaper for partisan reasons, the consequences of the documents being declared genuine are indeed far-reaching.  For they seem to hint at an attempt to compromise the Defence Ministry’s negotiating position due to the interference of the Prime Minister’s Office as well as suppression of facts from the Supreme Court. More reprehensible is the threat to force journalists to reveal their sources. It is universally recognised that the relationship between the media and the State ought to be adversarial, with the media playing an Oppositional role. It should remain so for our democracy to remain vibrant and viable.