India must act against public violence, but its past failures weigh heavy

Countering public violence requires punishing the guilty and promoting social harmony. Historically, the Indian state has failed on the former and some political parties continue to fail us on the lat

FM radio in India began to be privatised two decades ago but even today the stations are forbidden from broadcasting news. The fear all along has been that the citizenry standing ready to riot and the medium could make things volatile.
 
Such thinking did not anticipate the arrival of private television news networks. Today we have the unusual situation of radio being treated as a more dangerous medium than TV.
 
At a World Press Freedom Day event in Delhi earlier this year (in which I participated), the audience was told that in 2017 India had more state-ordered internet