The New Indian Express writes
Left to themselves, all politicians would have loved to do what Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao has said he will—bury journalists 10km deep in the ground. Unfortunately for them, India is a democracy with a constitution that guarantees freedom of expression. There have been instances, of course, where this guarantee has been ignored, the most infamous example being the press censorship that prime minister Indira Gandhi imposed in June 1975, and which continued till March 1977. Apart from that dark chapter of history, politicians have generally had to vent their anger via dire threats, forgetting that with power comes responsibility.
Being new to the job and perhaps overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task he faces, Rao has taken recourse to the second option without realising that it is unbecoming of a chief minister to talk of interring journalists or anyone else who “denigrate Telangana and disrespect its culture, people and language”. The rant has only showed him up as a ridiculous figure. This impression is also bound to be strengthened by his earlier aspiration to be a Hitler in order to punish those who did anything wrong. Evidently, the strain of his onerous responsibilities is showing.
Rao is not the only one whose nerves appear to be fraying at the edges. Another chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, also recently identified the media as the main culprit for nearly all of West Bengal’s ills and threatened to send her party’s cadres to discipline the errant newsmen. Such bombast may be good for their own morale, and for uplifting the spirits of the followers. But it shows scant regard for the Constitution which they have promised to uphold, or for the values of an open society where it is free-for-all as far as opinions are concerned. Moreover, it is the government’s duty to protect such openness and not threaten to clamp down on it, let alone bury the perpetrators.
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