nation, state, and democracy in india: media regulation...

Nation, State, and Democracy in India: Media Regulation and Government Monopoly

Victoria L. Farmer

Political Science and International Relations SUNY–Geneseo, New York, USA

Abstract:

This paper analyzes the administrative and legal infrastructure in which media genres in India evolved, with a focus on television (Doordarshan) through approximately 1991, when governmental monopoly of the airwaves was ended by the advent of satellite and cable technologies. Doordarshan was predicated on modernization and development communications paradigms that rendered television a powerful tool for state-led efforts in nation-building. Analysis of the Government of India’s laws and policies regarding electronic media provides insight into the concrete realities, rather than professed goals, of these attempts in the context of phenomenal class disparities, cultural pluralism, and multilingualism. The unintended consequences of this governmental media monopoly included the politicization of news programming; the implication of Doordarshan in the rise of communal politics; increasing consumerism; and exacerbation of regional anti-Centre sentiments. Based on archival data; memoirs; government documents; and numerous interviews with politicians, television officials, producers, advertisers, and legal experts, I demonstrate how the development communications paradigm rationalized a governmental television monopoly that was politicized, centralized, and hierarchical, creating a widening gap between government rhetoric and programming realities. The result has been a series of lost opportunities, in which Doordarshan undermines its greatest strengths: its wide reach, greater than that of any transnational broadcaster; its public, rather than commercial, rationale; and its extensive infrastructure that, unlike any satellite channel, could contextualize programming for local and regional informational, educational, and language needs. ________________________________________________________________________ * This paper has been prepared for preliminary discussion at the International Communications Association preconference on India and Communications Studies, 19-20 May 2009, Chicago, IL, USA. Thanks are offered to the American Institute for Indian Studies, which sponsored my early research, and to the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia and the Center for Global Communications Studies, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, for organizing this preconference collaboration. Address for communications: Victoria L. Farmer, Asst. Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, 2 Welles Hall, SUNY–Geneseo, NY 14454 USA. Email: [email protected]

Victoria FARMER ICA Preconference DRAFT

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Introduction This article provides historical context regarding governance of media in India, laying the

groundwork for subsequent work that focuses on communications in India following the

monumental changes brought about by technological innovations beginning in the early

1990s, such as cable television and international satellite communications. By this time,

India had staked a claim as a major global power in part because of its technological

expertise, but that faced questions of economic development and deepening of

democratic institutions characteristic of new states. I focus on one specific arena of state

action, government responses to evolving communication technologies, specifically

through close examination of independent India’s response to the advent of television.

I take an historical approach, beginning with the colonial endeavor to control

telegraph communication as a tool of governance, followed by analysis of the evolution

of legal and administrative infrastructures governing media technologies in India, from

telegraphs, to radio, and then to television. I examine the institutional structures and

policies under which new technologies arose, the developmental goals the government of

India argued that television would help to attain, and the unintended consequences for the

political and social role of television after the incomplete implementation of these

development strategies.

This focus on the institutionalization of nascent media technologies illuminates

questions in the study of India that transcend limited disciplinary or doctrinal strictures.

For example, the linkages between governance and participation are all too often

overlooked in research initiatives that focus on either the local, village level or the

macropolitical, state or national, level. Similarly, issues regarding domestic political


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initiatives and manipulations are all too often lost in studies that focus on international

disparities in technological development or that privilege the cultural content of media

expressions (and the deconstruction thereof) without adequate consideration of the legal

and administrative infrastructures through which such expression occurs.

This analysis also contributes to the growing body of research that bridges the

1947 divide in the subcontinent and the parallel bifurcation of scholarship between

historians and other social scientists. This historical approach highlights continuities

between the colonial and independent periods that may be less apparent in other

methodological or disciplinary analyses of contemporary India. Post-World War II

scholarship on India, through the vagaries of academic organization and disciplinary

divides, has often over-emphasized 1947 as a watershed. For example, in the first decades

of post–World War II scholarship on India, historians tended to study the colonial period,

while political scientists tended to focus on the politics of independent India. Some

notable exceptions exist in which political scientists have carefully examined the

preindependence antecedents of the postindependence institutions they analyze (e.g.

Frankel 1978, Jalal 1995), and recent trends in social science theory have helped to

balance this overly sharp dichotomization, but close examination of political institutions

further helps to detail the precise linkages between these two periods.

Such case studies demonstrate that India’s political institutions often share a

common origin in concepts, policies and laws from the latter half of the nineteenth century,

rather than from postindependence initiatives. For example, radio and television continue to

be governed on laws originating from the 1885 Telegraph Act (Farmer, 2000); R.K.

Raghavan (2000) notes that laws regarding the police rest upon the Police Act of 1861; and


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Rajeev Dhavan (2000) examines the colonial codification of Indian law and its later effects

on jurisprudence. This is not to make a deterministic argument, but simply to point out that

such studies show how the colonial legacy shaped, and sometimes constrained, the range of

political possibilities for reconstruction of independent India’s institutions of governance.

My emphasis on issues of governance leads me to focus on the electronic media,

telegraph, radio, and television, because this is where the thorniest issues regarding

democratic practice have arisen in India. This is because the evolution of policies

regarding the press followed a very different trajectory than did that of television policy.

While a full discussion is outside the scope of this study, one major point requires

attention. A relatively free, privately held and dynamic press has a long, rich history in

India dating from the importance of newspapers in the freedom struggle. From

independence the role of the press in creating a new nation was debated publicly, and

though examples of restrictions on the press are abundant (particularly during the

Emergency; see, for example, Sorabjee 1977), the existence of a free press is a dominant

refrain throughout India’s political culture, and attempts at restriction are widely greeted

with suspicion and resistance. Television policies did not evolve within this broad

political discourse regarding cultural hegemony, independence, and democracy, but

instead arose more as the result of technological faits accomplis over the course of more

than three decades. Television did not originate in the context of struggle against

centralized political control, but instead evolved within the institutional structures of an

independent Central government whose legitimacy rested in part on promises that it

would direct technology for development. Television originally arose more as a partner

with centralized authority than as part of the struggle against it. Public debate over the


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role of television, reaching beyond the relatively small group of people directly involved

in the industry, did not occur until after the Emergency and again more forcefully with

the campaign for the 1989 Lok Sabha election.

Similarly, though the history of Indian cinema since independence is replete with

examples of producers’ struggles in clearing the Central Board of Film Censors and

concerns about the availability of training and materials, the relationship between the film

industry and the Government of India is much more complex and nuanced than is that of

television. Cinema evolved through a more decentralized and initially less capital-

intensive technological climate than did television, and was regarded more as

entertainment for which censorship served as a check than as a centralized mechanism for

inculcation of political culture. When the Central Board was created in 1952, it was seen

not so much as an infringement of producers’ rights as a vast improvement on the

structure of censorship imposed by the British. The Indian Cinematographic Act of 1918

had reserved censorship for the provincial governors, outside the control of the provincial

legislative councils. Censorship was not uniform across provinces, and within provinces

often came under the de facto control of the police, clearly more concerned with security

and control than with artistic expression in the context of the freedom struggle (Chatterji

1987: 32-38). The force for growth of cinema was more market-based than was that of

television, and control over content was more fragmented and localized.

Regulation of the electronic media evolved in a very different context. The

genealogy of centralized television administration is rooted in the colonial history of the

1885 Telegraph Act, and can be traced through adoption in independent India’s

Constitution of principles from the 1935 Government of India Act. Administration of


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television is constitutionally reserved for the Centre, the national government in New

Delhi, rather than for the states. Though the Constitution of India delegates control of

“communications” to the states, communications at that time was construed as including

bridges, ferries and roads, but not broadcast media. Instead, “posts and telegraphs . . . and

other like forms of communication,” including television, are constitutionally reserved

for the Centre (Constitution of India, Seventh Schedule). The capital-intensive nature of

television and the early structure of governmental licensing and control rendered

television, more so than many other forms of media, an important tool for political ends.

From the mid-1980s, with the creation of an unprecedented television hardware

infrastructure, until the early 1990s, when international satellite transmissions entered

Indian airwaves, the government of India held a virtual monopoly over electronic media

broadcasting to a geographically large, ethnically diverse and new democracy. This

unique period in the history of broadcasting media thus provides important conceptual

access to political processes of state formation, nation building, assertion of sovereignty,

and political adjustments to global forces.

The Development Communications Paradigm

Indian television (Doordarshan, or vision from afar) thus emerged in a legal

infrastructure dating to the colonial period, which emphasized state control and

centralization. After independence, legitimacy of this structure was lent by theories of

modernization and development prevailing in the early post–World War II years.

Between the first broadcast in 1959 and the end of the1980s, Indian television had been

constructed as a large-scale national network, rife with contradictions paralleling those


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inherent to the larger project of constructing a new state. Though a rhetorical

commitment to “development” served as the guiding principle of the state-funded

television industry, tangible developmental rewards proved elusive. This paradigm, and

its adoption by Indian political leaders, thus merits brief explication.

