Whataboutery will not silence journalism

Some readers have suggested that this column should only focus on The Hindu ’s acts of commission and omission, and not on issues relating to freedom of expression, press freedom, and constitutional guarantees. For at least two generations of Indians, Professor Sen and Mr. Shah have represented the best of Indian democracy: they are fearlessly interrogative, argue, debate, dissent, and speak truth to power. It is chilling to read what this Padma Bhushan award winner told this newspaper: “The vicious jingoism masquerading as love for the country has reached truly scary proportions and so has the constant whataboutery in response to almost everything.” In the case of Noble Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, it was another eminent economist, Kaushik Basu, who defended him in a public column against a social media attack. He wrote in The Idea of Justice : “The absence of a free media and the suppression of people’s ability to communicate with each other have the effect of directly reducing the quality of human life, even if the authoritarian country that imposes such suppressions happens to be very rich in terms of gross national product.” Professor Sen has argued that the media is important not only for democracy but for the pursuit of justice in general. The controversy over what Mr. Shah said broke around the same time that the Ministry of Home Affairs issued an order authorising 10 Central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt “any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer.” Yet another round of whataboutery has started filling cyberspace, with people saying that such a ruling existed even earlier, so why talk about it now.