The beat correspondents’ protest to the Union Home Minister against the impugned outrageous gag order is justified as it amounts to denying them their inherent right to develop an overview and feel of the over all functioning of the Government in the MHA, thus allowing half-baked glossy information putting the people in the dark and confused. Such ordained restricted or regimented flow of information prevails only under fascism, which is anti-thesis to Indian system of democratic governance. This is coming on the heels of the already PMO driven similar gags introduced in the later half of 2014, restricting interaction of accredited media persona to senior officials and Ministers.

Well, in the scheme of the Constitution of India, the MHA enjoys a place of unbridled primacy over other Ministries/Departments as all other Ministries and Departments in the Union Government are borne out of it. It enjoys residual powers. Constitution or no Constitution, law or no law, any decision that MHA takes has ipso facto the force of law. Such being the might of this all pervasive and all permeating Ministry, this despicable decision is bound to be replicated and emulated by others in the Government. It’s time this order was revoked in the larger public interests.

The order also reflects poorly on ADG(Media), K.S.Dhatwalia, departmental publicity officer of the PIB attached to the MHA, for his failure to articulate the case and status of media before the Home Secretary, who in his over zeal rushed with such ill-conceived order just to please his masters. PIB has been conceived as a media friendly platform of the Government. This incident proves beyond doubt glaring failure of Dhatwalia. Even otherwise, Dhatwalia’s performance has been below average and poor.

This is typical of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s one-man rule of the Government of India, where Ministers are gagged, officials restricted and suffocated. Already bio-metric attendance of officials and their presence in rooms and offices in a horde with little or no work, aided and abated by directly PMO initiated directives to Secretaries over the usual channels has taken a toll of governance. The MHA order is a major nail, if not the last one, in the coffin of the evolving transparency of the globalised India.

The gagging of media spells doom for democracy and responsiveness (accountability) of the Government to the people. It also puts a lid on covert malpractices in the Government. To maintain that with the PM Modi at the helm everything is well with the Government notwithstanding the absence of Lokpal and other watchdogs of the shenanigans and deviant conduct of the Government. This also puts lid over the usual cuts, commissions, pay-offs that are prevailing orders of various deals, procurements, including defence equipment, arms, plants, machineries and others, which are norms of the global businesses.