The roti lesson

The roti lesson

Instead of shooting the messenger, Adityanath government should improve service delivery.

When a group of lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court to take suo motu cognisance of media reports of a missing law student in Shahjahanpur, it was because they did not want a repeat of the Unnao case. It will be recalled that the apex court had to transfer the Unnao rape and related cases from Lucknow to Delhi, because the political influence of the accused, then BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, appeared to have subverted the entire law and order machinery in Uttar Pradesh for two years. In the Shahjahanpur case the accused is former central minister and BJP leader Swami Chinmayanand. And although the law student is no longer missing, it remains to be seen whether state authorities will address her allegations of sexual harassment justly.

A good benchmark for judging governance in a state is how it responds to dissent and criticism – which can help it identify gaps in delivery and fix them. But if the primary focus is on silencing critics, it means that the failures of the state will endure rather than end. Likewise, when the ordinary citizen goes up against someone powerful, if the arms of the state ring-fence the latter at the expense of the former this too performs a silencing function. The message goes to other aggrieved citizens to swallow their complaints – no matter how grave.

Isn’t this the message that has been sent out in Mirzapur too? UP police have registered a case of criminal conspiracy against journalist Pawan Jaiswal, after his video showing students at a state-run school having just roti with salt as their midday meal went viral. Midday meal schemes fight malnutrition. They raise school attendance and lower caste barriers. Given this triple whammy developmental effect governments must go all out to ensure midday meals work well. And journalists who expose gaps should be commended rather than booked, as Jaiswal has been by the Yogi Adityanath government.

Governments must uphold the media’s right to free speech, not only for its own sake but also for the public function it performs, all the other rights it helps protect. We see in the Unnao, Shahjahanpur and Mirzapur cases, for example, how the right to justice and the right to food are buttressed by media. Shooting the messenger is the path to ruin. UP needs to step off it.