PRESS: Indira's India

...Indira Gandhi, for example, probably grew up thinking that a free press would be as fundamental to an independent India as it was to Great Britain, but after awhile she changed her mind...

...anyone...

...One has only to read Thucydides to know what happens to a democracy when its mood has turned perverse, or its problems have grown too large to handle...

...It is presumptuous to challenge arguments of this sort because I have never been to India, have only a casual reader's acquaintance with her history, have never seriously discussed the country with an Indian who wasn't a Marxist, do not know how to turn a feudal agricultural society into a modern state, have never spent the night in Calcutta, and have trouble balancing my checkbook...

...Thailand (.2...

...Opinion, for example, was only a four-page weekly, written almost entirely by its editor, a retired civil servant named A.D...

...The annual survey of the International Press Institute in Zurich concluded last year that more than half the world has no free press In May, Amnesty International in London released a list of 67 journalists imprisoned (or "missing") in 17 countries-Bangladesh (with three journalists in pri-son), Brazil (6), Chile (3), Cuba (.2...

...But I am skeptical all the same, if not of her, then of her inability to resist the inertia, corruption and intrigue Which seem to grow in closed societies, like toadstools in a cellar...

...It is easy to destroy one's enemies after they have announced themselves in the press, and their destruction probably provides a momentary freedom to act...

...Will India's government grow bolder when there is danger in boldness, and no one to point out inertia...

...The price in contention and political controversy, she announced a year ago, was too great...

...If the only question were cui bono, then one would have to conclude that Gandhi's coup from above was purely and simply a cynical exercise in political self-preservation of a thoroughly traditional sort...

...The declaration of emergency came at a moment when she, personally, was under vigorous attack, and one does not have to be a cynic to wonder if she were more concerned with India's future, or her own...

...Without firm guidance there is only pandemonium, a perpetual me-first shoving match...

...If the repressers were pugnacious in their deniais if was because they were conscious of their own hypocrisy...

...The long version leaves out Mussolini and includes supporting detail...

...But of course that is not the way Gandhi would put it...

...This hostility is new...

...Like the Italians, they are too fiery and contentious to agree on what to do, or to disagree in moderation...

...THOMAS POWERS...

...Uganda, Nigeria, Laos, Cambodia, Argentina and South Vietnam ought to be on it, and no doubt a lot of other countries as well...

...But very quickly one's enemies will cease to announce themselves...

...the poor are either apathetic or uncontrollable...

...The short version goes like this: the Indians tried democracy but it didn't work...

...India has a population of 600 million, and it is growing by 20 million a year...

...it grows hard to know whom to watch and the police begin to watch everybody...

...The leader of a closed society wants fat men about him such as sleep a'nights, just as Caesar did, and one suspects India must already have enough easy-sleepers in government...

...She did not say that henceforth Indian journalists would be expected to walk in lockstep on the right side of the road, but that is what she meant, and that is what has happened...

...It is all very well for you to make jokes, the argument would go, but we are faced with nearly insurmountable problems...

...Western journalists have found it increasing difficult in recent years to obtain visas to visit Thiru World or Communist countries, or to move about freely once they have been admitted...

...Closed societies have politics too, but their politics become a subtle, secret, shifting thing...

...Publications like Opinion or Seminar were closed or con-fiscated, their contents censored and writers jailed because they threatened the prerogatives of those in power...

...India's democracy has been dismantled, leaving the Congress party, and Gandhi at the head of the party, in virtually uncontested control of the country...

...Both are creative but obstreperous peoples, mercurial and childlike...

...It is hard to understand at first how the Indian government could have felt threatened by such faint voices...

...In less than a year the threat of confiscation or jail, the growth of a censorship bureaucracy and the enactment of a repressive body of law have pretty much emasculated India's once vigorous press, or at least brought it into harmony with the government's self-portrait of earnest, shirt-sleeved, nation-building boosterism...

...One may have freedom, yes," she said at the time, "but freedom does not mean walking on the wrong side of the road, paralyzing the duly elected government...

...But it is impossible to see what India gained when it ordered A. D. Gorwala to shut down his four-page weekly...

...In a mimeographed letter to his 5,000 readers Gorwala said the government had banned Opinion because its publication endangered "public safety, maintenance of public order and internal security (believe it if you can...

...Seminar had more pages but reached even fewer people with a circulation of only 2,500 a month...

...Habeas corpus was suspended along with freedom of the press and thousands of Indians have been imprisoned, including at least 30 opposition members of Parliament...

...The threat of prison is only the most dramatic form of press control...

...The wealthy have a traditional disregard for the poor...

...Gandhi no doubt shares his confusion...

...Why should a democratic India be any more effective than France under the Third Republic, or Germany under Weimar, or Russia after the April revolution, or Athens after the death of Pericles...