Social theorists of the 1920s and 1930s optimistically linked mass media and social

engineering—for instance, a 1936 League of Nations convention examined the potential of

broadcasting for international understanding—and propaganda during World War II

powerfully solidified the belief, and fear, that mass media could transform societies (Zivin

1994). In the years after World War II, many social scientists, aid agencies, and officials

in newly independent states heralded the central role communications systems could play

in the economic, social and political development processes of states formed from former

colonies. Development was defined variously, for example, as a process of structural

differentiation and specialization (Smelser 1964; Levy 1967), secularization with an

egalitarian ethos (Coleman 1968), the passing of traditional social relations (Lerner 1958)

or the inculcation of psychological adaptation to modernity (McLelland 1961); but all of

these definitions rested, at least implicitly, on sustained economic growth as the indicator

par excellence of development (Rostow 1956), and the assumption that the outcome of

the development process is societies resembling Western archetypes.

Mass media could play a role in this process. It could compensate for resource

shortages hindering development, imparting education cheaply to create the body of

trained personnel required for both industrial and agricultural development (Schramm

1963; 1967), and speed the adoption of new production techniques (Rogers 1962).

Multilingual broadcasting, it was hoped, could overcome difficulties in disseminating


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information in multilingual states. In addition, communications could foster values of a

“civic culture,” encouraging shared political values instrumental to the development of

the “nation” part of the “nation-state” equation. Thus, Almond and Verba included

“exposure to the media of communication” among the pre-requisites for the development

of a civic culture in new states (1963: 503-504), and Deutsch noted that “a decisive factor

in national assimilation or differentiation was found to be the fundamental process of

social mobilization which accompanies the growth of markets, industries, and towns, and

eventually of literacy and mass communication” (1953, 1966: 188). Early optimism

regarding the developmental outcomes of mass media was enhanced by empirical studies,

such as the Harvard University Project on Social and Cultural Aspects of Development

(HUPSCAD). This study found a significant positive correlation between exposure to

mass media and indicators of individual modernity, leading Inkeles and Smith to state

that “the media of mass communications were a truly independent force in shaping men's

modernity” (1974: 149; Mukherjee 1979, one of the very few researchers within India

working within this paradigm, also used the HUPSCAD data).

Building from this theoretical foundation, many involved in development

projects, including aid officials and planners in newly independent governments, began to

see promotion of communications systems as crucial to national development. In short,

mass communications could serve as a low-cost means to overcome obstacles to the

“take-off stage” of growth. Also, many welcomed the promotion of communications

systems as a strategy for development because of the seeming political neutrality of

communications technology (Hornik 1988: introduction). It was easy to achieve

consensus on such vague goals as “education” and “agricultural development,” and


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attainment of these goals, it was thought, could be hastened through the application of

mass media.

Many pilot communications projects were thus implemented in the early post-war

years, often in conjunction with Western aid programs. The main goal of these early

projects was often to provide technical solutions to problems in broader development

schemes. For example, maximizing agricultural benefits available from new seed strains

required providing farmers with information, and use of radio extension programs was

seen as a way to promote new agricultural practices. Similarly, education was identified

as a broad development goal, and the first television broadcast in India, in 1959, was an

experiment to beam educational programming to Delhi schools. These small-scale

experiments, predicated on the development communications paradigm, were

implemented with the often implicit assumption that expansion of local economic

development projects—whether through diffusion of innovation, demonstration effects,

or more elaborate and far-reaching technologies—would lead to broad-based economic

development. The mechanisms by which the narrow scope of many of these early

projects was to translate into broader developmental goals, however, were often

optimistic and undertheorized. These experimental projects tested the practicality of

using communications technology in diverse settings facing such basic problems as lack

of electricity or climates inhospitable to delicate machinery. Overcoming these technical

limitations often, by default, became the primary focus of these projects. Despite

considerable investments in communications technology and expertise, it became clear

that even these projects led to limited results in terms of economic growth, and

sometimes led to negative unintended outcomes. There was a feeling that “too often,


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information was being thrown at problems that were defined by lack of resources, not

lack of knowledge” (Hornik 1988: xi).

Disparities between goals and outcomes in early development communications

projects were partially due to ambiguous notions of what “development” entails a debate

that has continued in subsequent scholarship. For example, Tariq Banuri calls for more

nuanced, culturally and environmentally sensitive notions of development (1990), Jayant

Lele notes that the cause of shifting definitions of development relates as much to

ideological crises in the West as to developmental crises in the East (Lele 1993), and

Amartya Sen has eloquently argued that development must entail the expansion of

individual’s capabilities and freedoms (1999). The genealogy of communications

research that formed the theoretical underpinnings of communications policies of the

early Indian state, however, is traced more directly by returning to the development

communications paradigm.

Here it is helpful to distinguish between two disparate types of development often

collapsed within that paradigm, which I generalize into two broad categories, “material”

and “national.” By material, I refer to those indicators of development which, through the

exigencies of implementation and ease of empirical validation, became the substance of

specific development projects, such as programs for agricultural extension and public

health. National development, in this discussion, refers to the notion that development

entails the supersession of supposedly primordial social relations on the part of

individuals to identification with a broader notion of the “modern,” as represented by a

conflation of the nation, the state, and the civitas. This latter conception closely

approximates what Benedict Anderson terms “official nationalism” (2006, chapter six).


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This distinction was not prevalent in the discourse of development communications; the

concepts were often conflated. Both, however, lent themselves all too easily to

interpretations and implementation that privilege top-down control and elite-driven goals.

The Days of Radio

The first television transmission in India, in 1959, was certainly novel for its use

of a new broadcasting technology. Although television was new to India, by 1959

broadcasting already had a long history in India, going back to the early days of radio,

and before that to telegraphs. The emergence of television did not necessitate the

wholesale creation of new broadcasting policies, ideas about cultural transmission, or

schemata for the structure and expansion of broadcasting networks. Instead, the

introduction of television occurred within the contours of the structure, administration,

and concepts regarding the electronic media that had already evolved around radio, which

emphasized national development (or subjugation) and centralized control. To begin an

examination of Indian television with the first broadcast in 1959 would thus obscure the

ways in which television broadcasting was both impelled and constrained by a system of

ideas and policies already in place. As David Lelyveld eloquently notes:

Broadcasting has long existed in India as an institution both as a specific and monolithic formal organization and as a ‘discourse,’ a set of assumptions, conceptual constraints and logical connections. Emerging in the last two decades of British rule, broadcasting can stand as one of the last instances of a long history of British efforts to transfer their own institutions armies and police, bibles and churches, tax collectors and judges, schools and colleges, elections and legislatures to India. Each of these institutions has a complicated history of British intention and reluctance, Indian initiative and resistance, and unanticipated consequences. . . Routine procedures, the definition of roles in a bureaucracy, recruitment of personnel, concepts of authority and control, even typologies of programming and styles of presentation were all based


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upon well-established previous experience. . . The transfer of power from a colonial regime to a democracy did not substantially change that condition. (1990: 42-43)

Radio clubs began in Calcutta and Bombay in 1923. These clubs had received

temporary sanction for transmissions while various offices of the Government of India

(GOI) undertook lengthy study pursuant to the formation of policies to govern this new

technology. The first radio station, in Pittsburgh, US, had opened in 1920, and the first

regular broadcasts in England began in only in 1922. The British Indian Government had

few established procedures to govern the emerging technology, and designed policy

reactively, in consultation with officials grappling with the same issues in Britain.

The emergence of radio as an issue requiring regulation had been brought to the

attention of the Government of India in 1922 by the Director General, Posts &

Telegraphs, in the Department of Industries and Labour, but it was not until 1925 that the

Government issued a press communiqué indicating that the GOI was prepared to grant a

license to private enterprise for the provision of radio broadcasting in India.

Requirements for this license stipulated, among other things, that the majority of the

Directors were to be residents of British India; and that the Company was to inaugurate

broadcasting in areas to be agreed on by the government. The final form of the

communiqué did not accept the recommendations of Mr. M.N. Joshi, who had suggested

that provisions should be made for employment and training of Indians (Luthra 1986:

21), though the history of early radio shows that while some of the highest positions,

particularly those requiring advanced technical skills, were filled from Britain, many

prominent positions were filled by Indians (see, for example, ibid.: 116-126). In addition,

the communiqué specified that, regarding broadcasting stations, the Government of India

could “ take over or operate these or impose a complete censorship or close these down in


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times of emergency, impose complete or partial prohibition or pre-censorship either

generally or specifically at any time, issue any special or general restrictions as regards

matter which may or may not be broadcasted or as to the persons who may or may not

broadcast, [and] specify sources from which news and information in the nature of news

my be obtained and the times of broadcasting the same…” (Luthra 1986: 22-23).

In September 1926, the Indian Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) signed an

agreement to undertake broadcasting, under the General Managership of Eric Dunstan of

the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and with the Director of Wireless, Posts and

Telegraphs holding the required ex-officio government position on the Board of

Directors. Since telegraph technology had been coupled with posts since the 1920s, under

the Industries and Labour Department, references to new “wireless” technologies were

passed to Posts and Telegraphs, which by default became the governmental office

concerned with broadcasting and predicated regulation on the 1885 Telegraph Act.

While the draft agreement to issue a license to IBC had included the appointment

of a Censor by each local government, the exact nature of programming to be broadcast

had not been clarified. With the intensification of the non-cooperation movement in the

1930s, the Foreign Secretary to the Government of India urged that, as in England, in all

normal circumstances political speeches should be completely banned from broadcasting.

