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Ashok Mitra

The choice of members for the Prasar Bharati board betrays sectarianism of the worst order, as if New Delhi is India and India is New Delhi

Things move lugubriously in this uncertain polity. The Prasar Bharati Act is now as good as a moribund piece of legislation. It was put on the statute book by the Janata government that reigned during 1977-79 when Indira Gandhi's authoritarian goings-on were still the talk of the town. The vice-like grip she exercised over the public media, her political opponents felt, had bequeathed an overridingly important lesson for the nation: The dissemination of information and broadcasting, including telecasting, must be liberated from government control.

A committee was set up with the mandate to suggest ways and means for processing the details. Its recommendation was predictable: Constitution of an independent supervisory body outside the orbit of the government, complete with a parliamentary advisory council.

Rapid political changes however ensued, including Indira Gandhi's second coming. The Prasar Bharati Act went into cold storage. The present regime in New Delhi, tentative in more than one sense, has decided to give an amended new life to the old piece of legislation. As a demonstration of its seriousness about the matter, it has named a Prasar Bharati executive board consisting of several eminence grises from the world of journalism. A full time executive director has been placed in position too; he will apparently be the eye and the ear of the board. And the proposal of having an advisory council of MPs crowding the parlour of the board has been dispensed with.

The context is of course vastly changed in the 20 long years that separate post-Emergency India from the cynical milieu that it now is. Indira Gandhi had put the media, specially the electronic medium, in their place via her famous brand of disdain. The Prasar Bharati Act was a response to that haughtiness. Other events, however, have intervened which have not harmed the cause of free thinkers.

In the course of the past decade, the country has gone through a qualitative transformation as far as the media, particularly the electronic medium, are concerned. Private television channels, domestic and foreign, now crowd the scene. Transponders and satellite time are much in demand. When these are not available on a spot basis, producers of television programmes do not mind travelling thousands of miles in search of immediate hook-up facilities. The Indian consumer market, representing the demands and aspirations of at least one hundred million citizens, is a strong allure. The television media have succumbed to its spell. That is what free market economics is about.

Meanwhile, the plethora of television channels has given rise to quite a few problems, such as tension between domestic and foreign units, and occasional friction among competing foreign channels. These developments are understandable -- the potential of the Indian media market is still largely unexplored, and some comings and goings are bound to fill the landscape even as the country precariously hurtles itself into full-blast globalisation.

How exactly does the Prasar Bharati board propose to function against this background? Confusion abounds. Television is free but the authorities have not yet allowed foreign equity to enter the print medium. A rationale exists for treating this wing of the media on a separate basis; both the government and major sections of the public would perhaps look to the Prasar Bharati board to enlarge the scope of this rationale. Will the board however have the heart to take up the challenge? After all, the original intention behind the legislation was to make possible the liberation of the system of information.

In the circumstances, the board has to listen constantly to other voices. The electronic medium has been comprehensively globalised; little ground therefore exists, it will be said, for shutting the foreigners from the print medium. Rupert Murdoch has already entered the foyer, what is the point, it will be argued, of baring his entry into the living room?

The board was entitled to nurture in the beginning the illusion that its verdict is final on this most sensitive of issues. Its perambulations in a fool's paradise will be cut short by numerous signings of government-to-government memoranda of understanding and by World Trade Organisation fiats.

So it will be a terribly constricted arena for the Prasar Bharati board. To sooth its ego, it may be urged to look to other directions, such as the content and quality of the programmes the media package these days.

A genuine problem would indeed arise here: intervention by the board may be construed as interference with free market principles. If, for instance, the upmarket consumers in Chandigarh or New Delhi or Bombay or Bangalore are yearning for soft and hard pornography in the post-midnight hours, the board, to save its profession, may have to fall back on the last desperate plea of maintaining untarnished India's moral fabric. Is there any guarantee that an outcry will not be manufactured in the nation's capital and elsewhere that it was time to get rid of the old fogeys who are not in vibe with the free market aspirations of the 21 century?

One wishes one could end on this note of sympathy and commiseration for the helpless members of the Prasar Bharati who have arrived 20 years too late on the scene, and that too via the courtesy of ordinances which have yet to receive the imprimatur of Parliament.

In the circumstances, a comment on the manner in which members of the executive board have been chosen seems to be well in order. The politicians who have picked this board were those who had been put to graze by Indira Gandhi in the early 1980s. Several of them, uncertain in regard to the destination they should head towards, had then converted into vociferous supporters of the cause of restructuring Centre-state relations in the country. In documents they authored in that phase, much stress was laid on the need to decentralise the functioning of information and broadcasting agencies and placing the states on the same pedestal as the Centre in the exercise of media regulation.

All these invocations are now nothing more than scraps of obliterated memory. It would be both amusing and instructive if another look is taken at the composition of the Prasar Bharati board. Most of the members, its chairman not excluding, are long-standing citizens belonging to the nation's capital. They constitute, one can say with honest conviction, the cream of New Delhi's press establishment.

They cannot, therefore, help if -- in administering the amended Prasar Bharati Act -- they render themselves vulnerable to the charms of exclusively the Union government, even while philosophising that devil should take care of the states. The choice of members for the board betrays sectarianism of the worst order, as if New Delhi is India and India is New Delhi.

Please do not therefore blame fate if the board and, along with it, the Prasar Bharati Act as amended, happen to receive, never mind in what manner, the shortest shrift from the nation.

Ashok Mitra