Time article triggers flap over press freedom in India

As the subject of an unflattering magazine article about his health, India's Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had several choices: ignore it, send a letter to the editor to correct it, or make sure the man who wrote it never works in this town again.

A week after an article by Time magazine's Alex Perry appeared, alleging that the Indian prime minister who led his country during the tense nuclear standoff with Pakistan over the past few months is in very poor health, Indian immigration officials began delving into Mr. Perry's past visa applications.

The story on Mr. Vajpayee was particularly inflammatory because it also questioned the his ability to control India's nuclear weapons.

What the investigators found – according to Indian immigration sources – was that Perry holds two British passports, and that his visa applications contained irregularities, including a self-description as a teacher, rather than a journalist.

Though the investigation is still continuing, the evidence is enough for Indian immigration officials to order Perry to leave the country, perhaps permanently.

Some Indian political observers say it's all part of a pattern of harassment of news organizations that make the powerful look weak, foolish, or corrupt. The harassment has resulted in a kind of self-censorship by the usually boisterous press. No Indian paper has taken on the issue of Vajpayee's health as directly as did Perry.

"In so many ways, it is just like Mrs. Indira Gandhi," says Kuldip Nayar, a longtime journalist, former Indian High Commissioner to Britain, and current member of India's upper house of Parliament. Mrs. Gandhi, one of India's most powerful prime ministers, arrested journalists and politicians who disagreed with her during a state of emergency she called from 1975 to 1977.

"The criticism of the government has increased, especially since Gujarat," Mr. Nayar says, referring to the communal riots that have killed more than 1,000 Indians, mostly Muslims, since Feb. 27 in the state of Gujarat.

The irony, he adds, is that "the very people who are doing all this to the press are those who suffered in the emergency themselves."

During Gandhi's state of emergency, most of the current leadership, including Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani, and hundreds of journalists, such as Nayar, were put in prison for months without trial. Four foreign journalists, including the BBC's Mark Tully, were expelled from the country.

While no one feels that the current government's actions come close to those of Gandhi's, Perry, a British citizen, is among several recent cases of journalists encountering time-consuming interrogation and the threat of shutdown or expulsion.

• Last spring, after the Tehelka.com news service published excerpts of videotapes that showed high-level Indian Defense Ministry officials taking bribes, including sexual favors from prostitutes, Indian government officials at first acknowledged the investigation's findings and promised to take action. But then, officials from numerous agencies, including tax authorities, launched their own investigations of Tehelka.com. Ministry of Defense officials attacked the online news service's credibility in the press, disclosing that reporters used prostitutes to lure defense officials into the sting.

• Last summer, after a series of highly critical articles about the hard-line pro-Hindu policies of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), auditors of the Income Tax Department launched an investigation into the books of the liberal Outlook magazine and its editor.

• In February and March, after the privately owned NDTV 24-hour news service broadcast video of communal riots in Gujarat, top Indian officials counterattacked, alleging that the broadcasts themselves were fanning the flames of hatred.

The government's quarrel with Perry's article, headlined "Asleep at the Wheel," appears to focus on one paragraph: "India's leader (Vajpayee) takes painkillers for his knees (which were replaced due to arthritis); has trouble with his bladder, liver, and his one remaining kidney; takes a three-hour snooze every afternoon on doctor's orders; and is given to interminable silences, indecipherable ramblings and, not infrequently, falling asleep in meetings."

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