The Industry and Labour Department sent out a letter requesting input from provincial

governments, which outlined the dilemma:

In view of the practice established in the U.K. whereby normally all political speeches and controversial matter are excluded, the Government of India are of opinion that the policy of permitting political matter to be broadcasted in India requires careful reconsideration. . . the Government of India expressed the opinion that it would be undesirable to prohibit the broadcasting of political matter such as speeches by leading politicians, as


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such prohibition would reduce the value of political and propaganda matter which would be broadcasted on behalf of government. . . On the other hand there are arguments which deserve serious consideration against the free use of broadcasting stations for the dissemination of political views and ideas… In the first place there is the example of U.K. where it appears to have been recognised from the beginning that these controversial subjects should be excluded from broadcasting programmes… It might appear that the reasons for the prohibition of such matter are stronger in India where political ideas and balance are less well developed. . . As broadcasting has already begun (in Bombay and Calcutta) the issue of any orders on these matters is a matter of urgency. (Luthra 1986: 42)

The notion that India was not developed enough to allow broadcasting autonomy became a

cyclical refrain in Indian politics; Minister of Information and Broadcasting Unnikrishnan,

after the 1989 Lok Sabha elections some 63 years later, argued that Doordarshan was not yet

ready for autonomy from government control.

At the end of 1927, the Central Government announced its decision regarding

radio broadcasting, stating that “While the Government of India do not contemplate in

normal course that the government should utilize broadcasting stations for purposes of

making political statements…, this principle is not intended to fetter the discretion of

government in case of special emergencies, and … government must retain the right to

use its powers to disseminate correct information or combat misrepresentation… (Luthra

1986: 43-44).

As it turned out, revenues to the IBC were insufficient to create the hegemonic

broadcasting system desired by the colonial government. What Lionel Fielden, later the

first Controller of Broadcasting in India “conceived to be the business of transmitting

barbaric music on jewelled instruments to a population of Indian princes in the intervals

of holding profound converse with sages of charm and infinite wisdom” did not obtain

widespread popularity, due to both broadcasting skewed to a small Western population


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and the high cost of receivers (Luthra 1986: 32). The GOI took charge, and in 1930 radio

came under the direct control of the Department of Industries and Labour.

The 1935 Government of India Act included lists of subjects that were to be

controlled at the level of the Central government (the Federal Legislative List), at the

level of the provinces (the Provincial Legislative List), or concurrently. If broadcasting

was to be considered educational, according to proposed rules for devolution it would

have come under provincial control. However, a last minute change made broadcasting

policy a subject for the Centre, though the Provinces were to have considerable latitude in

broadcasting (Awasthy 1965: 6-8). The Seventh Schedule, List One, of the Act includes

“posts and telegraphs, including telephones, wireless, broadcasting, and other like forms

of communication” on the Federal Legislative List.

The Later Years of the Freedom Struggle

The inclusion of broadcasting on the list of subjects solely under the Centre in the

1935 Government of India Act was eventually carried over into the Seventh Schedule of

the Constitution of independent India. Within the 1935 provisions for central authority,

however, the Act specifically addressed the rights of the Provinces and Princely States,

creating at least the legal possibility for the creation of a two-tiered, federal and

provincial, system. Provisions for provincial- or princely state-level radio systems were

never fully tested in practice, however, since very few such transmitters were ever set up

by agents other than All India Radio, and AIR itself did not promote such

decentralization. A model from the 1920s had envisioned a decentralized structure,

corresponding to the cultural and linguistic diversity of the subcontinent. Instead of being


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a progressive model for accommodation of localized interests, however, this model was

based on a rejection of even the possibility of creating a national system, since it

questioned the very existence of an Indian national culture—to think otherwise would be

to accept the legitimacy of the growing nationalist movement (Zivin 1998). By 1936,

however, even such a conservative decentralized models was discounted, and All India

Radio was consolidated in a unitary, centralized structure The few remaining private

radio clubs that continues to operate after the formation of the IBC were not financially

viable, and either requested that All India Radio (as the ISBS came to be called in 1936)

take them over in the face of bankruptcy, or voluntarily ceased broadcasting when a more

powerful AIR transmitter began to serve the area, or were incorporated into AIR with the

integration of the Princely States in 1950. The only involuntary incorporations appear to

have been in Hyderabad and Aurangabad, where radio transmission was taken over as

“police actions” after the Nizam's administration had claimed independence and began to

air “external services,” (Awasthy 1965: 4-5) and in Goa when India took over control

from the Portuguese in 1961 (Luthra 1986: 78).

A number of features regarding radio broadcasting emerged in the final decades

of the Raj, in addition to those codified in the 1935 Act, which later also characterized

television broadcasting. One was the creation of a broadcasting infrastructure that tended

to favor urban over rural areas, and to grant primacy to Delhi. By its nature, transmission

is technologically simplest and most economical per-capita for urban areas. H.L. Kirke,

who came to India in 1936 from the BBC as Chief Engineer of AIR, argued that this bias

could be overcome, since licensing fees collected from urban centers could offset the

costs of rural broadcasting (Luthra 1986: 85). In the face of growing Indian nationalism


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and the creation of provincial assemblies, however, the GOI's perceived need for control

weighed against decentralization. Nearly forty years later, the Satellite Instructional

Television project (SITE) of 1975-76 was designed explicitly to serve rural audiences,

but even this pioneering project was not institutionalized in subsequent broadcasting

structures.

The concept of “community listening sets,” bestowal of reception sets to

impoverished populations, also dates to this period before independence. During the

colonial period, provision of the sets was left to the provincial governments. After

independence, as part of the first Five Year Plan, the central government agreed to

underwrite 50 percent of costs to provincial governments to provide sets, but the

provincial governments remained responsible for maintaining them (Chatterji 1987: 46).

Problems encountered in this scheme were also found in later projects to provide

community TV sets. These included an abject shortage of sets to cover the approximately

three-quarters of India's population residing in rural areas; lack of clarity and bureaucratic

infighting regarding responsibility for provision and maintenance of the sets, particularly

between central and regional governmental offices; and logistic, technical and social

difficulties in the placement of sets, particularly since minimal power and

weatherproofing requirements often meant that the sets were placed with a minor

government official or village leader who was able to exert influence to prevent segments

of the audience, based on divisions such as caste, gender, or religion, from access to

transmissions.

This period also saw the creation of regularized news services. The Central News

Organisation was created in 1937. Discussion of the possibility of each station preparing


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its own news scripts was scrapped in favor of preparation of scripts in Delhi, for

retransmission by other stations, “in the interests of centralised control and of economy”

(Chatterji 1987: 47). Lelyveld (1990: 47) has shown that this centralization of news

broadcasting was related to the provincial elections resulting from the 1935 Act: “… the

British authorities had decided that it was essential to keep broadcasting out of the hands

of the popular state governments that were to be elected… In order to control news

broadcasts and to determine who might speak and what they might not say, broadcasting

became a highly centralized affair, closely tied to Delhi and a few provincial capitals.”

AIR developed news-gathering capabilities very gradually, and it was not until 1953 that

news broadcasts originating at regional stations complemented central broadcasts

(Chatterji 1987: 47). Broadcasting in regional languages and news gathering capabilities

increased exponentially after this time, but the general system of either overt censorship

through Delhi or self-censorship at regional levels to prevent this direct control remained

largely in place throughout the years that the Centre held a monopoly over the airwaves.

This general institutional tendency in Indian broadcasting to view news reporting as most

efficiently handled from the Centre, in terms of technology, economy, and especially

control, originates from this colonial context, and alternate proposals were relegated to

oppositional or marginal status.

The use of Indian broadcasting to counter external threats also dates to the period

of radio in British India, with the beginning of Pashto broadcasting to Afghanistan in

1939 and the creation of institutional structures, partly outside of AIR, for external

broadcasting during World War II. The majority of external broadcasts were under the

control of the Far Eastern Bureau of the British Ministry of Information, shared only


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nominally with AIR (Luthra 1986: 128); programming for American troops was handled

directly by Americans; and broadcasts for populations of the Indian diaspora living in

Southeast Asia but speaking Indian languages (mainly Tamil) were handled by the office

of Indian Political Warfare (Chatterji 1987: 48). The extent of external broadcasting

decreased after the war, but did continue under a separate administrative division of AIR,

External Services, created in 1949.

World War II served as the impetus for a number of other changes within radio.

Internally, transmission hours were extended, and news bulletins in regional languages were

added to the English, Hindustani and Bengali broadcasts. Censorship came under the

purview of the newly created Regulation for the Control of Broadcasting during War.

Transcripts had to be prescreened by the Controller of Broadcasting for news, and by the

Provincial Governments for other transmissions, and “cut-out” switches were provided for

live transmissions. In 1941 a new Department of Information and Broadcasting was created

(Chatterji 1987: 44), and included a section on “Counter Propaganda and Monitoring,”

which had been formed from the Intelligence Section of the General Staff (Luthra 1986:

133). After independence this department became the Ministry of Information and

Broadcasting, the institutional home of AIR and later Doordarshan.

In addition to these institutional developments, the British period from 1930 to

1947, along with the first few years of independence, included the evolution of a number

of issues concerned with what I have termed “national” development. These issues are by

nature somewhat diffuse, yet very important in that they shaped subsequent policy

discourse about broadcasting in India.


