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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Practise what you preach-Pranesh Prakash
The only way to fix the IT laws is to change the way they are made Laws in India relating to the internet are greatly flawed. The only way to fix them would be to fix the way they are made. The Cyber-Laws and E-Security Group in the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEIT, ‘DeitY’ according to their website) has proved incapable of making balanced, informed laws and policies. The...
More »Century-old, hilltop mosque falls to mining greed-Mohammed Iqbal
The demolition of a century-old roofless mosque on a hilltop at Pur village in Bhilwara district of Rajasthan to make way for mining by a private company has led to outrage here. The issue has brought into question the State Waqf Board's role in giving the “green signal” to a group, claiming to represent local Muslims, for razing the mosque. Jindal Saw Limited, owned by the O. P. Jindal Group, bought...
More »The Censor Bench-Arun Jaitley
Judicial gag orders are as abhorrent as executive restraints on the media Some interim orders issued by the courts have restrained publication or comment on certain matters of public importance. Orders imposing judicial censorship on the media have been extremely rare. Except in the rarest of rare cases, judicial “gag orders” are as abhorrent as executive restraints on the media. The changed situation calls for a comment on these judicial orders and...
More »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...
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