...Last month a UNESCO working group in San Jose, Costa Rica, completed a 60-page draft report which many observers interpret as a proposal for official control of news by developing countries, and in New Delhi the representatives of 58 countries agreed to form a sort of joint press agency In order to counteract the "cultural aggression" and colonial meddling of the West...

...No doubt Gandhi has a point...

...One might cite a hundred models-Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Peron's Argentina, Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Park's South Korea, Sukarno's Indonesia, Castro's Cuba, Cromwell's England, Caligula's Rome...

...India, of course, is only the largest of the countries which have recently joined the fraternity of nations which speak with one voice, or as nearly one voice as repression can guarantee...

...The saddening thing is not that she wanted to do it, but that she could do it...

...Its circulation was only 5,000 in a country of 600 million, and its language was English in a nation with dozens of dialects...

...It would be wrong to doubt that India's troubles are immense, and sentimental to assume that a free press is never vicious, vindictive or divisive...

...This is not the sort of thing people are supposed to say...

...I can't believe it...

...So Gandhi, like Mussolini, took the reins into her own hands and now -only a year later!-the trains are finally running on time...

...It did not take long...

...Amnesty International admits its list is far from complete...

...Turkey (2), Russia (7), Uruguay (1) and Yugoslavia (5...

...It is too soon to tell if these developments are a new wave or the old, old story, but it is clear that advocates of a free press have not been winning friends and influencing people The most disturbing element of these recent developments is a confident new tone of voice and a certain willingness, still muted and tentative, to describe a free press as a superfluous luxury at best, and at worst the enemy of a just, well-ordered society...

...The skeptics have not been converted perhaps, but they have been silenced, and last month two small political journals, Seminar and Opinion, closed down after 17 years of publication, the one rather than submit to pre-publication censorship, and the other at the direct order of one of India's state governments...

...Their demise, one suspects, was almost by the way, a kind of mopping-up operation by a bureaucracy following regulations to the letter...

...No opposition parties have been suppressed as such, but they have been injured and intimidated, just as the Democrats in this country would be injured if Common Cause, the ADA, and the AFL-CIO political committee were all closed down...

...The intellectuals have been trained in two alien traditions, Marxism and liberal democracy, and debate in an alien language...

...India (4), Indonesia (21, some of them since 1965, South Korea (1), the Philippines (1), Singapore (2), South Africa (1), Taiwan (4), Tanzania (2...

...Furthermore, we're tired of advice from well-paid, intinerant foreign journalists who have trouble balancing their own checkbooks...

...Will it be less corrupt, when no one may safely criticize corruption...

...Threatened by the system, she junked the system...

...Her defense as stated in public papers, interviews and speeches might be described in a short version, or a long version...

...Politically motivated strikes, demonstrations and protests came to a halt, elections were "postponed" and activist groups were banned...

...In India, the long version concludes, freedom is anarchy, and is well-lost...

...Gorwala...

...The danger posed by their victims was not to the whole community, as the repressers naturally claimed, but only to the position of those who ruled...

...The people are illiterate and backward, are divided by language and religion, and do not know how the government is organized, much less who ought to run it...

...Another obvious beneficiary of her act was the Congress party which has ruled India since Independence...

...It used to be said of DeGaulle that without his glasses he could not tell where DeGaulle ended and France began...

...Will it be less constrained by opposition, when the opponents have all gone underground and might be...

...It is Gandhi's country we are talking about, after all, not mine, and if she says political controversy in India had reached a point of such violence that it was wrecking the country, I ought not to dismiss her claim out of hand...

...I grew up thinking that freedom is a fundamental human aspiration and that its enemies proceed half in guilt, hidiru--what they do and calling repression by other name:-Claims of national security, the greater good and reasons of state have always struck me as specious euphemisms for the exercise of power in narrow self-interest...

...Such rulers were the enemies of the free expression of opinion because its target more often than not was them, Would it be fair to add Gandhi's India to the list...

...In June, 1975, she declared a state of emergency and "temporarily" suspended the traditional civil liberties guaranteed by the Indian constitution...

...To survive a political figure must grow vigilant and cautious, lest he invite suspicion by pressing some issue too hard, or not hard enough...

...Henry Kamm reported their disapperance in the New York Times, but the Indian press did not mention it at all...

...After nearly 30 years of freely expressed opinion India is arguably worse off than it was at independence, while China has developed into a world power during the same period...

...and the government which must try to reconcile the two has insufficient power to restrain the rich, and insufficient resources to feed the poor...

...I have seen more political meetings disrupted by intemperate language than by goons, after all, and I once lived in Italy for two years when the government fell repeatedly for completely frivolous reasons-once, for example, because it could not muster a majority behind a kindergarten funding bill...