Press freedom Is it really free?

Scott Howard Phillips rightly said,“You can't pick and choose which types of freedom you want to defend. You must defend all of it or be against all of it." Siddhartha Mukherjee delves deeper into this, questioning whether we have the right to circulate opinions in print without censorship by the government.

- Siddhartha Mukherjee

It is from here, one can easily claim, that if we are such a great democracy, the largest in terms of sheer demographics, then we must surely have full freedom of expression and a free press, as media after all is often considered as the fourth estate, the ultimate ombudsman for any working democracy. Now if we are patient enough to take time out from our incessant Twitter battles, and check out our constitution, then we would even find freedom a separate chapter on fundamental rights, which in great clarity, elucidates the various rights that we, as citizens of India enjoy, including the right to full freedom of expression, and freedom of press, and implicitly we will all breathe a sigh of relief after reading this, for press freedom is one of the guaranteed implicit consequences of the vast right to speak whatever, that we all enjoy. So we all should go to sleep right, listening to good ol’ Bob Marley, thinking about the carefree days of the revolution right? In my honest opinion, if you do that then you are indulging in an act of supreme criminality, with grave consequences for the future prosperity and stability of our country, much graver than speeches at university canteens, proclaiming the ideas of utopia, utopias that we don’t and probably will never have. Yes, in theory we do have freedom of press, as interpreted from the stated notion in Article 19, but we also have a slight corrigendum to that, a sort of a sore that clearly states that reasonable restrictions can be imposed in the name of a number of really vague things , like morality public order and others. Now the word to watch out for here, the term that should have bagged all the Oscars if there ever was one for ban