Contents that are or may be unpleasant for public viewing, censorship controls such contents. Basically, in order to maintain peace among the general public, it hampers the affluence of information and ideas, so the content of such information or ideas does not contravene public sentiments. ‘Censere’ is the latin word from which the word ‘censorship’ has been derived. It means to measure, assets, be of opinion, rate.
Censorship is an act of suppression of speech or writing perceived to be detrimental to the public good.
‘An individual who reviews books, movies, news, etc., that are to be released and suppresses any sections that have been deemed pornographic, politically offensive, or a security threat’.
Jean Jacques Pauvert had highlighted that “Censorship is also one of those simple terms that are commonly recognized because it helps people to look the same as everybody else these days, with a bit of fuss, pleasant and correct-thinking. The Mainstream, the Conservative, and the Core all accept that anti-censorship, anti-discrimination, anti-war, pro-human rights, or freedom of speech has to be one”.
Censorship may well be levied by local or national governmental authority, by only a religious organisation, or occasionally by a potent private organization. It can be implemented to the communications mails, speech, press, theatre, dance, art, literature, photography, cinema, radio, television, or computer and smartphone. Censorship could be either curative or inhumane, depending as to whether the expression is exercised beforehand or after it has been made public. The practise has also been especially thorough in use since antiquity under autocratic and heavily centralised politicians, from the Roman empire to the 20th century totalitarian states.
Laws must amend or repealed to reconcile it towards international norms and the treaty obligations of India. These laws were misused, in many cases, in violation of decisions or advisories from the Supreme Court that clarified their reach. The Supreme Court, for instance, held in 1962 that speech or behavior only constitutes sedition if it invokes or appears to cause disorder or violence. Yet, even though the requirement is not met, different state governments continue to threaten individuals with sedition.
Social media regulatory regulations, such as the Information Technology Act of India, can and can quickly become instruments to criminalize speech, mostly to protect influential political figures. Section 66A of that act, which criminalizes a wide spectrum of speech, has been frequently used to detain and censor material for those who criticize the authorities.
India has even other laws criminalising freedom of expression. Although the list below is not exhaustive, it provides an overview of a number of such laws, reviewing how they comply with international standards as well as the commitments of India under international law, how they’re being abused, and what improvements are necessary to bring them under compliance with international trends.
The Contempt of Courts Act not only criminalizes speech that stereotypes or disrupts with the due time of any court hearings, or interferes with or hinders the course of justice. It also criminalizes speech that “tends” to do some of these things. This term leaves broad latitude for judges to render their arbitrary judgments as to whether speech has an “inclination” to bias, intervene, or disturb, which generates confusion about the nature of the legislation.
Section 69A of the IT Act authorises the blocking of material on the web ‘in the interests of India ‘s sovereignty and dignity, the protection of India, the security of the nation, friendly ties with foreign countries or social stability’ or the prevention of inciting hatred to commit offences which threaten those concerns.
Since traditional antiquity, censorship has originated as a result of persistent interaction. However, the printing press invention made it possible to easily reproduce the text in large quantities becoming considerably more useful in the current modern era. Originally, it was the church that enforced censorship, but the institutions in society soon got involved in it too.
In the 17th century, in England, where significant achievement was accomplished as early as 1695, the advert against censorship and that for press freedom began. But on the other hand, freedom of the press wasn’t accomplished in France and Germany till (considerably) afterward. Outcries have been consistently accompanied by partial advances. The emerging new media (film, radio, and television) too were subjected to censorship and preventative methods throughout the 20th century, and contemporary authoritarian governments were involved in the tremendous suppression of freedom of speech in such media. Censorship has mostly been used during European history as a form of power, cultural and political control inside the state, but has also been often used to prevent the cross border exchange of information and theories considered unwelcomed. But on the other hand, freedom of the press opened the doors for such a transfer. However, an anomaly emerged throughout this respect for a considerable time, state officials allowed political publications to report on activities abroad (even these reports constituted a significant part of information), and solely as they diverted from internal political situations.
Today, censorship is practiced by quite a host of individuals and institutions outside the scope of the law. We firmly condemn any unconstitutional Internet censorship on the part of the government and non-state actors. There is a range of provisions in the Indian judicial system which restrict free speech. Some-such as the former Section 66A are regulations expressly intended to restrict speech online. We reject ambiguous, moderate-specific laws that have a chilling impact on debate online.
Other regulations make speech a criminal offense. Several such legislation is incompatible with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Special Rapporteur’s Reports on Free Speech as well as many other records of human rights law that tie India. Our racial hatred rules, the defamation penal clause, call for immediate change.