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The most important is the development of the notion that broadcasting matters,

that the content of broadcasting is fundamental to the formation of political culture and

the maintenance of political control. This notion received its greatest fillip, in British

India as elsewhere, from Nazi propaganda efforts. Luthra points out that “propaganda

came in loud and clear from Germany and elsewhere, and was widely listened to, though

not very openly”; the German program “Lord How Haw” was particularly popular. The

British greatly feared the power of Axis broadcasting, particularly after the Japanese

advance, and the BBC began a Hindustani service despite the editor of the New

Statesman's concern that Indians preferred “the racy style of Berlin to the British

solemnity… The Germans who have made a special study of India, well understand how

to meet Indian tastes and susceptibilities.” By 1943 the Axis powers were broadcasting to

India over 15 hours of programming daily, in fourteen Indian languages. Though within

British India the ban on internal political speeches was largely upheld (and largely

unnecessary, as the most prominent leaders of the Quit India movement had been jailed),

the GOI did undertake programs “to explain the allied cause, the evils of Nazism and

Fascism, encourage recruitment to the army, educate people in air raid precautions and

cut down on inessential consumption.” Broadcasts by rulers of Princely States were

encouraged, mainly because “the British rulers seemed to attach much importance to

these in the belief that with ‘popular’ leaders unwilling to associate themselves with the

war, the average Indian's sense of feudal loyalty to the Rajas and Nawabs could thus be

exploited to good effect.” In addition, “most educated Indians being suspect, great

emphasis was placed on getting high-placed men with proven loyalties, leaders of certain

religious minorities and others sympathetic to the British ‘cause.’” Stations were also


21

requested to prepare programs on various regiments in the Indian army, but this plan

never came to fruition because “it was seen that the ‘exploits’ of these Units were largely

against old Indian rulers, or tribes in the North Western Frontier Provinces or in other

‘actions’ which did not reflect very well on what the British did in order to enlarge their

Empire and the area of domination.” In response to Axis broadcasts, the British relied

heavily on broadcasting to shape political thought; and although there was little proof that

it had the intended effect on political culture, the belief in this cause-effect relationship

had profound consequences for both the structure and content of broadcasting.

(Quotations from Luthra 1986: chapter 14).

In addition to the formative notion that broadcasting shapes political culture and

so can shape political outcomes, a number of other issues important to national

development in broadcasting arose during this period, mainly having to do with

“standardization” in one form or another. For example, the first attempt to describe the

listening audience statistically occurred during World War II, when 13,000 people were

interviewed to determine the credibility they gave to the BBC as compared to Berlin

News. It was then suggested that Professor Mahalinobis, of the Indian Statistical Institute,

Calcutta, and later noted for his work on the Second Five-year Plan, should oversee

“mass observation” of the radio audience, and that an office should be set up for

permanent observation of these trends (Luthra 1986: 135). Though either little came of

these efforts, or at least little remains in the historical record, this desire to establish

empirically the extent of governmental broadcasting efforts is interesting both as a

culmination of developmental efforts in the Raj (see Ludden 1992 for a discussion of this

empiricist developmentalism), and for its foreshadowing of future attempts at statistical


22

descriptions of influence. Although an Audience Research Unit was later established

within Doordarshan, regular audience research incorporating statistically significant pan-

Indian (albeit urban-based) sampling came into effect only through the logic of

consumerism, when statistics on television audiences were compiled for sale privately

mainly to advertising companies after the 1983 decision to allow commercial sponsorship

of programming.

A second issue of standardization involved timing. “The Indian Listener,” a

subscription-based magazine for radio aficionados, faced the problem of listing timings

for radio broadcasts. In 1936, the publication put subscribers on notice that it would adopt

“Indian Standard Time,” and listeners would have to add 30 minutes to the standard

schedule for proper timings for the new station in Delhi, and subtract 24 minutes to adapt

to Calcutta timings. The immediacy and simultaneity of broadcasting rendered time a

national issue in a way even the famed railways had not accomplished, and foresaw

crucial junctures for future broadcasts in which timing of announcements would be

strongly contested, as, for example, when media officials weighed the public's “right to

know” against fears of bloodshed and retaliation following the announcement of

tragedies such as assassinations or riots.

The most intractable standardization issue has been creation of an elusive

“national” language. The new state faced issues of the standardization of language for the

new “nation” as early as the announcement of independence. English speeches were

broadcast live by a group that included Nehru and Mountbatten, and were to be followed

by vernacular translations read by AIR newsreaders. Nehru chose to read the Hindi

translation himself, but


23

when he went through the first few lines of the translation he was visibly annoyed, and almost threw the papers away. He spoke, with the English script in front, improvising the translation as he went along. AIR should have known better than to use, in an excess of linguistic zeal, an academic style of Hindi for the translation, instead of the natural spoken word mixture of simple Hindi and Urdu which Nehru always used very effectively when addressing people (Luthra 1986: 169).

This “simple Hindi and Urdu,” or Hindustani, developed as a language common to much

of the northern sub-continental regions, though it could be written in Arabic script or

Devanagari and drew vocabulary from both Persian/Arabic sources and from Sanskrit.

Administration of Hindustani, however, proved to be anything but simple, as can be seen

by convoluted processes of lexicon compilation and charges of favoritism in

contestations of broadcasting language (Lelyveld 1990: 48-51). The communal overtones

inherent to the relative proportions of Urdu or Hindi words and grammar structures in

Hindustani made the language of broadcasting from Delhi an arena for competing

cultural claims. Charges of pro-Urdu bias were particularly prevalent after A.S. Bokhari,

a Muslim Urdu poet, succeeded Fielden as Controller of Broadcasting in 1940 (Luthra

1986: 255-57). At partition, Bokhari joined the Pakistan Information and Broadcasting

Department to set up Radio Pakistan Headquarters. By 1949, Hindi replaced the word for

Hindustani in AIR programme journals (Chatterji 1987: 47), and a form of Hindi drawing

largely on Sanskritized vocabulary became the language of broadcasting in much of

northern India (Lelyveld 1990: 51).

By 1956, Akashvani supplanted ‘All India Radio’ as the appellation for radio in

all but English broadcasts. Hindi for “voice from the sky,” (or, as Chatterji (1987: 43)

would more romantically have it, “cosmic voice”), the use of the name Akashvani both

symbolized the hegemony of Hindi in radio broadcasting and aptly characterized a


24

disembodied, authoritative and overarching presence not unlike, and in face related to,

the epiphenominal yet hierarchical presence of the central sarkar (government) in much

of India's rural hinterlands.

Since the 1930s the number of regional languages in which radio broadcasting

was available had increased, but this was within the context of a highly centralized

system in which English texts were translated in Delhi into vernaculars, and then

transmitted from there. This pattern foreshadowed later developments in television, in

which regional language programming was clearly subordinated to national broadcasts

transmitted from Delhi. With the advent of national television programming, a

Sanskritized Hindi, along with English, became the languages for India-wide broadcasts

and prompted a renewed round of cultural and linguistic contestations.

By the time television technologies became available, the institutional structure of

broadcasting had already precluded decentralization of technology and policy as a

solution to multilingualism in favor of the provision of vernacular transmissions or

administrative approval for regional program production through Delhi. Television, a

more expensive form of communication than radio, faced even greater constraints to

central provisions for regional programming. Also, by that time the policy consensus,

reflected in the Constitution, on the need to promote national integration predisposed

policy makers to a greater willingness to broadcast in Hindi and English in the hopes that

this would foster evolution of Hindi as a national language. This did not adequately

foresee the degree to which Hindi (much more so than English) would be opposed,

sometimes violently, in non-Hindi speaking regions (which account for at least two-thirds

of India).


25

Questions regarding determination of cultural propriety also came into question,

initially surrounding broadcasts by Indian singers, presaging many later debates about

what constitutes “Indian” culture and what aspects of this “culture” should be

disseminated through the electronic media. For example, the Minister of Information and

Broadcasting in the Interim Government, and thus the first Minister of Information and

Broadcasting of the independent state of India, Sardar Vallabbhai Patel, chose to make a

stand: a ban was placed on all musicians “whose private life was a public scandal”

(Luthra 1986: 105). This “clean-up” action “was regarded by some as a measure directed

against Muslim women artists who had been traditionally in majority in this profession in

North India” (Luthra 1986: 162). AIR, under the ministership of Sardar Patel, went on to

oversee standardization of the national anthems “Jana Gana Mana” and “Vande

Mataram,” supplying gramophone companies with accepted definitive versions and

issuing them with instructions not to put any other versions on the market. During the

selection process the Station Director of Trichinopoly warned that linguistic separatism in

South India could be exacerbated unless a song by Subramanya Bharati was included as a

national anthem. The suggestion appears to have made little impact in Delhi, but the

Government of Madras did issue a note that all schools in Tamil Nadu were to sing a

Bharati song after “Jana Gana Mana” (see Luthra 1986: chapter 19). This foreshadowed

the later refusal of the Tamil Nadu government to agree to broadcast Hindi news as part

of the televised National Programme from Delhi. The attempt to use media policies to

promote a “national,” and so “Indian,” culture, and the contestation of these cultural

reifications, dates to the first moments of independence and continues to the present.


