Muzzled media?...Democracy...surely you're joking!

Well, well, well, Das Munshi is at it again. First he shoots his mouth off by saying that every sports channel covering an event that involves India must share the feed to DD, then he comes out to express his 'shock' (oh, so sad) on the verdict against the son of a late, former Congress party man, and now the self-proclaimed soccer daddy of India plans to throw the final ace up his sleeve (or up some other dark recess) in which he's drawn up a plan that will effectively knock down one of the pillars of Indian democracy - the media.

The proposed bill, which has provisions such as programmes that will be rated with a 'U', 'A', or a 'U/A' and appropriate time slots will be provided for them to be aired based on the ratings, sting operations can be carried out only if it's in the best interest of the public and cannot be done on ongoing cases and investigations and if it has to be carried out, permission must be sought from the person(s) they wish to carry out the sting against. Was Das Munshi high when he came up with this?What's the point of the sting if the 'point' is being blunted? It's like asking the teacher for the questions of the exam saying "we'll study for the exam, but you please give us the questions".

The bill also has provisions to enable an officer of the govt to review the content of what will be telecast, and if he/she feels that the criticism is harsh, it can be edited. Whatever happened to free and fair media? This would effectively eliminate the free part of it, as the media wouldn't be free to operate on it's own without interference, and it wouldn't be fair because the content put out would be in accordance to what the govt wishes for us to hear, a la North Korea or the former Soviet Union.

I guess someone forgot to refresh the memory of the govt about the early part of the 20th century in Germany and Italy where rulers like Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin had done the same thing and it was termed as fascism. But then again, since Sonia Gandhi's father was an ardent fascist & a supporter of Mussolini, it shouldn't surprise us that his daughter's party is behaving in this manner (the apple doesn't fall far from the tree). If this is step one of the grand fascist revival plan, then the steps to follow are to suspend elections and bring in one party rule and switch back to communism (or give it a fancy name called socialism) and rename our country from the Democratic Republic of India to the Union of Indian Socialist Republics. The iron curtain will come up again, this time in a new geographical location with newer comrades.