One positive fallout of the otherwise high-handed manner in which Republic TV editor Arnab Goswami was arrested on Wednesday morning is the focus on the trampling of free speech and personal liberty, with even senior ministers voicing their opinions.
Let’s look at the facts surrounding the arrest. An interior designer and his mother committed suicide in Mumbai in 2018, allegedly because the victim was not paid his dues for the work he did in Goswami’s office. A case was registered, closed and then reopened. His arrest in the two-year-old case, like several other such cases, including those foisted in BJP-ruled states, smacks of a witch hunt, more so since Goswami has been cooperating with the Mumbai police, visiting the police station whenever he was summoned. There cannot be two opinions that the Maharashtra government’s action is tantamount to an attack on the free press. Its use of the police force for vendetta cannot be condoned.
That said, the episode throws up bigger questions on the state of governance in the country today and the role being played by sections of the media. Like many institutions, including constitutional ones, there can be no denying that the media has been heavily politicised in recent years, though it’s not our case that it was totally free of any influence in the past. But open alignment with a political dispensation and sidetracking of the very purpose of a free press was not as stark earlier.
Television channels in particular, as the SC recently observed, are being accused of misusing the freedom of expression, giving up the media’s primary role of being a watchdog and instead resorting to trials and disseminating one-sided narratives. Let’s stand with free speech and resist fascist tendencies, as some Honourable Union ministers urged us to do, the underlying principle being it should apply as much to Goswami as to those journalists who were arrested while covering the Hathras incident or the happenings in Kashmir.
It’s important not just to selectively remember Emergency but recognise the threat and fight it every moment. Whatever be Goswami’s ideological/political position, he is entitled to a free and fair treatment as are lesser mortals in the media and society at large, with many of those arrested languishing in prison for long periods without even a trial.