26

Although television was not envisioned at the writing of the Indian Constitution,

certain constitutional provisions (many of which resulted from the colonial and

nationalist legacies discussed above) formed the basis for subsequent television policies.

The Constitution, which came into effect on January 26, 1950, incorporated many

features of the 1935 Government of India Act, despite Nehru's misgivings that under the

British these provisions had resulted in a “slave” act. As noted, both the 1935 Act and the

1950 Constitution divided legislative duties according to lists for Central, provincial, and

concurrent jurisdiction. Both the 1935 Act and the 1950 Constitution placed broadcasting

under the Central government (the Federal Legislative List of the Act, the Union List of

the Constitution). The only explicit constitutional provision regarding broadcasting, then,

was its inclusion on the Union List of subjects. The Constitution does guarantee a number

of judicable “fundamental rights,” including “freedom of speech and expression” (Article

19 [1]). In addition, the Constitution posits a set of nonjudicable “directive principles,”

including the principle that the State should provide for the educational and economic

interests of the weaker sections of the population (Hardgrave and Kochanek 1986: 47-63;

Constitution Parts III and IV).

At the time of independence, then, many of the institutional features of the

structure and administration that would characterize electronic broadcasting in

independent India were already in place. The major shift in the discourse of broadcasting

policy was the addition of the notion, codified in the Directive Principles of the

Constitution, that the state should promote the economic and social development of its

citizens. However, the onset of major obstacles to nation building in the immediate post-

independence years—including war and communal riots—overshadowed explicit


27

linkages between this developmental stance and media policies. The planning process

initially paid little attention to broadcasting, while the evolution of radio continued

mainly through the momentum of continued expansion and external exigencies.

The Early Years of Independence

Broadcasting was not a prominent focus of policy debates during the early years

of independence, when discussions focused on the more immediate issues of sovereignty,

internal harmony, and broad issues of political economy. Television was at first

considered too expensive a technology to merit prolonged consideration, and radio

broadcasting evolved according to previously designed plans and procedures. The “fear

of disorder” at independence (Brass 2000), as indeed for most new states in the post-

World War II years, predisposed policy initiatives toward state strength rather than civil

or individual liberties, toward centralization rather than decentralization. Regarding radio

in India, the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, did argue that broadcasting should be

made autonomous from direct central command, but he also indicated that this would

have to be postponed due to the immediate imperatives of political stability.

Television evolved slowly through the mid 1970s, initially through the efforts of a

small group of educators and technicians promoting small-scale experiments in

educational broadcasting, the first of which occurred in Delhi in 1959. In 1964, the

Ministry of Information and Broadcasting appointed a Committee on Broadcasting and

Information Media, the Chanda Committee (1966), to assess radio and television

programming efforts and to suggest policy guidelines. This report, which became


28

available in 1966, argued that expansion of television should be undertaken alongside

that of radio.

More importantly, the Chanda committee began to formulate the argument that

broadcasting could be instrumental to the successful implementation of government

development plans. The prominent scientist Vikram Sarabhai furthered this argument,

saying that if used for development, the cost of creating a broadcasting infrastructure

should be considered a valuable investment with promising returns rather than as simple

overhead (Sarabhai, 1069; 1974). Sarabhai’s vision encouraged India to undertake the

world’s largest development communications experiment, the Satellite Instructional

Television Experiment (SITE) of 1975-76.

There is substantial literature on SITE, in part because the project incorporated a

research component, the Development Education Communications Unit (DECU), housed

in the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and hired an anthropologist, Binod

Agrawal, to document every aspect of the project. For brevity’s sake, only an outline is

provided here; additional information can be found in Agrawal (1978), Agrawal and

Sinha (1986), and Bhatia (1980), and a full explication and interviews with key personnel

is available in Farmer (2003).

SITE used a telecommunications satellite supplied by NASA to broadcast for one

year during 1975-76. Programming was broadcast to 2330 villages, spanning twenty

districts in six states. In addition, relay transmitters broadcast the national program of the

television section of AIR (in Hindi) from Delhi to 355 villages in Kheda district, Gujarat.

The ground segment of the project was coordinated by ISRO, the research and

development organization of the Department of Space, using indigenously produced


29

equipment. Programming, mainly provided by AIR, included science education and other

educational enrichment programs for children, both instructional and recreational

programming for adults specifically designed for SITE, and the national programming

produced by AIR for the kendras (transmission centers) already in place as part of AIR.

SITE was very consciously a model project in development communications, and

in international development generally. The project was developed in close cooperation

with the United Nations, which helped to set up the Experimental Satellite

Communication Earth Station in Ahmedabad. In return, India provided training facilities

for representatives from developing countries. In January 1976, SITE held the “SITE

Winter School,” under the direction of SITE Programme Manager E.V. Chitnis, to

provide training and experience with SITE projects to participants from over a dozen

countries. Topics covered ranged from technical issues to program evaluation design, and

included sessions on teacher training for use of television in classrooms, social analysis

of audiences, and programming for special audiences (Satellite Instructional Television

Experiment: 1976).

The SITE program was considered a success in many respects. First, of course,

was the fact that such a large-scale technical project could be successfully implemented

at all. The medium was enthusiastically accepted by the vast majority of villagers, a

simple finding but one that was in no way guaranteed before the experiment. Audiences

were usually large, except during times such as major festivals or the harvest season, and

multi-jati (subcaste), allaying fears that lower and scheduled castes would be barred from

viewing areas (Agrawal 1978).


30

Evaluations of the success of instructional programming were likewise positive,

though they did indicate some basic constraints and limitations. Adoption of agricultural

innovations resulting from SITE programming, such as modern paddy transplant methods

and multicropping, could be found in all six cluster areas. In the following season, even

more farmers used these techniques, attributed to demonstration effects. Successes in

health and nutrition were less abundant, but Agrawal did find that the programming could

reinforce some practices that were already present. For example, few cases of changes in

traditional methods for cooking grain could be found, despite programming to that end.

But in villages where some scheme already existed for family planning, use of television

programming on this subject did lead to more open discussion and use of health services

by village women. Aspects of SITE geared to elementary education also showed

promising results in some areas. Many teachers felt that visual depictions of science

experiments and concepts facilitated their teaching and their students’ comprehension.

Nonetheless, the SITE experience included a number of problems, many of which

would only be compounded by attempts to expand educational programming to a pan-

Indian level. In addition to hardware difficulties, a number of issues arose regarding the

contextualization of programming, that is, with the provision of programming both

accessible and useful to the target audience. Programming for school children, for

example, often included material that was simply above the heads of younger students.

Also, while students could learn a great deal from visual presentations, they were often

unable to understand the audio portions of the programs, due to poor paradubbing or use

of non-local languages. Language was a serious problem throughout the entire project. It

was found, for example, that even though vast expanses of northern and central India can


31

be broadly characterized as Hindi-speaking, dialects abound, and broadcasts in a

standardized Hindi were not comprehensible to people in such diverse regions as Bihar,

Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. Contextualization not only of language, but of

information, was sometimes found to be a problem. For example, standardized

agricultural information simply cannot meet the needs of a large farming population

facing diverse conditions of soil, climate, and irrigation.

Portions of the national program, particularly recreational programming, were

considered successful. For example, a program called Ek Desh, Anek Pradesh (One

Country, Many States) showed lifestyles of villagers in different regions of India, and

generated significant viewer interest, as did some special events programming, such as

telecasts of Republic Day festivities in New Delhi. These programs often generated a

great deal of post-program discussions by villagers, and were very popular. Notably,

news broadcasts on the national program, in Hindi, were the least effective, in terms of

comprehension and viewer interest, of all SITE programming.

In addition, Agrawal’s study notes distinctions between relatively richer or poorer

people in accepting television programming and innovations portrayed in it, and therefore

recommends that “TV should cater to the needs of poor and landless by treating them as

their prime target audience” (1978: vi). While this is undoubtedly a necessary condition

for the success of development communications projects, however, it is not necessarily

sufficient. Viewers can only act on new developmental information if the social agencies

and material infrastructure exist to enable them to do so.

In short, SITE demonstrated that well-structured media messages could be very

successful in promoting adoption of new practices within development schemes,


32

provided that the broader material and institutional structures for their adoption was in

place. However, this project was not implemented in a context in which successful

material development and infrastructural transformation had already occurred, so that

media had only to publicize methods for consolidating and extending gains possible from

this material base. Instead, the Chanda report had invoked the power of broadcasting to

play a role in creating these transformations in the first place. This proved to be a task too

large for a communications experiment to fulfill. Nehru’s vision of creating pressure for

mobilization from below to achieve social transformation was unlikely to arise from a

highly centralized broadcasting structure that was financially and administratively

dependent on the very social and political forces that had blocked implementation of

development schemes to begin with. Promoting media for development had fostered

creation of expertise, a hardware infrastructure, an ideology of using communications for

development, and a sense of entitlement to media resources on the part of segments of the

population, but it was unable to foster political organization for material development in a

democratic context. These changes in the institution of broadcasting—in both

infrastructure and ideology—created a powerful tool that could not succeed in its

intended results, but paved the way for a number of unintended consequences.

