India leaders attack 'media gag'

By Charles Havilland BBC correspondent in Madras

Senior politicians in India have condemned an attempt to imprison five senior staff of one of the country's most respected newspapers, The Hindu.

The Supreme Court will on Monday hear a petition challenging the arrest order.

It was issued by a state assembly committee in Tamil Nadu, where the 125-year-old newspaper is based.

Journalists across India have rallied round The Hindu and hundreds of reporters are on day-long hunger-strike in Tamil Nadu's capital, Madras.

The Hindu's journalists are getting some high-level support.

The move against The Hindu has been widely condemned

India's deputy prime minister, L K Advani, said he felt "upset" by the arrest order, while the leader of the opposition Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, said: "Such high-handed action by the state legislature is a threat to our democracy.".

Some 300 fasting journalists were joined by a crowd of opposition politicians at the Press Club in Madras.

Some wore placards announcing "Democracy is being murdered".

Speakers denounced the committee of the Tamil Nadu Assembly, or parliament, which on Friday sentenced The Hindu's editor, executive editor and three other senior staff to 15 days in jail.

That committee objected to some descriptions of the state's chief minister, J Jayalalitha, contained in the paper last April, and invoked the right of legislative privilege to sentence the five to prison.

'Gross abuse'

The journalists evaded arrest and their whereabouts are now a secret.

The Hindu's offices were raided by police on Friday

But in a petition to be brought before India's Supreme Court in Delhi on Monday the five describe the resolution against them as illegal and void.

This case is a sign of the ever-worsening relations between the sensitive Ms Jayalitha, a former film star, and a paper with a sober and sometimes stuffy reputation.

Media associations in Delhi said the prison sentences were "a gross abuse of legislative authority".

And senior journalists in Delhi have said it goes further and amounts to an attack on the entire press.