From News Dispaches NEW YORK: Rajiv Gandhi’s increasingly blatant control of the government owned monopoly TV and Radio has come under increasingly criticism by the press and opposition parties.

A report, by Barbara Corossette published in the New York Times on June 16 read:

“With a national election looming toward the end of the year, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his Congress Party are rapidly assuming political domination of the Government run television and radio networks that have a monopoly of broadcast news in India.

The government has also raised the price of newsprint, prompting charges of political interference by newspaper editors who preside over a lively independent and often irreverent press. Some of the Prime Minister’s supporters are joining the outcry.

“At the center of the controversy is Gandhi’s new Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting K.K Tewari, an outspoken champion of the Congress Party. Critics say his first few weeks in office have coincided with a revamping of television and radio news to give pride of place and the bulk of broadcast time to Gandhi’s daily routine, at the expense of opposition politicians and other national and international events.

“Indian television and radio reaches 80 to 90 percent of the country’s 810 million people, more than two thirds of whom are illiterate.

“Mr. Tewari, who belittles Western style news reporting and what he called in an interview “the myth of press freedom in America and Britain,” holds the view that anything the Prime Minister does is news in India just as “every word President Bush says is news in America.” His critics reject his protestations.

“What we have now is simply the open misuse of the media,” said Amita Malik a leading firm, television and radio critic for several decades. “The news has become a Congress Party bulletin.

“Other political and broadcasting columnists are comparing the present trend to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s management and suppression of the news during emergency rule from 1975 to 1977.

“Ms, Malik a columnist for The Indian Express India’s most widely read newspaper and film critic of The Statesman said in an interview that documentary and talk shows had also been affected. She added that when she was in the Soviet Union recently she saw political debates on television “that we could never have in India.”

“Indian television now reminds me of Eastern Europe in the 1960’s,” she said. “The cult of personality, government knows best — it is a remarkable parallel.”

Vilification Is Protested “In his few weeks in office, Mr.

Tewari has shocked and unsettled politicians, some in the Prime Ministers party with his vituperative public attacks on opposition politicians and their private lives. In the interview he described the opposition as “not a party but a rabble,” and compared it to “a seasonal disease that pops up only in election years, like the viral fever that comes with the monsoon.”

“On June 10, 15 leading jurists and scholars from Indian universities and research organizations accusing the Government of “Goebbelsian vilification” of the political opposition joined in the protest against the 30 to SO percent increases in the price of newsprint and other paper used by book publishers journals and educational institutions.

“Newspapers normally friendly to the Gandhi government have carried columns critical of the new policies and are questioning the Prime Minister’s assertion that higher paper prices merely reflect supply and demand.

In the interview the 47 year old Tewari described as “bunk” the charges that television and radio news had been turned into propaganda instruments for Gandhi.

“Running down the list of opposition leaders, he said television was being kind not to report on all they do. He called one man a “feudalist, revivalist, obscurantist” who “puts on earrings and bangles and dresses in a sari.”

“All of these things were not disclosed by television,” he said.

Article extracted from this publication >>  June 30, 1989