The Supreme Court has taken steps to lay down a code for media reporting. This attempt at prior restraint on the media is a dangerous move with precedent from authoritarian polities. In a context where the judiciary has been lax in defending the media from attacks which seek to curb its freedom, such unilateral moves will not remedy bad reporting but rather make conditions worse for the media to play...
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Editor-in-Chief of Bihar-Dhirendra K Jha
How an image-fixated chief minister has bent the state’s media to his will If you haven’t heard of an income tax raid on the residential premises of Nitish Kumar’s close aide and treasurer of the ruling Janata Dal-United (JD-U), Vinay Kumar Sinha, you are not alone. Thanks to the local media, it took a while even in Patna—where the house is located—for people to get to know. This, incidentally, is the...
More »Not much on the plate by Samar Halarnkar
I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...
More »When Home Is No Refuge for Women by Nilanjana S Roy
This month, two women’s stories, told courageously, helped to underline the reality of domestic violence in India. Nita Bhalla, a journalist, wrote for the BBC about being physically assaulted by her partner. Meena Kandasamy, a poet and writer on social issues, wrote movingly in Outlook, a national newsmagazine, of surviving a violent marriage: “My skin has seen enough hurt to tell its own story.” Both Ms. Kandasamy and Ms. Bhalla are,...
More »Kafkaesque ordeal?-TK Rajalakshmi
The arrest of Syed Mohammad Ahmad Kazmi in connection with the bomb attack on an Israeli embassy car raises many questions. AN uneasy silence fills the streets of B.K. Dutt Colony near the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Named after the revolutionary freedom fighter Batukeshwar Dutt, who, along with Bhagat Singh, threw bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly on April 8, 1929, the nondescript colony has been...
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