The private member’s Bill that Rahul Gandhi’s close aide and Congress MP Meenakshi Natarajan was scheduled to introduce in Parliament last week lays down a draconian set of rules clearly aimed to gag and threaten the media in the name of “protecting national interest”. Called the Print and Electronic Media Standards and Regulation Bill, 2012, it provides for a media regulatory authority — part selected by the I&B minister and three...

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...

-The Hindu The outcome of the Press Council of India's decision to challenge the Allahabad High Court Gag order on reporting the movement of troops will be an acid test of how far the judiciary can go in curbing media freedoms. The court's order — which directed senior officials in the Home and I&B departments of the Centre and the Uttar Pradesh government to ensure that no news on the subject...

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...

The Supreme Court wanted to know today “what was happening” in the Orissa Maoist hostage crisis. The Centre told the court it had “no idea”, while the Orissa government — the primary respondent in a public interest petition seeking to prevent it from succumbing to the “blackmail tactics” of Maoists — was not represented. A Bench of Justices T S Thakur and Gyan Sudha Misra had posted an urgent hearing of...