When King Gyanendra seized power through a military coup nearly 22 years ago, the state launched a planned attack on the press. The royal regime sent army and police personnel into the newsrooms of media houses and interfered with their work.
Today, security personnel have once again entered Nepali media houses simultaneously. They arrested some journalists and made unsuccessful attempts to arrest others.
The political circumstances surrounding these two events are different. But the sight of security personnel being sent into newsrooms to intimidate journalists has reminded us of that dark period.
The media houses that police entered had published reports about intermediary Inam Sapkota and his connections with Supreme Court justices. Those reports also mentioned that Sapkota had claimed to the justices that he was close to the prime minister.
Supreme Court Justice Hari Phuyal has stated on the record that he met Sapkota and that Sapkota introduced himself to several Supreme Court justices as a representative of the prime minister.
There are established procedures, institutions, and laws for holding media houses accountable if any of their reports are false or inaccurate. Media organizations can be held accountable only by using those institutions and laws and following the prescribed procedures.
Journalists and media houses are not above the law. But if police officers enter newsrooms looking for journalists and crack down on them simply because they wrote news reports, what will remain of the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press?
If there are legal grounds for taking action against anyone, those grounds must be made clear. The required procedures must be completed. Dissatisfaction with news coverage cannot be used as grounds for arresting journalists.
This is the protection the Constitution, written by the Nepali people after a long struggle, affords the press. If the state disregards that protection and uses its power to violate it, the result is not merely interference with journalists or media houses. It is an attack on the Constitution itself.
That is why the incidents on Friday evening, when Nepal Police officers and personnel entered media houses and detained journalists, cannot be treated as an ordinary occurrence. On what legal grounds was this action taken? Who ordered it? And what procedures were followed? We need answers to these questions.
The incident must be investigated immediately. Those who arrested journalists, and those who ordered the arrests, by violating the law and due process must face action – regardless of the institution they belong to or the position they hold.
Those at the highest levels of the state are currently trying to distance themselves from the question of who sent the police into the newsrooms. Within hours of the police entering the media houses, the prime minister’s secretariat issued an unusual clarification.
In a statement, Dipa Dahal, press expert at the Prime Minister’s Office, said:
“Neither the Prime Minister’s Secretariat nor the Prime Minister’s Office was involved in the arrests of journalists. We had received no information about this matter. As soon as the prime minister learned of the incident, he instructed the authorities concerned to immediately release the detained journalists.”
There are two serious problems with this statement.
First, the Prime Minister’s Office says that neither the Prime Minister’s Secretariat nor the Prime Minister’s Office was involved in the journalists’ arrests.
It is not that the police consult the prime minister before taking every action. In many matters, the police act independently in accordance with the law – and they should. Therefore, the Prime Minister’s Office may not have been directly involved in this operation.
But the absence of direct involvement is not the same as the absence of accountability.
The Prime Minister’s Office is the head of the government. It cannot evade political accountability for the actions of government institutions such as ministries, departments, and the police.
If a police officer or the police institution itself commits a mistake, it is the government’s responsibility to investigate. Depending on the gravity of the wrongdoing, it must issue a warning or take disciplinary action. It cannot consider its responsibility discharged simply by declaring that “the Prime Minister’s Office was not involved.”
If the government is not required to bear accountability for the actions of its agencies beyond the narrow confines of the Prime Minister’s Office, then there is little point in having a prime minister or their office at all.
The “head” cannot evade responsibility by saying, “I don’t know what one of my body parts has done!”
The second problem with the statement concerns the instruction the prime minister is said to have issued.
The statement says: “As soon as the prime minister learned of the incident, he instructed the authorities concerned to immediately release the detained journalists.”
It was necessary to take steps to secure the immediate release of the arrested journalists. But releasing them does not eliminate accountability for their arrests. The questions of why they were arrested and who ordered their arrests remain just as relevant.
Journalists’ freedom is not a matter of the prime minister’s benevolence. If journalists are released after he orders their release, and arrested after he orders their arrests, press freedom ceases to be a constitutionally guaranteed right. It becomes a matter of his benevolence.
Therefore, simply announcing that the prime minister instructed the authorities to release the journalists is not enough. What were the grounds for their arrests? If there were no legal grounds, why was such an act committed? Where is the commitment to investigate the matter and take action against those responsible?
If the prime minister or his office believed that the police entry into media houses and crackdown on journalists constituted an infringement of the press’s constitutional rights, they should also have immediately ordered an investigation. They should have pledged to take action against those responsible for the wrongdoing. But no such commitment was made.
The prime minister’s conduct toward the press and press freedom has raised serious questions before, too.
There were allegations that people from the prime minister’s secretariat had been involved in parking vehicles across the entrances to media houses, blocking access. There were credible grounds for these allegations. Despite calls for an investigation from political parties, including the ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), and other organizations, no investigation was conducted. No answers were provided about who were involved or who owned the vehicles. Nobody responsible for the obstruction was held accountable.
A government that failed to investigate and take action over the previous incident gives us little reason to believe that it will conduct an impartial investigation into the latest incident, in which police were sent into media houses and journalists were arrested.
As in the previous case, the ruling RSP and almost all opposition parties and their leaders have called for an investigation into this incident.
Our appeal to the ruling RSP and all opposition parties is this: This issue is far too serious to be dealt with by merely issuing demands and going through the motions. Parliament itself must take the initiative and investigate this assault on the press and the Constitution. Political parties must take the lead in making that happen.
A parliamentary investigation must establish who ordered the police to enter the media houses. Where were the simultaneous operations at different media organizations coordinated from? What were the legal grounds for arresting the journalists? Were the necessary procedures followed? Was there political or any other kind of pressure involved? Were people from the prime minister’s secretariat involved, or did the police act on their own initiative?
The answers to these questions must be made public. Responsibility must be established for those who committed the wrongdoing and those who ordered it. They must face action, and safeguards must be put in place to ensure that such an incident does not happen again.
Given the government’s persistent hostility toward the press, we reiterate that a parliamentary investigation is essential.
If such trial balloons – attempts to test the waters for interference with the press and the Constitution – are not nipped in the bud, these actions will gradually become normalized. Those in power will grow increasingly brazen. Society’s balance will begin to unravel. The press and democracy will grow weaker.
Therefore, we once again urge all political parties and Parliament to treat this matter with the seriousness it deserves.
