Passage Based Questions: Legal Aptitude - 14 | Passage Based Questions for CLAT Preparation PDF Download

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In the freedom of its media India, like many countries, falls somewhere in between the US and the China. India is not an authoritarian country, but it is increasingly a democracy with quasi-authoritarian characteristics. The prime minister hands down pronouncements from up high. No reporter dares to interrogate him the way their American counterparts grill President Donald Trump almost every day. If you point out weaknesses in India’s fight against the virus-for instance, relatively sparse testing-a social media lynch mob immediately descends upon you.
For those who believe the current situation demands more of the police-man’s stick, the reporter’s pen is part of the problem. They expect journalists to act as cheerleaders for the government, taking each claimed success in the fight against the virus at face value, posing no awkward questions, keeping public morale high by downpaying gloomy prognoses. In this view, the media’s role is not to question the government, but to work shoulder to shoulder with it at a time of crisis.
That the idea of the media as a lapdog rather than a watchdog would appeal to those in power should come as no surprise. But in these uncertain times this appears to appeal to many ordinary Indians as well. In the public imagination, journalism as a profession seems to have lost much of its moral sheen. As politics becomes more tribal, the temptation to shut down critics rather than engage with them grows stronger.

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Add the horror stories of quarantine centres, and people fleeing from them. Michel Foucault’s seminal ‘Madness and Civilisation’ showed that the stigma against that disease evolved from the fear of confinement, till then the SOP for dealing with the mentally ill. It will be burgeoned by our newest discrimination. WHO has warned of mass anxiety disorders. Suicide trautmatises the family, stigma twists the knife deeper.
Our flight instinct is booted as much by fear of infection, an evolved reaction called ‘parasitic avoidance’. The person with the home quarantine stamp becomes the legatee of the ‘leper’ of yore forced to ring a warning bell and cry,’ Unclean ! Unclean!”
Stigma is rooted in power. The Church once made a sacrament of it; the State still perpetuates it. Soumitra Pathare, director of Pune’s Centre for Mental Health Law & Policy, points to the Hindu Marriage Act which has dropped epilepsy and leprosy as grounds for divorce but retained mental illness.” To get at stigma, we should first focus on discrimination, which is visible, observable, measureable and regulatable. The Delhi high court did pull up the Delhi Judicial Service for refusing a candidate who had applied under the ‘disabilities ‘ saying ‘mental ‘ didn’t count. Tamil Nadu arrested the bakery owner who refused to employ a Muslim. Police can do the same with those barring or attacking those battling Covid”.