Ramachandra Guha: Why Ram Mohun Roy’s colonial-era petition for press freedom is still relevant
In 1824, the Government of Bengal (which was then in the hands of the East India Company) issued an Ordinance placing strict curbs on the freedom of the press. This gave the government the powers to cancel a newspaper’s licence without any explanation. The Ordinance provoked outrage among the intelligentsia of Calcutta, active in editing and publishing periodicals in English as well as in Bengali. A petition to the government asking it to rescind the Ordinance was drafted by Ram Mohun Roy, who obtained the signatures of some other Indians (including several members of the Tagore family) before sending it off to the authorities.
I had read Ram Mohun’s petition many years ago, and was prompted to go back to it recently in the wake of a growing spate of attacks on journalists in India today. His words make for sobering reading at a time when the government of independent India has become as hostile to a free press as was its colonial predecessor.
Let us hear Ram Mohun directly. In his petition to the East India Company, the great liberal urged the British rulers not to be “disposed to adopt the political maxim so often acted upon by Asiatic Princes, that the more...
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