Silencing Criticism: Kannada editor B.V. Seetaram’s arrest

Silencing act

VIKHAR AHMED SAYEED
Kannada journalist B.V. Seetaram’s arrest highlights the intolerance of quasi-religious and other powerful forces towards criticism.


B.V. Seetaram, Editor of "Karavali Ale".
IN an interview with Frontline on the morning of January 4, B.V. Seetaram, the 54-year-old director of Chitra Publications, which publishes the midday Kannada newspaper Karavali Ale (The Coastal Wave), expressed an uneasy foreboding that he would be arrested. “The district administration has not responded to my calls for protecting Karavali Ale and is, instead, looking for an excuse to target me,” he remarked. That evening, Seetaram was detained by the Udupi police near the small town of Karkala in Udupi district in southwestern Karnataka. Seetaram and his wife Rohini were served a warrant in a two-year-old defamation case.

According to sources close to Seetaram, 25 policemen surrounded his house in Mangalore when he was on his way to Karkala. He was served the warrant while he was en route, and he was produced before the local Magistrate the next day. He was charged under Sections 500 and 501 of the Indian Penal Code (defamation) at the court of the Civil Judge (Junior Division) and Judicial Magistrate, First Class, in Udupi and remanded in judicial custody until January 17, after he refused bail apprehending a threat to his life if he was arrested by the Mangalore police.

Karavali Ale, founded in 1991 by Seetaram and his wife, is a six-page Kannada broadsheet published from Mangalore and Karwar. The duo also heads three other publications in the region – an English weekly called Canara Times and two Kannada dailies Sanje Ale and Kannada Janantaranga. Karavali Ale, priced at Rs.3 and with estimated sales of more than 50,000 copies, was the leading midday newspaper in the coastal districts of Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Uttara Kannada before December 2008 when a series of attacks on its distribution network dented its circulation.

Delivery vans carrying copies of the newspaper were reportedly stopped and attempts were made to burn the copies. On December 11, 2008, miscreants burnt 5,000 copies of the newspaper. News agents and hawkers were intimidated by men belonging to right-wing groups. According to Seetaram, the circulation of Karavali Ale declined by almost 20 per cent, and advertisers were very reluctant to advertise in the newspaper. “I lost at least Rs.5 lakh in December,” he said.

The immediate provocation for the attacks was a report in the newspaper on December 1. A Dalit organisation called Dalit Sangharsha Samiti had issued a press statement in which it criticised Rajashekhara Nanda Swami of the Gurupura Vajradehi Matha. The statement, which was carried in Karavali Ale, alleged that the Swami behaved in a discriminatory manner with the Dalit residents of the area when he went to attend on November 30 an event that discouraged conversion to Buddhism. Earlier, on November 17, there was an attack on the printing press of the newspaper after it carried a report that cast doubts on the method of acquisition of land for the Mangalore Special Economic Zone (MSEZ) in Kudubipadavu village in Dakshina Kannada district. more