How successive Indian governments have been monitoring the media

In his autobiography, Lucknow Boy, the late Vinod Mehta, Outlook magazine’s founding editor, has written about how 700-odd income tax officials swooped down on the offices of the Raheja group, promoters of Outlook magazine. The raids, conducted in 2001 across 12 cities, including Outlook's Mumbai office, came some weeks after the magazine had reported on then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's foster son-in-law, Ranjan Bhattacharya, and his influence in the PMO, Mehta writes.

The excesses of the Emergency on the media for 19 months, from June 26, 1975 to early 1977, during the Indira Gandhi years, have been well documented. Newspapers were censored, several journalists arrested and foreign scribes expelled. On the media's conduct during the Emergency, L K Advani had once said: "You were asked to bend but you began to crawl." Mehta, however, has documented in detail how Rajan Raheja was harassed in 2001, in an ordeal that ended after meetings with the finance minister and PM's right-hand man, Brajesh Mishra.

The recent quitting of senior ABP News journalists, and the general attempts by the Narendra Modi government, as last week’s statement from the Editors Guild of India put it, to “interfere” with the independence of the media, has brought the focus back on how succeeding governments at the Centre have monitored the press. Nearly all governments have been guilty of 'influencing' the media, but questions are being asked whether the Modi government has taken ‘persuasion’ to the level of ‘coercion’.

Monitoring of media is nothing new. According to old-timers in the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the apparatus to monitor media was put in place during the British Raj. The British rulers monitored English and Indian languages newspapers, as also radio broadcasts from foreign countries. A monitoring station was set up in Shimla, and All India Radio had a separate monitoring service to track foreign radio stations, and share information with the government and intelligence agencies. The independent Indian state inherited and continued this practice. The monitoring station was shifted to Delhi in 1981.

As a routine practice, Press Information Bureau officials compiled newspaper clippings that were sent to respective ministries. Most politicians also kept a close watch on all that got published about their respective political parties in the English and language publications.

The landscape changed with the mushrooming of news television. Given the dynamic nature of television broadcasts, governments felt the need to put in place a recording facility. Initially, private agencies were relied upon to supply ministries with recordings of news television bulletins and programmes.

A monitoring service of television channels -– the Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC) -– was set up by Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Limited, or BECIL, a Mini Ratna company under the Information and Broadcasting ministry, in 2008.

The EMMC started as a small operation with a staff strength of two dozen. While it monitored news channels, particularly during the India Against Corruption movement of 2011, its primary job was to see if they were any violations of the broadcasting code in terms of showing inappropriate sexual content or excessive violence.

Under the UPA-2 regime, a Group of Ministers on media was also set up. Its members were then union ministers P Chidambaram, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Kamal Nath, Kapil Sibal, Salman Khurshid, Manish Tewari and V Narayansamy. The GoM on media’s brief was to “meet every day at a fixed hour, analyse the events of the day, and issue suitable directions to a nodal officer to prepare appropriate material for briefing the media.”

Monitoring operations under BECIL expanded in the last four years. The team, as a recent article by senior journalist Punya Prasun Bajpai has pointed out, is now 200-strong and operates out of Soochna Bhavan. According to the BECIL website, it now also tracks social media.

Most of the 200-odd employees are supervised by an additional director general in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Of these, 150 monitor the channels and the rest file reports, which three deputy secretary-level officials then send to the Information and Broadcasting Minister. The 200-odd employees work on six-monthly contracts and earn between Rs 28,000 and Rs 50,000 a month. Their demands for permanent employment have not been met.

If during the UPA years, the then Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari would take it upon himself to ‘persuade’ editors and proprietors to be more ‘balanced’ in their coverage of the government, the responsibility has now fallen on the shoulders of current Information and Broadcasting Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore. From the party’s side, if during the UPA years, those close to then Congress president Sonia Gandhi would phone editors and proprietors, it is now the job of some in BJP chief Amit Shah’s inner circle.

If the editors and proprietors persist with ‘negative’ coverage, they soon find Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh spokespersons boycotting their programmes and refraining from appearing in them, or ministers not attending the annual events of such media houses. A similar treatment has been meted out to print organisations. After the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls, a leading newspaper found the government's top brass refusing to attend its flagship annual event.

A newspaper published from Delhi has stopped using the phrase ‘Modi government’ in reports that could be perceived as ‘negative’. A cartoonist recently complained that his caricatures of the PM were dropped, while the newspaper's editor defended their ommission, explaining how the cartoons didn't conform to the publication's editorial policy. Bajpai has claimed that ABP News was asked not to use the PM’s photographs or visuals and that the channel would find its signal blocked during specific programmes that were perceived to be critical of the governnment.

For newspapers and print publications, a separate cell in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) tracks negative reportage and compiles a file daily. Not just the BJP’s social media cell, but PIB officials have also been tasked with tracking the social media posts of television and print media journalists. Soft warnings are issued occasionally, both by BJP’s second-rung leaders and RSS leaders, advising journalists to fall in line. 'Friendly' PIB officials also take it upon themselves to 'guide' journalists.

However, the Modi government, say sources in the PIB and BJP, isn’t as concerned about the coverage in English language media, whether print or electronic, as it is about what popular Hindi and regional language news channels and newspapers have to say. Over the past year, the government has strengthened its monitoring of Hindi and regional media. It has also reached to regional language publications by posting senior PIB officials in state capitals and ensuring that regional media get copious information on the 106 schemes of the Modi government.

A dedicated Hindi news channel of Doordarshan is also in the works, and likely to be launched before the assembly polls in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattigarh and Mizoram. The Information and Broadcasting Ministry is of the view that DD News, in its current avatar of a bilingual channel, is unable to attract a dedicated following in Hindi-speaking states, which is also the BJP’s primary political catchment area.