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Kathmandu, Sept.16: Should press freedoms be curbed in Nepal. Strong reservations have been expressed to government's plans to curb press freedoms after official accusations of " exaggerated' reporting in the media of a four-year Maoist insurgency that has claimed more than 1,400 lives.

" We are ready to face the worst if attempts are made to curtail freedom of the press," President of the Editors' Society Govinda Biyogi told a gathering of officials, including MInister for Communications Jaya Prakash Prakash Gupta.

" The government is apparently toying with the idea of imposing some restrictions and yesterday's meeting was a trial balloon," said a journalist who attended Friday's the meeting but did not want to be named. " The government through a cabinet decision had endorsed a decision to make some amendments to the Press and Publication Act, which would incorporate the provision of suspending the publication of a newspaper if it was found to be publishing news that would be detrimental to the security of citizens,' the official daily newspaper, The Rising Nepal, said it its Saturday editions.

Such an amendment would have to be approved by Parliament where the ruling Nepali Congress party has a majority. " We want the people from the media to thoroughly discuss the issue and come up with suggestions as to how the present perversion related with reporting of violence related issues could be done factually so as to avoid the printing and broadcasting of exaggerated news that could spread fear in society," Gupta reportedly told a gathering of opposition leaders, journalists and senior civil servants.

" His party (UML) was against the Maoist insurgency, but it was also strictly against the idea of curtailing press freedom," The Rising Nepal reported UML leader and journalist Raghuji Panta as saying. " The government cannot curtail press freedom my making excuses," another opposition leader Lila Mani Pokhrel reportedly said. This is an indication that any amendments to curtail unlimited freedoms enjoyed by the Nepali fourth estate in the last decade under a multi-party dispensation will be opposed in Parliament. Home Minister Govinda Raj Joshi accused some sections of the media for " highlighting the perpetrators of violence."

Censorship or self-censorship of the media, inaccurate and motivated reporting will be hotly debated in the coming weeks and months. Latest official figures say 1,434 persons have been killed in the insurgency to topple monarchy and multiparty democracy and supplant a communist state in Nepal.

Among the dead are 979 Maoists, 208 policemen and 249 civilians. nepalnews.com br