Vendetta against media will damage India, says Naipaul
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Your support makes all the difference.India faces the threat of censorship comparable with Indira Gandhi's state of emergency, the novelist Sir V S Naipaul warned yesterday.
The Nobel laureate described his disappointment and anxiety at the government's "persecution" of Tehelka.com, an internet media company that exposed one of the biggest bribery scandals in India's post-independence history. "It has become a bad story, and it could possibly become even worse," he said at a news conference in Delhi.
"I think something like this happened to Mrs Indira Gandhi some years ago. She carried on in a particular way that seemed expedient, and later it became something worse. I think that's a possibility."
In 1975 Mrs Gandhi, then Prime Minister, suspended the constitution and jailed an estimated 25,000 political opponents, journalists, lawyers and students without trial after she was convicted of electioneering malpractice, technically banning her from office. The judiciary was sidelined and the press was heavily censored.
The Trinidad-born Sir V S, always unsparing in his assessment of the country of his forefathers, is a member of the board of Tehelka. The website's reporters shook the government in March 2001 by mounting a sting in which they secretly filmed senior officials accepting kickbacks for a fictitious defence contract.
The case initially seemed a landmark in the evolution in India of a robust and campaigning free press, but since then the government has waged a vendetta against Tehelka and its journalists. While most of those implicated have received little more than a slap on the wrist, government agencies have harassed Tehelka and its investors.
Almost all the Tehelka staff, once more than 100, have been laid off and the website has been forced to suspend operations through lack of funds. Its chief investor, a Bombay-based brokerage called First Global, has closed almost all its Indian branches after being sent more than 200 summonses.
Sir V S spoke of his goodwill towards the Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads the coalition led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister. But the Tehelka affair had been "profoundly disappointing". He said: "It comes from another era. It serves no purpose. It probably will damage the country. I really hope [the government] will find ways now of withdrawing from the situation, of stepping back, because at this late stage it is still possible to recover some goodwill and some intellectual prestige."
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