Despite disappointing delays, there can be no doubt that the Supreme Court and the High Courts have remained a strong bulwark against an executive which is determined to cut the media down to size, Supreme Court senior advocate Chander Uday Singh said in Chennai on May 3.
Mr. Singh was delivering the Lawrence Dana Pinkham Memorial Lecture at the convocation of the Asian College of Journalism’s (ACJ) class of 2022-23 and the presentation of the ACJ Journalism Awards for 2022.
The present National Democratic Alliance government, led by the BJP, believed that a brute majority in the Parliament was justification enough to tame and bend the media to its bidding, Mr. Singh said. While outright censorship would not work in the 21st century, the government, “borrowing from the modern autocrat’s playbook,” has adopted a variety of strategies to control the media, he added.
