It will pass   as the cruelest of cruel jokes in the history of Jammu and Kashmir.   The biggest ever contingent of the parliamentarians from the largest democracy in the world arrived on Monday to a ‘ghost city’ to know people’s opinion and gather people’s perception in a ‘no-newspaper’ city. About five million people have been caged without even allowing a flutter.  The sick are denied to visit hospitals, fetch medicines and babies deprived of food for the past one week and publication of the newspapers   made impossible. True, the government has not so far issued any orders to ban the newspapers but it has adopted a  fascist policy  of intimidating, beating and harassing the journalists, reporters and newspaper staff. To make the movement of the reporters impossible during the strict curfew in the state the government has not only been repeatedly cancelling their curfew passes but very tacitly passing instructions to security forces not honor even the passes issued to the journalists and media professionals. In hundred days turmoil  more than hundred five people have been killed and hundreds have been wounded by  bullets and pellets. Hardly a day passes when police and paramilitary forces are not using brute force against people, killing them, brutalizing them and vandalizing the villages and civilian colonies. Making publishing of newspapers impossible has a malicious design of blocking information channels to the people of the State. In tune with  the Big Lie doctrine of the Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, the government has exerted totalitarian control   over the media by creating situations that has made publication of newspapers impossible.  Besides gagging press very subtly it has also banned local TV networks as also a foreign news channels.   Besides banning some international televisions the authorities have also asked the cable operators to withdraw relaying of important international television that have deputed their crews to cover Kashmir situation.  To continue with the ban on Kashmir media when the team of Indian Parliamentarians is in Kashmir is obviously to keep them   in dark about the situation in the State. Though the phenomenon is not new  the method used by the government to block information to the people is dubiously distinct.   Denial of information or providing of filtered information to people has been an inalienable shade of the political landscape of the state for the past many decades.  Whenever the state government fails on every count the self-appointed prophets of nationalism and patriotism in the state bureaucracy finds   a scapegoat in the newspapers and media and blame it for its failures. In seventy five years history of journalism there is no parallel of creating situation for preventing publication of all newspapers. There is no parallel to it during the feudal rule when the people of the State were struggling for freedom of press and platform even during those days of struggle at no point of time all newspapers were banned. The authoritarian rulers were not banning any newspaper without ascribing   reasons for the ban. The policy adopted by the state government towards media in Kashmir does not find even  a parallel in the Jagmohan rule that is counted as the worst of the Central rules in the State. In 1990, he officially banned some newspapers under government that were challenged in the court of law. But the state government that has claim of being democratically elected and having people’s mandate is yet to recognize that by all norms press is ‘institutional limb of modern democracy’.  The mandarins in the state administration and even spin doctors of the present government are perhaps unaware of the verdict of one of the highest courts in India that the freedom of press is to be upheld even during the emergency in the country. The government by drawing blinds on the realties in the situation may trick the team of Parliamentarians from New Delhi but blocking channels of information to people is a dangerous game fraught with dangerous consequences.        
 
 

Lastupdate on : Mon, 20 Sep 2010 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 IST