-The Telegraph The Supreme Court today appeared to be considering whether to lay down norms for court reporting that, if violated, would cost a journalist the right to cover court cases. The idea came from senior counsel K.K. Venugopal, who has been pushing for media curbs, and seemed to find favour with Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia. Venugopal suggested that journalists wishing to cover the courts be made to apply for formal...

-PTI The marathon hearing on the issue of framing guidelines for media reporting of court proceedings concluded in the Supreme Court on Thursday, with some noted jurists terming the endeavour “judicial overreach” which will open the “floodgates” with a whole range of “complications.” A five-judge Constitution Bench reserved verdict, after 17 days of hearing, which started on March 27. The Bench was told that the apex court did not have inherent powers to...

Recent debates on Internet censorship in India have focused to the allegedly free-for-all nature of the internet. Those of us who have argued against internet censorship have been somewhat misrepresented as arguing for absolute freedom whereby the reasonable restrictions laid down in Article 19 (A) of the Constitution of India don’t apply. Nothing could be farther than the truth. It has been said that the internet can be used to incite...

While freedom of speech and expression is an individual right, its actualisation often relies on a vast infrastructure of intermediaries. In the offline world, this includes newspapers, television channels, public auditoriums, etc. It is often assumed that the internet has created a more robust public sphere of speech by doing away with many structural barriers to free speech. But the fact of the matter is that even if the internet enables...

Meena Kandasamy, one of Chennai’s well-known activists and poets, was recently in Hyderabad delivering a few lectures at NALSAR and other institutions about Ambedkar, when she heard about a beef festival at Osmania University being organised by the Telengana Students’ Association and the Progressive Students Union. Several students and teachers had gathered to support the event organised by the dalit students and also as a symbol of admonishing cultural oppression from...