July 17, 2026

Harassing Media Houses Will Not Help

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2021-07-25 01:50:32

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Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack

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Despite what the newly-appointed Information & Broadcasting minister Anurag Thakur says, it is difficult to believe that in a highly centralized government such as the one being run by the NDA in which major decisions are taken by just two or three people, the Income Tax department will have the audacity to conduct a raid on a premier media house like the Dainik Bhaskar group without active instigation from the powers that be. The suspicion that the raid was ordered from the top is also strengthened as this government has shown a propensity to try and silence critics and dissenters by letting loose Central agencies on them. And the Dainik Bhaskar has riffled too many feathers recently by first honestly reporting the chaos and dance of death during the second wave of Covid and then delving deep into the Pegasus snooping case.

But does the government, so conscious of the headlines and often accused of being obsessed with headline management, not know that raiding a media house critical of its policies and actions would invite adverse headlines in the media across the globe? Since the reports of at least 10 to 20 times more deaths due to Covid in India in the second wave than what the government has put out are appearing regularly in the media outside India and these reports are being prepared by reputed think tanks which might have partly based their calculations on the reporting of Dainik Bhaskar during that time, the newspaper needed to be punished for being so honest and truthful. But this is one decision that has boomeranged on the government and is getting critical headlines across the world. How will it manage the headlines now?

But the government must know that this is not 1975 and it cannot make the media crawl. The composition and character of the media has undergone a sea-change since then and the power of television, coupled with the advent of digital media and social media platforms have meant that the likes of VC Shukla cannot, even with all the dictatorial powers at their command, censor news or force the media to give a positive spin to stories that show the government in a negative light. Hence, the government must stop harassing the media and learn to live with the bad headlines. If not, they will be the only ones that will remain.