'The national press has been unfair to the problems of the minority community," Mr. Qurban Ali, Special Correspondent of the BBC News Service in India, and in a lecture on "50 years of Independence and the Role of the Media organised by the Media Monitoring Unit of the Jamaat-e-Islami ...

"Unlike in Pakistan and Bangladesh where the freedom of the press has been stifled and the media monitored to become a mouthpiece of the government, the Indian press has played a vital role in shaping 50 years of democracy in the country."

"Barring the few years of Emergency, the Indian press has been allowed to evolve its own pattern of disseminating news, views and information. But this freedom that has been abused time and again to establish a Hindu monopoly and sidelined the interests of the minorities, particularly the Muslims". The fact that there are very few people from the Muslim community in mainstream journalism today is ample proof of the insensitivity of the media.

"The idealism and the missionary zeal of the vernacular press during the freedom struggle got diluted and during the first few decades of Independence, it was only the Hindu point of view that got precedence over everything else.

The situation, however, changed in 1977 when the concept of on-the-spot reporting was introduced by the Sunday magazine for the first time in the country. The advent of the electronic media later also helped in portraying the news in a neutral and unbiased manner."

"Linguistic, ethnic and communal biases, however, continue to underline mainstream journalism today ... In 1990, a wave of communal riots swept through North India after three Hindi newspapers reported the death of more than 100 Hindu students at the Aligarh Muslim University ...

Even in the wake of the Ayodhya riots, there were various attempts on the part of the media to highlight caste and communal differences. While the interests of the Muslims and their plight in the wake of the riots were totally underplayed, it was only the atrocities on the Hindu community that were splashed across the newspapers.

The biggest strength of the Indian press has also been its weakness (that) it has been difficult to suppress the truth and present only one version of the story. Thanks to the freedom of the press, we can be assured that we are not being fed with only the half-truths."