In Germany, during 1843 and 1849, in his distinguished tenure as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, Karl Marx answered questions of communication and expression with extraordinary consistency and strength. His desire for democracy and the revelation of facts were the cornerstones of resilience to official initiatives to distort the definition of freedom as a licence to operate and to claim that perhaps the truth is subjective and ascertainable by government. Marx describes editorial practises with free expression which pertain to working journalists as either an individual or group of people right regulating ties among both reporters and public and private officials, along with the proprietors of the press itself, free press, on the other hand, as an economic consideration, is a highly skilled requirement for intellectual labour. His proposals provide concrete solutions to ongoing discourse on press freedom and the prevailing conditions of journalism: maintaining democracy requires freedom of speech and preservation of the public domain, including the media, especially from forms of censorship arising from the exploitation of intellectual labour from those who own or control the media.
Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India grants us the basic human right of expression and speech. 40 years ago in the Lok Sabha, former Minister of Information and Broadcasting, L K Advani clearly and unequivocally stated that “the government doesn’t believe in either press control, passive or exclusive, coarse or discreet“. The main duty of his ministry, after the enforcement of the Emergency in 1975, was to address the enormous exploitation and harassment of the media.
It gives us freedom, unrestrained by the fear of punishment, to share our thoughts. As for the means of exchange of ideas, the Constitution is silent, but it requires the right to publicly view a piece of art, like motion movies. Nevertheless, this right is not universal and immune to certain rational limitations where the subject matter on display is so against public policy, international affairs, state sovereignty and dignity, law and order, dignity and morality, or in regard to contempt of court, defamation or admission of an offense as set out in Article 19(2).
But in comparison, the Indian state is undergoing intermittent but strong censorship. There are also examples of being coerced into silent obedience by the free press. The raids by CBI, alleging charges of suspected corruption, against the founders of NDTV, Prannoy and Radhika Roy, are seen as among the most brazen assaults on press freedom. The murder of liberal journalist Gauri Lankesh has too risen as among the country’s biggest divisive and controversial topics.
Censorship, commonly understood as coercive state control, has often been viewed as a technically boring subject even though it is a politically critical subject. Censorship requests and also censorship practices come from and are followed in all walks of society. Censorship is then also a joint venture among both the society and government.
If horrible enough, press censorship really can impede a culture. Since the press is such a major part of the daily lifestyle of today’s residents and it is the basis of essentially all the facts, if the information is not provided incomplete or truthfully or concisely then the population is left ignorant or uneducated.
Censorship can not be survived by any democracy. If there is censorship, then based on fact, each person does not make his/her own choices, but only on the grounds of whatever flows via the lens of the censor, that’s always whoever serves the censoring mechanism and installs it ever deeper into the mind of the public, irrespective of its real authenticity.
Censors are the ones who choose what to write, and what not to write. The press of the regime is what systematically promulgate censorship, since those press are critical weapons of the dictatorship, even though they are not directly controlled by the government, but rather by the clique that regulates the government as they have power over the mass press.
The elevation of censorship of the press on January 25, 1977, drives most Press members to be caught unawares. The Indian Press Corps has still been squinting during this newly found light after 19 months of becoming virtually incarcerated with very little to do and so much to whinge about. Newspaper offices, which had started to “resemble crypts,” as one analyst observed, are now once again bustling with activity. And India is again an international topic at this stage, with foreign journalists, camera crews, and professional photographers flooding in to make a good grab on changing events. Just a month or so ago, their presence was hardly accepted. This is not simple to produce an estimation, but at least there are 30-40 western journalists present in New Delhi at any particular time today, with possibly the same amount of photographers and TV camera crews.
In a few of his elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated, “Our democracy would not be maintained when we do not ensure freedom of expression and speech.”
In Bombay, the Indian Express, Chief News Editor, S. Krishnamurty, stated, “More and more large newspapers have become much more readable and accessible nowadays. Even the reality was questioned in censorship since you were just allowed to represent one aspect, so readers didn’t even want to accept that”.
Assistant Editor of the Times of India, Inder Malhotra, “I am elated that censorship is lifted and is not much active as a journalist. I hope it will be completely excluded and not re-imposed. It is ludicrous to fathom that if any Press is still not, or can not be, entirely free anywhere at any moment. And even from the perspective of all those who tell them what and how to publish or what to keep out, journals get to be irrelevant”.
This basic principle is being suffocated to death slowly and painfully again nowadays, with the emergence of right-wing nationalism and dirty politics in the world.
