Selective ads being used as political bribery, says Arun Jaitley

In an apparent attack on the AAP-led Delhi government, which had faced criticism over its advertisement budget, Union minister Arun Jaitley on Friday wondered whether “selective and excessive” advertising by a state government amounts to “political bribery.”

“If today any state gets the right to disburse excessive and selective advertising, a trend which is being witnessed for the first time, under which friends are rewarded and opponents punished....So the power of selective and excessive advertising is used.... I raised a question, will such advertising become political bribery or political incentive ” Union minister of information and broadcasting asked at an RSS event.

Though the Union minister did not name any political outfit, his remarks were seen as a veiled attack on the Kejriwal government which had come under severe criticism from the Opposition over its advertisement budget.

The senior BJP leader said he used to feel that the “era of censorship or pinching pockets had ended”, but the first symptoms of a new method are being witnessed in the country. He said he felt that if this experiment of “selective and excessive advertising” succeeds, then “all states will do it”.

“And those people, who are critics of the ideology which I support, their stunning silence is most eloquent,” Mr Jaitley said, adding that a debate is needed on the issue.

Referring to the Constituent Assembly, he said the two media personalities in it had emphasised on aspects related to the need to preserve commercial independence of media.

He, however, also said that the idea of any curbs on the freedom of media has been rejected by society and in this age, because of technology, this is not even possible.

“If the Emergency, instead of 1975, had been brought in 2016, technology itself would have defeated it,” he said.

Mr Jaitley also said that the definition of the term news has been changing.

He said there was a time when reading one newspaper gave you the entire picture, but with the coming of 24X7 TV news, the definition of news changed to what camera can capture.