BIHAR PRESS BILL 55 youth wing of his party in September 1980, because they had reported some of his remarks verbatim. He and A R Antulay, a former Congress (I) Chief Minister of Maharashtra, later described journalists as "dogs". Another former Congress (I) Chief Minister in Andhra Pradesh, T Anjiah, threatened to jail a correspondent at a press conference for having made an assessment of the success of the all-India strike called, on January 19, 1982, by the National Campaign Committee of eight central trade unions. In the Congress (I)-ruled State of Orissa, the wife of a journalist was murdered in 3980 because her husband had been exposing certain misdeeds of the government. Another journalist in Orissa was handcuffed and paraded through a town for the same reason. Moin Ansari, convenor of the All-India Urdu Press Correspondents' Association, has charged that threats and Inducements were used by the Congress (I) government in Bihar to see that some newspapers came out on September 3, 1982, the day of the all-India newspapers strike against the Bihar Press Bill. The Bihar Public Relations Directorate, for one, threatened newspapers with the stoppage of advertisements if they decided to close on that day. A day before the strike, a Jamshedpur-based journalist was arrested at Ghatsila because he happened to be the convenor of the ad hoc committee against the Bihar Press Bill, and was kept in jail handcuffed and tied throughout the night and produced in this state before the court next morning for bail. On September 23, a senior journalist in Ranchi, D P Dasgupta, and his family were injured when a group of armed miscreants of the Congress (I) raided his house and attacked them. These are only some of the overt Instances of interference in the functioning of the press that have taken place over the last three years. There are more such instances documented by the various State units of the Indian Federation of Working Journalists, with the number of covert attempts at interference, being anybody's guess. 3 Among the charges made against the Tamil Nadu government for amending the Act are that Rs. 17.50 crores had changed hands at the time of issuing liquor licences to vested interests from outside the State. The Ord nance to amend the Act was issued as a pre-emptive measure 'n September 1981, when it was feared that this charge, contained in a memorandum of 22 Tamil Nadu M Ps to the Prime Minister, might gain currency in the press. See India Today, September 30, 1982. Since then ihe Tamil Nadu government has set up an advisory committee, in the wake of the agitation against the Tamil Nadu Act and the Bihar Press Bill, to examine in depth the implications of Section 292-A. At its meeting on October 30, all the representatives of the press, except one, demanded that the entire Section 292-A should be repealed. 4 The former Solicitor-General of India, Soli Sorabjee's written opinion on the Bihar Press Bill submitted to the Editors' Guild of India, as reproduced in The Economic Times (New Delhi), October 10 and 11, 1982. 5 Constitution 1st Amendment Act 1951. 6 Constitution 1st Amendment Act 1951 and Constitution 16th Amendment Act 1963. 7 On September 1, 1982, the Prime Minister told a meeting in Lucknow that the movement launched by journalists against the Bihar Press B.ll was "bogus" and that she would not advise the President to withhold assent, on the ground that such assent had already been given to the Timil Nadu and Orissa Bills. A week later, on September 7, the new information and Broadcasting Minister, N K P Salve, told a meeting in Nagpur that the Prime Minister had spoken out of "disgust", without elaborating with whom or what she was disgusted. Salve also said that he found nothing objectionable in the Bill and did not consider the "storm" 'to be raised over it by the journalists to be justified. On October 4, the Prime Minister told the Raj\a