The Emergency and Janata Period

SITE was to have been the exemplar as a model for development (both national

and material, still ideologically conflated); as a transcendent link of the “modern and the

backward”; as an icon of Indian leadership of the nonaligned world; and as a

technological catharsis in the face of irresolute domestic and international economic

disparities. Nonetheless, the SITE project was never institutionalized as a basis for


33

television in India. Politics intervened, and the rhetoric of the Emergency

(constitutionally based provisions for national security imposed during 1975-77)

overshadowed any discussion of the role of developmental communications. In the face

of perceived threats to “national security,” ideals for use of media for either broad

democratic or developmental purposes were lost. Post-Emergency, the Janata

Government was unable to implement significant reforms in media regulation, despite a

significant policy document toward that end, Akash Bharati (Verghese 1978). Indira

Gandhi, on her return to power in 1980, consolidated central control over television and

initiated rapid expansion of television beginning in 1983 in order to create a nation-wide

system.

Early plans to create a communications infrastructure for development had

envisioned a three-tiered system (national, regional and local), which was to culminate in

the SITE program. Partially for reasons of technical simplicity and economic constraint, but

increasingly for reasons of political utility, these goals became diverted. Professor Yash Pal

in fact argues convincingly that given the established network of low-power transmitters, the

economic constraints to decentralization are not prohibitive (personal interview, 9 March

1990). The political sphere after the Nehru years was increasingly characterized by attempts

at consolidation of political power at the highest levels of the Congress Party, and part of

this broader goal included increasing hopes for the role new investments in television

infrastructure could play in implementing the five-year economic plans, and more broadly in

promoting a “national” identity compliant with the political centralization of the early 1970s.

I argue that television emerged as a technological and policy solution to a structural

rift arising from these attempts at consolidating power in the political sphere.


34

Communication from political elites to the masses had occurred, in the context of the

national independence struggle, through the auspices of political parties, most importantly,

of course, the Indian National Congress. As the mechanisms of elite-mass communication

became frayed and increasingly unable to meet growing communication needs as the post-

independence Congress Party faced governance in a competitive electoral context, television

came to be seen as a way to convey political messages directly to the electorate.

The current configuration of television in India thus cannot be explained only

through examination of the availability of new technologies; nor is it, as poorly nuanced

arguments would have it, simply a diffusion process from the West (a prominent

explanation from mainly Western theorists of the time), or a mirror of cultural processes

within India (the revisionist apologia offered by subsequent commentators, largely but

not only politicians). Instead, the structure of Doordarshan is best understood as a

response of the Congress Party, the dominant force in the first decades of independence

(and later of subsequent non-Congress governments) to fears of internal factionalism and

the growing significance of opposition movements. The timely availability of new

technology allowed a plan to circumvent party politics by appealing directly to the

electorate, using the technology of television to reach the voter without relying on the

mobilization of grassroots political participation.

While SITE was underway according to schedule, significant political events

resulted in the nadir of post-independence democratic practice, the Emergency of 1975-77.

Mrs. Gandhi had been a consensus figure after the deaths of her father and the subsequent

Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, but was relegated to the presumably unimportant post

of Minister of Information and Broadcasting. She was not, however, the compliant dynastic


35

figurehead sought by some older Congress powers. By 1969, differences culminated in a

split in the Congress Party. Lok Sabha elections were called in 1971, with Mrs. Gandhi

instituting such populist measures as nationalization of the banks. Anti-Indira unrest

continued to grow in the early 1970s, spurred by economic pressures due to drought and

global oil prices. In Gujarat and Bihar agitations were led by the prominent socialist leader

Jayaprakash Narayan against alleged corruption of local Congress governments (The JP

Movement), and by the mid 1970s a loose coalition of leftist, rightist and regional groups

coalesced in opposition to the Congress (R) and Mrs. Gandhi. In 1975, this ideologically

improbable grouping, the Janata Front, won state elections in Gujarat. Also in June 1975,

Mrs. Gandhi was found guilty in the Allahabad High Court of electoral violations in her

home constituency in the 1971 Lok Sabha elections.

“The Emergency” refers to the period from June 1975 through March 1977 in which

Mrs. Gandhi invoked constitutionally based measures restricting a number of civil liberties

and democratic practices in the name of national security. India had already been under

measures relating to external emergencies that had not been rescinded since the 1971 war

with Pakistan. In 1975 the President signed provisions regarding internal emergency found

in the emergency provisions of the Constitution (Articles 352 through 360), at the request of

the Prime Minister and without the expected procedural consultation with the Cabinet.

During this period, opposition leaders were jailed, often under the draconian

provisions of the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). Mrs. Gandhi’s son,

Sanjay, was given extra-constitutional powers, resulting in such egregious offenses as the

dislocation of thousands through “slum clearance” and coerced sterilizations in the name

of population control.


36

The day the Emergency was proclaimed, newspapers in Delhi found themselves

unable to publish: electricity to the presses had been cut, because “according to Delhi

Electric Supply Undertaking oral instructions were received by them from the Lieutenant

Governor of Delhi that this be done” (White Paper 1977: 8). Subsequent Emergency

provisions and extra-legal acts severely curtailed press freedom through a variety of means,

ranging from the implementation of strict censorship policies to the harassment of

journalists and their families. According to the White Paper on Misuse of Media produced

by the subsequent Janata government, at least 253 journalist were arrested during the

Emergency, including Kuldip Nayar, K.R. Malkani and K.R. Sundara Rajan (White Paper

1977: 5; for Ambassador Nayar’s account of the Emergency see Nayar 1977). During this

time, the Writers & Scholars Educational Trust commissioned a study on the press during

the Emergency by Soli J. Sorabjee, a staunch defender of civil liberties who became

Additional Solicitor General of India after the Emergency. Michael Scammel, Director of

the Trust, noted in the forward that during the Emergency “. . . Three quarters of the Indian

press was muzzled (and the other quarter shut down), foreign correspondents were put under

severe pressure to conform to censorship regulations, and the BBC office in India was even

shut down. At the same time, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of political prisoners

in jail without trial. . .” (Sorabjee 1977: 7). As an indication of the general atmosphere of

fear at the time, and in part because Mr. Sorabjee was then involved in what Scammel

termed a “courageous rearguard action” through litigation against Emergency provisions, it

was originally decided that the book would be published unsigned (ibid), but despite

personal fear and due to the calling for elections signaling the end of the Emergency (and, I


37

might add, considerable personal integrity), the book was published with Sorabjee as author

(personal interview, 18 March 1990).

As Sorabjee documented, on the same day as the Proclamation of Emergency, 26

June 1975, “for the first time in free India precensorship was imposed by promulgating a

Censorship Order. . . under Rule 48 of the Defence of India Rules, 1971.” This stipulated

that no “news, comment, rumour or other report relating to any action taken under certain

provisions of the Defense of India Rules, or any action taken under MISA, could be

published unless it was previously submitted to the Censor (called ‘authorised officer’) for

his scrutiny and his permission was obtained.” Also requiring precensorship, and so in effect

banned, were any reports on “the Emergency, the Presidential Order suspending Habeus

Corpus, the place or conditions of detention of persons arrested under MISA, about the

family planning programme, or about the imposition of Presidential rule in the Indian States

of Tamil Nadu and Gujarat” (1977: 12). The list of subjects on which publication was

prohibited was greatly lengthened through the Prevention of Publication of Objectionable

Matter Act, 1976 (White Paper 1977: v).

Exactly one month after the initial imposition of the Emergency, Mrs. Gandhi

proposed that the “Press Council be abolished, news agencies be fused into one,

advertisement policy be reviewed, housing facilities given to journalists be withdrawn and

foreign correspondents not willing to fall in line be deported.” V.C. Shukla was named

Minister of Information and Broadcasting, replacing I.K. Gujral (who later became Prime

Minister after the 1989 elections). Shukla industriously pursued Mrs. Gandhi’s suggestions.

That regarding the “review” of advertising policy was particularly powerful, since

government notices constituted the bulk of advertising revenues available at that time, the


38

loss of which could easily force a publication into bankruptcy. Similarly crippling were

allocations of newsprint, since newsprint was virtually unavailable outside of government

procurement The private-sector entertainment-focused cinema industry was not so clearly

under direct threat, but the Centre did have near total coercive power over documentary

filmmakers through its allocation of raw filmstock; there were indications of financial

irregularities in the allocation of censorship approval certificates; and even screening of the

American film All the President’s Men, depicting press exposure of the Watergate scandal,

was blocked. (White Paper: v and 83-88).

In addition to such restrictive government pronouncements, a number of influential

publications received notices to submit issues to the government censor. The Indian

Express, as one example, fought this order through the courts. The precensorship order was

withdrawn, but later the newspaper faced a cutoff of electricity to its press in Delhi, and the

nationalized banks refused routine credit facilities. Raj Thapar, Editor of the influential

monthly Seminar, chose to cease publication rather than submit to precensorship (White

Paper: 18-22). Numerous additional examples were brought to light after the Janata Party

won the 1977 elections and published the White Paper on Misuse of Mass Media. The

enquiry committee received forty-five complaints regarding misuse of censorship, including

allegations from such prominent journalists and activists as M.R. Masani, Editor of Freedom

First in Bombay; B.G. Verghese, formerly Chief Editor of The Hindustan Times and Chair

of the Akashvani Commission after the Emergency, during the Janata period), and Nikhil

Chakravarty, longtime Editor of Mainstream who was named Prasar Bharati Board

Chairman in 1997. Despite these courageous examples, however, it must also be noted that

significant sections of the press simply capitulated, undertaking thoroughgoing self-


39

censorship. As the Minister of Information and Broadcasting during the Janata Period (and

later savvy manipulator of the media himself, see chapter six), L.K. Advani, announced to

the press in 1978, “You were asked to bend, but you chose to crawl” (quoted in Shenoy

1998).

