The Congress tracked how the media portrayed its Prime Minister discreetly, while the BJP does it aggressively and overtly. The task is carried out by the Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC) — a legacy of the British, inherited by the Congress and now the BJP — to keep a tab on all news channels to find out how much airtime is devoted to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Now, Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley and Minister of State Rajyavardhan Rathore have joined the list of those being tracked in the news broadcast by the electronic media. The coverage of Mr. Modi’s Mann ki Baat on All India Radio and his engagements with world leaders find a mention on the significant list of activities undertaken by the EMMC, displayed on its webpage. The Central Monitoring Service was used by the British primarily to track anti-war propaganda on radio. Its new avatar, the EMMC was set up on June 9, 2008, by the UPA government to monitor the content of television channels and report on violations of the programme and advertising code. It serves as a chilling deterrent to free speech and offers the Ministry reasons to serve show-cause notices on television channels.