Press Club of India demands withdrawal of FIR against Editors Guild chief, members

Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh/ Pic/PTI

The Press Club of India on Monday condemned the registration of an FIR against three members of a fact-finding committee of the Editors Guild of India along with its chief who had examined media coverage of the ethnic violence in Manipur. "It is a case of shooting the messenger rather than taking measures to restore peace in the state. We demand that the FIR against Editors Guild of India (EGI) president Seema Mustafa and the three members be withdrawn immediately," the Press Club of India (PCI) said in a statement here.

The Manipur Police booked the four for allegedly trying to create more clashes in the state rocked by ethnic strife for nearly four months. The PCI claimed that the Manipur police invoked Section 66A of the Information and Technology Act even though the provision has been struck down by the Supreme Court.

"This is a strong-arm tactic by the state government which amounts to intimidation of the apex media body of the country," it said.
In its report on the media coverage of the ethnic violence in Manipur, the Guild said journalists in the northeastern state wrote one-sided reports, the internet ban impacted their ability to communicate with each other, and the state government played a partisan role in the ethnic conflict.

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The three-member fact-finding team, comprising EGI members Seema Guha, Bharat Bhushan and Sanjay Kapoor, reported that the media in Manipur seemed to have become 'Meitei media' with editors consulting each other and agreeing on a common narrative to report an incident. "This, the EGI team was told, was because they did not want to inflame the already volatile situation further," the report said, adding that the downside of such an approach during ethnic violence is that it can easily slip into forging a common ethnic narrative.

The report said with the internet suspended, and communication and transport in disarray, the media had to rely almost entirely on the narrative of the state government.

"This narrative under the N Biren Singh dispensation became a narrow ethnic one playing up to the biases of the majority Meitei community," the report said.

"The state government also tacitly supported this vilification by allowing the Manipur Police to file an FIR against the Assam Rifles, suggesting that one hand of the State did not know what the other was doing or this was a deliberate action," the report said. "There are clear indications that the leadership of the state became partisan during the conflict. It should have avoided taking sides in the ethnic conflict but failed to do its duty as a democratic government which should have represented the entire state," the report said.

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