While this period was the most authoritarian in India’s history, however, it should

be noted from a comparative perspective that despite anti-democratic maneuvers at this

time, India did not succumb to the praetorianism found in less stable Third World states

at that time, and “in contrast to many other postcolonial dictators . . . Mrs. Gandhi did not

seek to destroy or dismantle all opposition parties or rewrite the constitution. Nor did she

suspend all civil liberties guaranteed under the constitution” (Sil 2000: 326-27). Indeed, the

Emergency ended when Mrs. Gandhi herself called Lok Sabha elections in 1977, albeit in

part because she had so effectively squelched any voices that may have questioned her

assumption of an overwhelming electoral triumph. Most importantly, the fundamentally

democratic ethos of Indian civil society did not crumble under Emergency provisions. As

scholar W.H. Morris-Jones wrote, “The political society of independent India had for nearly

30 years, up to June 1975, been one of remarkable openness and freedom. It was precisely

because these values still mattered to many Indians that even while the ‘Emergency’ and

censorship prevailed, she went out of her way to claim that its rigor was being ‘relaxed.’ For

the same reasons she felt the need for elections to reinforce her legitimacy” (in Sorabjee

1977: 9) A significant number of remarkably stalwart lawyers, journalists and scholars

carried the torch through forbidding circumstances, and oppositional “underground”’

literature was circulated (for a sample, see The Pen in Revolt 1978). In retrospect, India’s

commitment to democracy was in many ways vulcanized through these pressures,


40

particularly with respect to a newly strengthened intolerance of blatant curtailment of press

and media freedoms.

Regardless of these political developments, the SITE project continued as planned

during 1975-76. There was no reason for the Emergency to derail SITE: it had a budgetary

allotment, was of limited scope and entirely under governmental control, did not contain any

explicitly political programming, and all news programming came from Delhi. SITE

personnel later told me that they remembered a representative of the Central Bureau of

Intelligence was sent to SITE, but no workers remembered direct interference and the

director of the Space Applications Centre remembered only that if such a person did visit

SITE, he was completely ignored (personal interviews, Binod Agrawal, 25 February 1990

and Prof. Yash Pal, 9 March 1990). Other than the SITE program, Indian television was at

fledgling stages, and also firmly under central direction. There were still few channels with

only a limited number of programming hours daily. A nationwide network with more than

just limited evening programming was still a decade away. For these reasons, television was

not an issue—or target—as were the print media during the Emergency. Nonetheless, a few

issues do merit mention.

Following a recommendation of the Chanda Committee, the administration of

Doordarshan was separated from that of All-India Radio in 1976. It was not, however,

restructured as an autonomous corporation, which the Chanda Committee considered

necessary for “a broader outlook, greater flexibility, and freedom of action which the

corporate form alone can give” (Chanda 1966: paragraph 779). A broadcasting corporation

wasn’t created until Prasar Bharati was constituted in 1997, and as of the beginning of the

twenty-first century it by no stretch could be considered completely autonomous of Central


41

influence. Though administratively separated, both radio and television became consolidated

as attached departments of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, thus locating the

future of television in Delhi, the political Centre, rather than at the heart of innovative

research, the Development Education Communications Unit in Ahmedabad.

When the Janata coalition came into power after the 1977 elections, it attempted a

thorough investigation of the excesses of the Emergency through a Commission chaired by

J.C. Shah, Retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India (Shah 1978). On her return to

power after the 1980 elections, however, Mrs. Gandhi did everything possible to quash the

report, and very few copies remain. During the Janata interregnum the Shah Commission

was unable to gain the cooperation of key Emergency figures, and widespread institutional

restructuring of institutions that had served the Emergency or been abused by it was

undermined by the rapid collapse of the Janata coalition (see, for example, Dayal and Bose

1977). Similarly, the White Paper on Misuse of the Mass Media was not technically banned,

but was “withdrawn,” amounting to much the same thing (L.K. Advani, personal interview,

8 March 1990).

The Shah Commission Report does document irregularities in the administration of

the electronic media during the Emergency, most notably the requirement by Minister of

Information and Broadcasting V.C. Shukla that AIR personnel translate the Congress Party

Manifesto into the various Indian languages for the 1977 elections (Shah 1978: Volume 2,

1-9). Doordarshan does not appear to have been directly involved but also could not prevent

such use of government resources for party ends. According to the Shah Commission

Report, Doordarshan Director General P.C. Chatterji (who later wrote the first significant


42

analysis of Doordarshan, see Chatterji 1987; 1991), “himself did not relish what was being

done but felt that they were helpless and that they had no choice” (Volume 2: 3).

The Janata Government also undertook planning for reform of the electronic media,

and reiterated the Chanda Commission’s recommendation for granting autonomy to

television in the second major government-sponsored report on broadcasting, Akash

Bharati: The Report of the Working Group on Autonomy for Akashvani [All-India Radio] &

Doordarshan (Verghese 1978) The Working Group, chaired by B.G. Verghese, wrote “We

are of the opinion that all the national broadcasting services should be vested exclusively in

an independent, impartial, and autonomous organisation established by law by Parliament to

act as a trustee for the national interest.’ It added, ‘the autonomy of the corporation and its

independence from government control should be entrenched in the Constitution itself”

(Verghese 1978: Recommendations 9-10). The Janata government was unable to carry out

these recommendations before its fall, however, and so television remained a tool easily

available for misappropriation by the ruling party.

Mrs. Gandhi’s Return

After Indira Gandhi’s electoral comeback in 1980, she had a maximum of five years

to ensure her re-election. Preparations had to be made in the context of increasing political

opposition, both within and outside the Congress Party, and the increasing awareness of

Congress’ inability to promote significant economic development. At this time it was also

clear that coercive practices used during the Emergency would not be tolerated a second

time. Finally, by this time the Congress was no longer capable of serving as the network for

communication between elite and grassroots levels in the way it had before the Emergency,


43

and particularly during the freedom struggle. Facing these difficulties, Mrs. Gandhi had to

find new methods for garnering votes. The surprising success of televising the 1982 Asian

Games sparked inspiration, and she turned to the persuasive potential of television.

By the time of the Asian Games, there were approximately forty transmitters in the

Doordarshan network. Most were relay stations that did not have production facilities, and

many were relatively low-power (100 watt) transmitters in remote, mountainous or border

areas, including Imphal, Shillong, Jammu, and Shimla. Significant expansion, creating a

nearly pan-Indian infrastructure, occurred only after the Asiad.

The major impetus for the growth of Doordarshan was a political decision:

ealizing the enormous potential influence of television, the Indira Gandhi government

decided to embark on a major expansion of television in time for the next scheduled Lok

Sabha elections, due in 1985 (S.S. Gill, personal interview, 8 February 1990). S.S. Gill,

an officer of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) who had overseen the creation of

stadia, roads and other infrastructure for the Asian Games, was appointed Secretary of

Ministry of Information and Broadcasting with responsibility for creating a near pan-

Indian network within a very short timespan. Importation laws were changed to allow

purchase of components necessary for the indigenous production of more viewing sets for

the exponentially growing audience, and educational schemes were launched to train

teams of engineers and technicians. Beginning in July 1983, an 18-month project to

expand the network was sanctioned by the government, with a budget allocation of Rs

680 million (Chatterji 1991: 31).

In early 1983, only about one-quarter of India’s population was within signal range

of a Doordarshan transmitter. While the oft-repeated claim that a new transmitter was raised


44

almost daily in 1984 does not tally with published Doordarshan statistics, most sources

agree that coverage was extended to more than half of the population by mid-1985, and to

three-quarters by 1990. By the end of the twentieth century, according to Doordarshan

statistics, this figure had been raised to eighty-six percent of the population, covering

approximately sixty-eight percent of Indian territory. During the period of Doordarshan’s

airwave monopoly, through the early 1990s, available statistical data on Doordarshan was

often scanty or conflicting; compilations were then best available through Doordarshan

(Annual publication of Doordarshan’s Audience Research Unit), specific government

publications such as Television in India (1989, 1990), and Mass Media in India (Ministry of

Information and Broadcasting periodical). During this period, precise statistics had not yet

become commercially crucial enough to promote significant private investment in statistical

analysis; the expansion of the television network was only then underway, and there was no

television alternative to Doordarshan.

The expansion of Doordarshan’s reach and programming in the early 1980s was

aided through the advent of commercial sponsorship, created a nexus linking state control of

television for electoral ends with commercial pursuit of profit through advertising. The

logical goal of both electioneering and advertising, however, is to reach the largest number

of people possible, and in a country as diverse and as riven with potential cleavages as India,

this logic is fraught with possibilities for unintended outcomes. Throughout the 1980s,

Doordarshan came to be used as a tool for promoting a national identity through the

projection of an “Indian” national character, closely identified with the ruling party. The

implications of this process for news programming became perhaps most severe by the time


45

of Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership, but there were also significant implications for non-

news programming.