India was ranked 136 out of 180 by the World Press Freedom Index 2017, a nation with the nation’s biggest democracy. “By Hindu nationalists seeking to eradicate from the national discourse all forms of anti-democratic expression, self-censorship is rising in the mass media,” the source noted.
Though there’s no absolute censorship or governmental intrusion with the freedom of the press, self-censorship incurs a genuine threat to the clear majority of national discursive viewpoints. There should be legislation to not only defend the environment for the media to operate independently and to also guard against the official’s professional and non-option of the media.
The Press Council of India’s recent reports on “Protection of Journalists” claims that 80 Journalists are already dead in India as of 1990, with acquittal so far in just one case. This simply demonstrates that hostility to freedom of the press runs throughout the political spectrum. The danger to the capabilities of the Indian media to conserve a strong majority of opinions is largely due to an inaccurate regulatory design that does nothing to help shield and silence press freedom. We take a glance at the regulations and laws which mostly govern the Indian media as well as what needs to be reformed to promote the freedom of the press.
An essential feature in how they uncover the reality is the protection of the authenticity of channels used by journalists. In India, however, journalists are not granted statutory rights to protect their sources. In fact, in a courtroom, by not divulging her channels, a journalist may even be charged with obstruction of justice. This renders the reality specious to uncover. The law will make telling the truth a dangerous choice among future abuse in the community by those who are revealed and putting up with unfairness and misconduct.
It is necessary to examine news media authority from the vantage point of the press majority. There are currently no laws imposing restrictions on:
In reality, whenever it ratifies monopolies, the Competition Commission of India, which governs economies to ensure it remains competitive, is delusional to the need for “the majority of views” in the media. It is asserted that “the media should not and can not be parsed with general goods and services. The market for ideologies for assuming, boots, or snacks is very distinct from this one”. In general, India’s courts have upheld free speech, yet their record is inconsistent. Most lower courts prefer to deliver poorly reasoned, speech-limiting rulings, and the Supreme Court has often been contradictory, though always a powerful protector of freedom of expression, allowing lower courts to decide whatever precedent to emphasize. This lack of continuity has led to an uneven terrain of freedom of expression rights and left the door open to municipal authorities and interest groups attempting to use the legislation to bully and threaten controversial and opposing views.
The Supreme Court of India has placed limitations on the use of sedition law, rendering inciting violence a mandatory factor, but even in circumstances in which this condition is not met the police tend to lodge sedition charges. There are also other important cases of using the provision of sedition to suppress political controversy or speech. Police in Tamil Nadu, for example, filed sedition charges in May 2012 against thousands of citizens who protested peacefully the establishment of a nuclear power station in Kudankulam. If citizens who have protested and demonstrated peacefully for a year should be accused of sedition and declaring war on the country in such a callous manner as has been achieved here, what is the future of free speech and dissent in India?
Censorship will continue to rise and will have a downfall too. As technological advancement and the appetite for democracy conflicts with governments that are determined to regulate their people, beginning with what they view, read, and listen to.
Some recommendations that need to be dealt with to completely eradicate censorship and promote free speech and expression:
The third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson, claimed that press freedom serves the function of opening up “all sources of reality”. and not just the one about which the state guides us. He said that instead of “government without newspapers,” he would prefer “newspapers without government”.
Owing to the ever-changing values of social acceptance, censorship in India today is a real hassle. We are now at a time when everybody must be more inclusive and consider voices and opinions which are in contrast to ours. We ought to stand together if we are called to protect the right to speech, a freedom that, despite our differences, is enjoyed by us all.
The issue in India is not whether the constitution doesn’t ensure freedom of expression, but that, thanks to a combination of overbroad rules, a dysfunctional criminal justice system, and the aforementioned lack of clarity in jurisprudence, it is easy to suppress free speech. India’s judicial system is notorious for being clogged and overloaded, resulting in lengthy and costly delays that might deter even the innocent from struggling for their free speech rights. There is increasing friction and controversy over the true essence of India’s freedom of the press. The growth of right-wing extremism and saffronist ideologies, on the one side, propels quiet yet unmistakable censorship that instills fear in the media and the public. But on the other side, efforts by the BJP government to promote greater responsibility and accountability in digital media will broaden the concept of a “free press”. It also seems evident that there is still an urgent need for the commission to use its power to produce a sense of accountability on digital sites such as youtube, Whatsapp, Facebook and not to make laws which therefore reinforce the government’s stance in curtailing press freedom.