The title perhaps merits some musing. At a time when the media are being “deframed”, or rendered frameless by augmented reality and virtual reality (AR & VR, as they are generally called in tandem), the idea of framing it might sound incongruous. But then the book bearing the title is not about the technological inflection point that the media is at today, where media-tech is way ahead and media content is playing catch-up. Nor is it about media in the catch-all sense of the term. It is about the news media. And the title is metaphoric.
The slimness of the book, at 150 pages, is deceptive. There is a lot more there beyond the printed word. Not so much to be read between the lines as to be read on, beyond the compressed, circumscribed text, in elaboration — in other readings elsewhere — of the quick succession of ideas mooted here. This is more so of the first two, than the latter two, of the four chapters that constitute the book. The yield is a mix of stimulating ideas, succinctly yet open-endedly put, which distinguish the first two chapters, and a retelling of significant facts and developments affecting the news media in India, with a no-time-to-dwell-on-them haste in the subsequent two.
The unevenness of the work in this sense is perhaps unavoidable. The discourse segues from the era of a printed press striving to surface and to survive the heavy-handed colonial censor into the press that doggedly fought alongside the nationalistic forces for Independence; it then finds the first flush of its own independence souring in the Constituent Assembly debates between 1946 and 1949 where a countervailing argument about the need to rein in the press (buttressed by both B.R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru) prevails, resulting in the (as we now realise, very problematic) “reasonable restriction” rider being included as Article 19(2), hedging in the fundamental right of speech and expression and its practice granted by Article 19 (1)(a)&(g) of the Constitution that came into force in 1950 to define the new republic.
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The restrictive sentiment against the free press deepens with the market paradigm being embraced by the big press. Over the period of the First and Second Press Commissions, interspersed by Indira Gandhi’s infamous Emergency gamble, a three-way standoff, of the press versus the state versus the court, emerges. The burden of the rest of the narrative through chapters 3 and 4, which deal with the broadcasting (TV and radio) phase and the current phase of digital flux respectively of the news media, is essentially that the “reasonable restriction” caveat has ceased being reasonable and that, in the way it has been leveraged and deployed under BJP rule since 2014, ruthlessly plays havoc with free speech and expression, so much so that the qualification of a fundamental right that subclause (2) of Article 19 was meant to be literally undoes the right itself. So much so, again, that the earlier three-way standoff has been replaced by a press that is itself an assortment of the complicit, the compliant, and the bold coexisting (or trying to) with an acutely and increasingly draconian and aggrandising state and a court that chips in with relief now and then.
The last two chapters of the book — and particularly the last, on the digital here and now — naturally do not have the advantage of distance and hindsight for reflection or perspective and become a marshalling of adverse measure upon adverse measure taken by the state to curb and curtail the freedom of the press.
Print capitalism
Early on in her work, Pamela Philipose flags the British policy of deliberately delaying the opening up of the public sphere and the prospect of “print capitalism”, a necessary even if perhaps not sufficient condition for the rise of nationalism, as theorised by Benedict Anderson, in its colony, India. Of course, printing to spread religion had been brought into India even in the 16th century by the Portuguese Jesuits. And religion was one of the combination of factors that leavened a nascent public sphere in England. The Protestant Reformation, preferring and privileging direct access to the word of God by reading the Bible over dependence on the intermediary representative apparatus of the Church, led to a surge of Bible printing.
Framing the Media: Government Policies, Law, and Freedom of the Press in India By Pamela Philipose Orient BlackSwanPages: 180Price: Rs.635
With that kind of questioning and reimagining of what was divinely ordained, matters of state, as much as matters of religion vis-a-vis the Church and its ecclesiastic hierarchy, could not for much longer be the preserve of the royalty and nobility. And the pushback against a democratising public sphere in England took myriad forms of censorship through the 17th and 18th centuries. Already under Henry VIII’s Tudor rule in the 16th century, the rule of “scandalum magnatum” had proscribed as seditious any publication against the magnates of the land. Rigorous licensing of printing, prepublication censorship, prohibitive levies on publications especially periodicals, were some of the means by which printing was kept in check. In fact, the more adventurous and non-conformist printers sought the relatively safer and more liberal havens in Europe like Basel, Hamburg, Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Antwerp to carry on their trade in the early 17th century. The first equivalent of a newspaper in English to appear in London came from Amsterdam in 1620.
Press and the British polity
The idea of a press commenting on public governance or affairs was anathema to the English governing class. As Sir Roger L’Estrange, appointed Licensor in 1663, put it, “a Public Mercury should never have my vote; because I think it makes the Multitudes too familiar with the Actions and Counsels of their Superiors, too Pragmatical and Censorious and gives them not only an Itch but a colourable Right and License to be Meddling with the Government”. Newspapers were barred from reporting parliament debates well until the late 1700s.
The slimness of the book, at 150 pages, is deceptive. There is a lot more there beyond the printed word. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
These antecedents and the prolonged strife in England between King and parliament and then between parties (Whig and Tory), a struggle in which newspapers and journals and journalists were both players and victims, form the distant backdrop of the British colonial power’s, and successive governors general’s, actions and sanctions against the emergent press in India through the 19th century, beginning with licensing of all publications (1823) that Philipose enumerates.
Flash forward to the section in the book on the Constituent Assembly debates pertaining to freedom of speech and expression, and of the press, and we cannot help marvelling at the naivety of some members’ faith in the goodness of government — ipso facto, by virtue of being government. Philipose quotes one of them as saying that the government was “utterly incapable of doing any wrong to the people”. Such faith, or construct, of government is a throwback, again, to early 18th century England. Chief Justice John Holt, buttressing the case for cracking down on seditious libel, declared in 1704: “If men should not be called to account for possessing the people with an ill opinion of the government, no government can subsist; for, it is very necessary for every government that the people should have a good opinion of it.” Such self-righteous expectation of mandatory allegiance and goodwill of the people for the government of the day was to warp into not only disallowing truth as defence in libel but also into the perverse proposition that truth only aggravated the libel. The greater the truth, as the saying went, the greater the libel.
Sedition and freedom of expression
Whether or how much to allow for deterrence against seditious or libellous speech or expression in the context of Article 19 was another matter that exercised the members of the Constituent Assembly. Philipose suggests that while the second National Democratic Alliance government dropped the term “sedition” from the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita of 2023, the terminology replacing it, in Section 150, is sweeping and newly lethal in its implications.
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It is the trigger points and openings Philipose provides in this lean yet supple work to contextualise the significant developments constitutive of the news media in India today, even though she does not have the space or scope to go into them herself, that sets it apart as a rich resource.
It is not her fault, but a sobering reality check, that at the end of it we cannot help recalling Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr: the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Sashi Kumar is a journalist, filmmaker, and media thinker and initiator who launched the Asianet TV channel and subsequently founded, and chairs, the not-for-profit public trust Media Development Foundation, which runs the Asian College of Journalism.
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