Gokhale and the Freedom of the Press

[This article was written in April 1971 immediately after the elections, but was not published. It is now published as it was written. The fears expressed in it about determined onslaughts on the freedom of the press by authoritarian Governments have been abundantly borne out by the nightmare experiences of the emergency. While democracy has been given a new lease of life by the spectacular victory of the Janata Party at the last elections and the prompt restoration of the freedom of the Press, the basic weakness of our public life, emphasised in the article, still remains. The illiteracy and the gullibility of the public make it singularly vulnerable to unscrupulous demagogues and charisma-pedlars, especially when the press is throttled. This can be remedied only by systematic and purposive education. That is the great task that awaits the press and all who care for the future of the country. –N. R.]

At a time when the air is buzzing with confident expectations of a committed civil service, a committed press and a committed judiciary, a very short speech by an old Liberal in the Imperial Legislative Council of the Morley-Minto dispensation comes to one’s mind with sardonic significance. The speaker was Gokhale, the year 1911, the subject was the Bengal Government’s to give a subsidy of Rs. 62,000 a year to the owner of The Indian Mirror to run a vernacular newspaper. The vernacular press had for long been a thorn in the side of the Bengal Government. It had adopted many drastic measures against it, including the Vernacular Press Act, which made Motilal Ghose convert the Amrita Bazar Patrikafrom a Bengali into an English newspaper overnight. A subsidy for starting a pro-Government newspaper was another of the bright ideas of the same case-hardened bureaucracy.

The short speech Gokhale made in support of the resolution moved by Bhupendranath Basu against the budget provision under this head, is one of his best on record, a particularly fine example of that perfect blend of suavity, sweet reasonableness and lambent irony, which made the ICS squirm inwardly while it profusely complimented him. He began by conceding that it was legitimate for the Government to wish to defend itself against ill-informed or unjust criticism. But, if its intention was to convince the people that it was wronged, subsidising a newspaper was about the worst possible way of going about the business. He himself knew the proprietor of the Indian Mirror very well. He was a man of integrity and independence, “one who had laboured long and incessantly for the welfare of the country”….“The description of a ‘paid hack’ is the very last that could be applied to him.” But, “for one man who knows Rai Narendranath Sen personally 99 will judge him only from appearances.” And appearances would be wholly against him. “When it is known that the paper depends for its existence upon a large subsidy from the Government, no further proof will be required by most people to discredit the paper, and along with the paper, all that appears in it.”

The Government would lose both ways. Opinions expressed in a subsidised paper would not have the weight which would be attached to a pronouncement from the Government. On the other hand Government might be actually embarrassed by other opinions of the Editor if he was, as the Rai Bahadur was, a man with a mind of his own and expressed himself in a forthright way on matters in regard to which the Government would prefer to be neutral. Other provincial Governments, which might be tempted to follow Bengal’s example, might perhaps fare worse. They may choose individuals for the task who have not the same prestige and the same qualities, as Mr. Sen possessed, who would, in other words, be ‘paid s’ or worse–“and the results then may be most mischievous.”

If the Government must have defenders in the press, Gokhale went on, “far better that the Government should have an organ of its own, an open State organ, conducted out of State funds and issued as a State publication.” He of course assumed that such a paper will at least avoid all social and religious questions (because of the Government’s policy of neutrality); and further that “it would avoid ordinary political controversies,” in other words, confine itself to correcting misrepresentations.

“But, Sir,” he continued, with obvious enjoyment, “there is another way which perhaps would be better than a direct State organ. The Government might, without directly coming into the field, get some of its more pronounced champions to undertake the work. There is, I understand, a body here, called the Imperial League, of which my friend the Maharaja of Burdwan is a distinguished member.” (It was this gentleman, incidentally, who said that he gloried in his role of chorus girl at the Empire’s festive board when he represented India at the Imperial Conference.) Gokhale reminded the Council that the Imperial League had been told by the Viceroy that it should do rather more than present addresses to incoming and departing Viceroys. Being composed of very wealthy gentlemen it might perhaps be induced to start an organ of its own, “which would actively combat the views that are circulated in a section of the vernacular press.” Of course such a paper would represent “the views of certain wealthy gentleman in the country only,” but “they will be men who have a stake in the country, as we are often reminded, and their newspapers will be free from all objections which may be urged against a subsidised paper, since there will be no Government money behind them.”

Having thus discussed with all appearance of sympathy, possible alternatives, Gokhale drily concluded that he did not believe that “any of these courses will really achieve anything very much,” since newspaper propaganda, subsidised or otherwise, was no substitute for true statesmanship.

This speech has a startlingly topical relevance today, in spite of the dust of 60 years. Of course nobody crudely proposes subsidies for newspapers nowadays. But nobody knows either who are the beneficiaries of party chests. That apart, an open subsidy may be far less mischievous than a masked one. The British Royal Commission on The Press, while discounting the suggestion that newspaper policy was often influenced by advertisers, observed, “The income to be feared is that which comes from a concealed source and can be earned only by the sale of the editorial columns.” How do we know that an element of subsidy does not enter into the substantial payments made for government advertisements to newspapers with nominal circulations? But there is nothing secret about the unfair discrimination in respect of advertisements which many of the party governments in the States, irrespective of their political complexion, have exercised against big newspapers which have been critical of the ministry or of particular policies of these governments. The Tribune affair in Haryana and the DMK’s exhibitions during the recent elections are cases in point. How demoralising this threat might he in the case of the more timorous papers may well be imagined.

Government favouritism is now a recognised part of “public relations” machinery. Gokhale assumed without question that even the despotic and alien government of those days would, if they started their own papers, carefully avoid controversial politics. The official press of today labours under no such inhibitions. But because of its inefficiency and the formidable competition of the private press not much harm is done. Unfortunately that cannot be said of the audio-visual media of publicity, notably the radio, which is a Government monopoly and which exhibited during the mid-term elections the worst features associated with monopolies. One reason at least for the landslide in favour of the Indira Government (in March 1971) was that a predominantly illiterate public was completely defenceless against the amalgam of charisma and the Fat Boy tactics of making the flesh creep by talk of a conspiracy of reactionaries against the poor.

This gullibility of the public nurtured on dream-fantasies is the most depressing feature of our current politics. The healthy scepticism of the much smaller but more politicalll mature literate public of Gokhale’s day kept the Rai Babadurs and the Maharajas at arm’s length. They, whom Gokhale slyly styled “the more pronounced friends and champions” of the Government of the day, have of course their modern counterparts. But these, if more strident, are also more canny. They know that running newspapers is no child’s play. So they would prefer to play the cuckoo and plant their eggs in another’s nest to hatch. The air reverberates with demands that “big business” and “vested interests” in the press be liquidated, that the circulations of the bigger papers be curbed to help the smaller papers, that all newspapers be converted into trusts, and so on and so forth. These are the various ways in which it is proposed to inspire the press with a “social purpose”, the absence of which our own Press Commission has deplored.

The champions of “commitment” ask, “Is not Socialism the goal accepted by the Constitution? What is wrong in asking the press to work for Socialism?” This is just juggling with words. While asking you to treat the Constitution as sacrosanct, they reserve to themselves the right to tear it to tatters. So far as the journalist is concerned, he has only one loyalty–to truth as he sees it–and that is the one principle determined allegiance to which by the entire press will alone enable it to function unitedly as the public conscience and withstand the onslaughts of idealogues and fanatics of every description. There is no independent press left in any country where doctrinaire socialism sits enthroned. That is a grim warning which the Indian Press will neglect at its peril.