By Sondip Bhattacharya
The phone hacking scandal which is causing such turmoil in the UK and the Indian government’s intention to curb a spate of media leaks by law provide an occasion to compare the information cultures of the two countries.
Both are facing crises concerning privacy, but the solutions appropriate to them may not be the same.
In the UK, the uproar has closed down one the world’s oldest newspapers, the tabloid News of the World. Senior media professionals have invited police attention, Scotland Yard has seen resignations at the top, a judge is under a cloud, prime minister David Cameron has come under attack and the hitherto unstoppable Rupert Murdoch, whose promotion of predatory commercial media led to this chaos, is taking a beating from which he may never recover. It is amazing that a mere tabloid can wreak such havoc – even if it was the worlds biggest and longest- running.
In India, we are weathering a season of scams in which media leaks have played a pivotal role. The latest is the leaking of Lokayukta Santosh Hegde’s report last week which linked Karnataka chief minister B. S. Yeddyurappa to illegal mining. And they include Radiagate, in which the media itself was embarrassed.
In general, leaks have served the public good, cautioning institutions and people in positions of authority or privilege and curbing the free run of impunity.
However, Radiagate also invited the formulation of new privacy laws which may have some effects detrimental to the public good. Ratan Tata’s innocuous conversations with his publicist Niira Radia – who was close to other, not entirely innocuous telecom players – led to a Supreme Court petition by the Tatas to contain the free flow of such gossip in the public domain. And it provided a handy excuse for a government beleaguered by scams to take steps towards general legal curbs on personal information.
A privacy law was anyway on the cards following concerns over the possibility that personal data accreted by the Universal ID would be leaked or otherwise misused. Now, it seems to have provided a legal wrapper which can hold provisions beneficial to government. The draft of the Privacy Bill, 2011, has become rather confusing. It focuses on custodial responsibility, holding people who have the data of others in their possession responsible for its misuse. At the same time, it contains a caveat protecting journalistic research. How is one to read this? Is an official from whose office a document is leaked culpable, but the journalist who organised the leak is not? Such a disparity would not stand up in court, and the governments attempt to contain investigative journalism would fail.
Some other clauses have the delicacy of a sledgehammer. One clause provides a blanket ban on copying all personal data, except with the permission of the authorities. And in general, the Bill fails to acknowledge that information may be more or less sensitive, depending on its nature and the use to which it is put.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s credit card statement, which was accessed by Murdochs journalists at one time, is good for a gossip item. On the contrary, the Lokayukta’s opinion of Yeddyurappa is explosive. It can either bring down a state government or take the steam out of the BJPs national campaign against corruption. A privacy law should be able to distinguish between grades of information according to their capacity for affecting politics and public security.
The Murdoch empire is in the dock for illegally sourcing information which resulted in front page stories in the UK tabloids. But we have never had tabloids, apart from the almost forgotten Blitz. In Indian newspapers, similar stories would have been deemed to be unimportant and buried in an inside page. There is only one exception to the pattern, and that seems to have sealed the fate of the Murdochs: the case of Milly Dowler, a child who was murdered by a maniac.
We, too, have gone berserk once over a murdered child: Aarushi Talwar, whose case remains unsolved. The media frenzy over her death saw TV channels playing judge, jury and executioner. The privacy of the grieving family was not merely invaded, it was assaulted. There was even unsavoury public speculation about the sexuality of a dead child. Only one politician officially voiced concern over these excesses in Parliament, and there was some unheeded mewling about the media’s lack of restraint.
The revulsion that the Murdoch brand now elicits owes largely to the Milly Dowler case. The News of the World had commissioned hackers to access her cellphones voicemail in search of newsbreaks.
When her mailbox became full, they deleted some messages to make room for more. Investigators noticed the deletions, which encouraged the parents of the child to believe that she was still alive. It was this callous cruelty in the quest for the next juicy tabloid story which made the Murdoch publications objects of disgust.
We have behaved just as badly in the case of Aarushi, the only difference being that we have speculated wildly about the murder victim and her family, not criminally manipulated their private data. We obviously need privacy laws which can curb the media in such situations.
But we certainly do not need laws which have the potential to curb investigative journalism in general by criminalising the process by which the media accesses information.
Unless criminal means are used. That is what the News of the World did, and it has got its just deserts. But the sort of stories it focused on are really at the peripheries of investigative journalism.
The focus of the mainstream is not the tragedies of murder victims but stories of national importance about threats to public security or national security. And at its best, it exposes threats to the nation emanating from government itself, from its policies and failures. Investigative journalism is protected by free speech laws, but its standing in the face of privacy legislation needs to be examined and elucidated.
In India, two mechanisms exist for exposing governmental wrongdoing: queries under the Right to Information Act and the media. And without the help of the latter, the former cannot turn its discoveries into agendas for public and political action. As the Privacy Bill evolves, its drafters will be mindful of events in the UK. But they should also be mindful of the fact that the two media cultures are fundamentally different, and curbs which are sought in the UK may be harmful if applied in India. INAV