Vendetta Or Not?

Were the tax raids on the offices of Bhaskar group and Bharat Samachar vendetta-driven attacks on freedom of the press or perfectly justified actions by tax authorities?

Most journalists and opponents of this government will say it is the first – the two media houses were being punished for their reporting on the management of Covid.

The government, BJP spokespersons and other supporters will say the two media houses were evading taxes and indulging in other financial shenanigans. Is the government to watch this helplessly?

They would both be right.

Let’s be clear: if the current raids were not vendetta-driven, nor were the tax raids on the Express group in the late 1980s when Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister. If those were vendetta-driven, then so were these.

Is that giving a clean chit to the latest targets of tax raids? Definitely not.

There is probably not a single media proprietor who doesn’t have some skeleton to hide - not just relating to the media business but other businesses as well. Not one.

All governments (union and state) have information on these. But all governments (from Nehru to Modi) sit on this information, waiting and watching (patiently, not helplessly) for the right opportunity to cloak their revenge (always, but always, for the editorial stance) under the garb of checking financial or other irregularity. The action is never without any basis. This weapon is wielded when informal channels of communication between media owners and governments/ruling party don’t yield the `desired results’. The union government has one set of weapons; state governments another set.

Ultimately, it is the journalists who get caught in a bind.  

Since the raids/action are clearly punishment for an editorial stance/reportage, they jump in (as they indeed should) to allege freedom of press coming under attack. How do they know when the action is vindictive? The targetting is obvious when a particular media house is singled out for transgressions that others have also committed and when the action follows a string of negative reports/editorials.

Action is wound down (either because the government realises the negatives will outweigh the positives or because it and the proprietors reach some compromise) and the proprietors continue with their shenanigans.

The journalists know they’re being manipulated – that media owners cry `freedom of press under attack’ to escape action – but there’s little they can do apart from limiting their outrage to the more egregious, and clearly vindictive, examples (like the Express case in the 1980s and the current ones). Let us not forget that journalists did not allege threats to the freedom of the press when one media tycoon was facing action from the Enforcement Directorate in the late 1990s. Other media barons got stories done on the merits of the case or the treatment of the proprietor, but no journalist body cried about threats to media freedom.

If this and future governments don’t want allegations of attacking press freedom to be thrown at them when they take legitimate action against newspaper owners for financial and other transgressions, then the action will need to be seen to be legitimate. It should not be like the convenient use of the Central Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement Directorate against political opponents.