(Image source from: Can Indian politicians ever give a freehand to media and I&B ministry?})

Every day, at the crack of dawn, the officials at the information and broadcasting ministry congregate to collate all the media feedback for the bygone day and present it to the Prime Minister so that he can scour over it the first thing in the morning - similar to the task they did during the UPA times, albeit with some modifications.

Under UPA, the officials use to collate the news items under heads like political, security, finance and others. However, Modi likes his news feeds to be streamlined under 'positive' and 'negative'. Even worse, the beleaguered babus have to report to work an hour earlier than they did during the times of Manmohan Singh.

Call it government's way of keeping a tab on the media or anything else, we don't believe there is anything nefarious about it since all governments across the globe do it. The catch is until now the media has not been given any clear understanding of PMO objectives. Even BJP's newly appointed spokesperson MJ Akbar hasn't briefed the media at all. So it's left to I&B ministry to bell the cat.

In practice the ministry has been more than a well-meaning nanny, more like a Big Brother. That said, there have been copious instances of Congress trying to use the I&B ministry as a police truncheon and cow the media during the Emergency.

When Vidya Charan Shukla, the I&B minister of Congress died in 2013, Sohail Hashmi had written about him as “snapping power supply to newspapers critical of the Emergency, introducing draconian censorship, banning magazines and newspapers, and sealing printing presses that dared publish anything critical of the infamous Mrs G or her Emergency regime”. Not just that, Shukla famously banned Kishore Kumar songs from being aired on All India Radio because the singer had refused to sing at an Indira Gandhi rally.

There is no denying that Vidya Charan Shukla and the liked functioned like medieval despot, curbing freedom of expressions by clamping down on the press.

Bemoaning Congress' autocracy and making the right noises, I&B minister Javadekar said at the recent Leadership Summit at Goafest 201 that there has to be an absolute media freedom. The right to criticism must be allowed as only when that freedom is nurtured, can we say what we have achieved as a democratic nation.

When recently asked by Karan Thapar whether India could move towards a future where the I&B ministry “ceases to exist”, Javadekar said “Philosophically or ideologically I’d be willing to do that.”

Brave words. But will he find any takers?

While Javadekar might talk about giving a freehand to media's “right to criticism,” does that mean that cases again students lampooning the prime minister in their college magazine be dropped.

Freedom of expression draws oodles of lip service, but not many politicians can walk the talk. It’s not that the PMO is ordering crackdowns on students for drawing up offensive puzzles. It could be just that policemen and local activists trying to win the favor of the new masters in Delhi with their over zealous crackdown.

All said and done, the existence of I&B ministry makes little sense today as it has barely managed to rise from the print world to a television world with no grasp over social media, the internet and mobile phones. Quite irrationally, it does not even allow private FM stations to make news, even though no such stricture for private television channels exist.

We roll our eyes at the press releases and little public service films that it releases from time to time. But its real value for government has always been its utility.

A free-minded Javadekar might have the best intentions but the question his will his other political peers be as eager to give up the “Ministry for Taming Information and Broadcasting”? Not quite so, we believe.

AW: Suchorita Choudhury