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Power of Pen is Mightier than the Streets!
What I have understood in my three decades plus involvement in the media sector is that no government in the world prefers to be friendly with the newspapers and its editors. What further I have experienced is that practically all the governments in the world possess a sort of utter distaste with the media for a variety of reasons. What, in addition to these, also is known to me is that even so called democratic governments too have some sort of allergy to media, freedom of expression and the likes for reasons unknown.
Media is a power. It is a force. Its flow and the speed can't in no way be blocked. The media acquires power from the society. The society, basically who are the real consumers of the news propagated by the media, provide the media the required strength to face the challenges posed to it by the government. Thus it is this society that is important in keeping the media and the media men alive.
I also know that a democracy in its real sense of the term can't continue in the absence of a free media. Thus free media is synonymous to democracy. Both go together. It is perhaps this that visualizing the intimate relation in between the press and democratic system, a few years ago the Kathmandu based French Ambassador, Michel Lummaux, at a Telegraph weekly seminar held on September 17, 1998, had officially suggested me to write in the masthead "the press and the nation's democracy rise and fall together". I sense the gravity of the Ambassador's sterling suggestion and hence from the next week onwards it is being printed accordingly.
Let me talk today at a very personal level. I admit that Nepal's democracy has benefited my newspaper and me the most. Most in the sense that I can now write whatever I think appropriate and useful for the broader section of the society. The system in place could have benefited others as well. However, academically perhaps this is the single weekly that has enjoyed the beautiful critical and scathing articles penned by various scholars over these democratic years.
In a nutshell, we support our friends' anxiety for a free press. We support their initiatives taken in this regard. However, we beg to differ with the mode of their resentment being expressed against the government. Streets! Streets for the media men to express their anger against the government is not a place. Streets should be left to the mercy of the political parties. It is their right indeed to go to the streets in order to build pressure against the state. Let it remain the preserve of the political parties and their leaders. However, for the media men, coming to the streets and that too coinciding with the political agitation initiated by the political parties smack some thing very foul and stinking indeed.
We see politics in the whole affair in the sense that how come our agitation coincide with the agitation currently being waged by the political paraphernalia? Surprising indeed.
Why the streets? Why not the power of the pen has been used which is what we should have done? Our duty is to inform the society that we are being gagged through our own writings. If it is so then why we have come to the streets? Question automatically as to some force inimical to the country and its media has made us all to come to the streets. Care must be taken by those who have come to the streets that we do not become the victim of the evil designs of certain countries that are hell bent on destabilizing and weakening our entire edifice for the fulfillment of their hidden agenda. Care must be taken to ensure that we are being not used by some one behind the curtain to act like their political stooge.
The day our friends realize this, Nepali media will attain maturity which is what is lacking today.
Not very surprising then why Nepali media men write less or more often than not reject stories that relate to certain countries' naked interference in our internal politics.
Let the fight of a Nepali with the other Nepali remain within our own boundaries. Let others not meddle in our fight against government's intention ( not yet substantiated) to gag the Nepali press.
It is time that the government clarified its official position over its much-publicized intent of bringing into effect stringent laws and regulations in order to curtail the rights of the press. We also urge the state authorities not to irritate the newsmen.
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