Throughout the 1980s, the percentage of programming devoted to glitzy, urbanized

depictions increased, and the contradictions between dreadfully inadequate developmental

programming and advertising-driven consumer fare made a farce of development as the

rhetorical justification for continued centralized state control of television. At the same time,

the concept of “development programming” became codified and ossified (and sometimes

ludicrous) in the “fixed-chart system” through which various groups in need of

development were identified and then provided with an allotted number of programming

minutes: fifteen minutes for women and ten minutes for farmers, for example, often

shown at times of the day when these groups would be least likely to watch.

Though only time will tell, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century the

most damaging aspect of centralized media policy seems to be the impossibility of any state-

sponsored depiction of the “nation” to be fully devoid of polarizing religious, ethnic,

linguistic, or communal overtones. This was particularly problematic in India in the

implication of state-sponsored serialization of the Ramayana and other epics in the general

rise of a virulent Hindutva (see, for example, Shah 1997). Though such charges can never be

conclusively proven, the hierarchical control of television from Delhi also meant that the

government could never fully clear itself from such accusations, and so the secular

credentials of the state were brought into question.

One caveat is necessary before turning to discussion of the serialization of the

epics. As I have noted previously (Farmer 1996), every day in India thousands of

newspapers, hours of television programming, a thriving cinema industry, video and


46

magazine production, and a host of other media forms generate entertainment, education,

and political persuasion. In the vast majority of these productions, communal issues

simply do not arise or are studiously avoided. Furthermore, a focus on communalism in

Indian media in no way implies either that Indian media messages are subject to some

natural gravitational pull toward communal uses, or that there is something peculiarly

Indian about the use of media for divisive ethnic, religious, or racist purposes. Indeed,

after the 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City, it was crucial to

note that the United States is no more immune than other places to the harnessing of mass

communications technologies to violent parochial messages (Justice 1995).

Serialization of the Ramayana, followed by the Mahabharata, aired for over three

years beginning in early 1987. One consequence of this programming decision was the

inadvertent implication of Doordarshan, and therefore of the state and the ruling party, in

widening schisms between the majoritarian “nation” as presented on Doordarshan and those

outside this homogenized conception. Programming during the 1980s projected an India that

was overwhelmingly north Indian, Hindi speaking, middle class, and Hindu. The

serialization of the Ramayana, and particularly its treatment as a Hindu, rather than an

Indian, saga, constructed a symbolic lexicon that aided communalist mobilizations and

formed the basis of the imagery used by L.K. Advani in his rath yatras. By the end of the

1980s, Advani and the BJP had emerged as perhaps the most media-savvy manipulators of

Ram-related imagery, which had been given pan-Indian exposure by Doordarshan, to forge

a sense of Hindu resurgence and unity that ultimately resulted in the destruction of the Babri

Masjid in December 1992.


47

Charges linking communal praxis and media messages can never be conclusively

proven. However, the very insolubility of the causality puzzle linking mass media images

and political mobilization turned Doordarshan into a resilient scapegoat. Given

subsequent vicious communal rioting, the legitimacy of the state’s vision of the “nation”

came to be suspect, severely undermining conceptions of Doordarshan as an impartial

provider of information.

Rajiv Darshan and the End of Monopoly

Although creation of a national network was initiated largely for electoral ends,

Mrs. Gandhi was unable to reap the fruits of her investment in television. After her

assassination in the period leading up to the elections, the sympathy vote for Rajiv

Gandhi overwhelmed the salience of television in the election process. Though the effect

(particularly in Delhi) of Doordarshan’s depiction of mourning masses deserves greater

study, television was not used in the subsequent elections at the end of 1984, as it was in

1989, as an extended election strategy. The 1989 elections then emerged as an important

test case of the role Doordarshan could play in the electoral process.

A major consequence of Doordarshan programming in the 1980s was the erosion of

the credibility of its news programming, through blatant use of the medium for publicizing

Congress Party leaders and initiatives. This became particularly severe in the period

preceding the 1989 elections, when the conspicuous use of news broadcasts for

electioneering earned for Doordarshan the derisive sobriquet “Rajiv Darshan.” This attempt

to manipulate the media did less to garner electoral support than it did to hamper democratic

processes.


48

By 1987, the political climate had become more threatening to the Prime Minister,

as the print media, and particularly Indian Express, began to focus on issues such as

Bofors and disagreement among Congress leaders. In response, Rajiv Gandhi and his

advisors decided to focus on the electronic media as an alternative mode of political

communication, circumventing what was seen as a “hostile” press. The hope was that

darshan from afar, or door darshan, could carry the Congress message directly to the

electorate.

Manipulation of television was not limited to the news. A directive reportedly was

issued to Doordarshan to develop programming on India’s achievements to bolster Rajiv

Gandhi’s image before the elections (Times of India April 15, 1989). Many

documentaries in conjunction with the Jawaharlal Nehru Centenary followed. These

documentaries were so numerous, redundant, and often so fawningly laudatory that even

some of their creators began to feel that Nehru himself would not have approved of the

overexposure. Two “development” schemes, Panchayati Raj and Jawahar Rozgar Yojna,

were announced in time to capitalize on the upcoming elections and figured prominently

during news broadcasts and prime time documentaries. There were numerous

documentaries on achievements in industrialization, on national integration, and on

historical figures of national importance, virtually all Congress. These themes also

figured in short spots that were part of the national advertising campaign somewhat

enigmatically named “Mera Bharat Mahan” (My India is Great); and in the telecast of

sporting events such as “Bharatiyam,” which brought 40,000 children to Nehru stadium

for “mass gymnastics” under the motto “India Fit and Young,” in commemoration of the

Nehru Centenary.


49

All of these programs conflated a number of images and personalities: Mahatma

Gandhi, spinning wheels, Jawaharlal Nehru, industrial plants, physical fitness, Indira

Gandhi, children saluting the tri-color flag, patriotic songs such as “Jana Gana Mana”

and “Sare Jahan se Accha,” Congress leaders, peasants tilling the fields, rockets taking

off, montages of photos of various ethnic groups and religious places, and Rajiv Gandhi.

The effect was that of a months-long campaign advertisement, and the none-too-subtly

implied message was that the continuation of all these good things required the

continuation of Congress at the Centre.

Doordarshan became a prominent electoral issue in the 1989 Lok Sabha election,

as the Congress Party attempted to use the electronic media to garner votes through what

was termed “legitimate use of official media.” In response, a broad spectrum of the print

media decried alleged “misuse of the electronic media,” and the party manifestos of most

of the national opposition parties called for restructuring Doordarshan. One of the first

actions taken by the victorious National Front government was introduction of legislation

to grant autonomy to Doordarshan and All India Radio (Akashvani), under a public

corporation to be called Prasar Bharati.

Nonetheless, methods of arbitration of disputes regarding television and the

electoral process were not fully resolved during the 1989 elections. While in 1989 (as in

1977) many hoped that a change in ruling party would lead to changes in Doordarshan,

the National Front was unable to enact the Prasar Bharati Bill before the collapse of the

coalition. Still, the perceived salience of television to candidates, and particularly

younger candidates, increased after the 1989 elections (Sharada 1998). The Bill was

promulgated by ordinance in only in October 1997 and again a year later, circumventing


50

Parliament’s imprimatur. Although since then the existence of a Prasar Bharati Board has

become the norm, the constitution of the Board became heavily politicized, particularly

under the Prime Ministership of the BJP’s Atal Vajpayee. Indeed, the passage by

ordinance of Prasar Bharati, rather than its enactment through the Lok Sabha, was done

largely to remove or prevent the appointment of secular, anti-communalist individuals to

the Prasar Bharati Board; these have included eminent historian Romila Thapar and S.S.

Gill, who had overseen the expansion of television in the mid-1980s. The Rajiv Darshan

period was dark indeed for those seeking institutionalization of media freedoms and

autonomy from the ruling party, and a number of informants at that time told me that they

felt this period was even more frightening than the Emergency, since the manipulation

was more insidious. In retrospect, however, this period appears more one of corruption

that must be rooted out, of a demonstration of institutional strictures that need to be built,

than did the Emergency, during which the collapse of India’s democracy seemed

terrifyingly possible. As attorney Soli Sorabjee noted, at least during the late 1980s there

was widespread and public criticism of media manipulation, through the press and

seminars. These strategies were not so readily available during the Emergency (personal

interview 18 March 1990).

By the end of the 1980s, legacies of the development communications paradigm had

rationalized a governmental television monopoly that was politicized, centralized, and

hierarchical, creating a widening gap between government rhetoric and programming

realities. The result has been a series of lost opportunities, in which Doordarshan

undermines its greatest strengths: its wide reach, greater than that of any transnational

broadcaster; its public, rather than commercial, rationale; and its extensive infrastructure


51

that, unlike any satellite channel, could contextualize programming for local and regional

informational, educational, and language needs. By the early 1990s, however, contestations

over monopoly, institutional structure, programming, and news manipulation were suddenly

overshadowed by a much bigger issue: transnational satellite television, the implications of

which are explored by other authors in this [preconference / volume].


52

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