AA Edit | Don’t Interfere With Press Freedom
That the high court has gone into the details of every single charge that was made against Mr Purkayastha and the portal and found them to be frivolous is a big victory for the democratic forces in the country and confidence-booster for the fundamental right to speech and expression
The order of the Delhi high court quashing the first information report (FIR) filed by the economic offences wing of the Delhi police and the enforcement case information report (ECIR) of the Enforcement Directorate against editor of the left-wing news portal Newsclick and its founder-editor Prabir Purkayastha points to the unconstitutional and illegal way the Union government has used the investigative agencies at its command to harass its political opponents for no reason. It must offer a course correction to the self-respecting people who man the agencies against the way the government often chooses to deploy them in operations which are clearly out of their remit.
That the high court has gone into the details of every single charge that was made against Mr Purkayastha and the portal and found them to be frivolous is a big victory for the democratic forces in the country and confidence-booster for the fundamental right to speech and expression.
The court found that the FIR contained no element that needed to establish a case of cheating; there was nothing that warranted the invocation of the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and there was no violation of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. Continuing with the cases will be a gross abuse of the law, the court declared. It is now clear that the tough laws which legislatures have enacted to take on terrorists and criminal mafias have been used to target and incarcerate political opponents.
It was during the Emergency that the government imposed formal censorship of news. If that involved the misuse of a constitutional provision, several decades later, the government of the day is misusing and abusing laws to strangle free speech and a free press. It is one of history’s ironies that the same people who opposed the Emergency are now using intimidating tactics to silence free speech in this country. The present government must realise that such efforts cannot go very far in this country, whether there is Emergency or not.