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| Editorial: Trai's muddled thinking |
| Business Standard / New Delhi Nov 23, 2008, 00:19 IST |
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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), which is also the regulator for the broadcast sector, has come out against governments, panchayats and urban municipal bodies setting up their own broadcasting businesses; it has also recommended that political parties and religious bodies too should not be allowed to enter the business. From the central government’s point of view, of course, some of the recommendations would be welcome — since it has a large degree of control over the news and views on the state-owned Doordarshan and All India Radio, why would it want to give similar access to rivals in the states? Indeed, the ban on governments setting up TV channels is the only one that makes sense; governments in India have more urgent priorities, there is no shortage of private channels of every hue, and the country does not need another loss-making dinosaur like Prasar Bharati.
But Trai’s recommendation is impractical, as it can be easily subverted. You may ban a political party from formally owning a channel, but nothing prevents a leading politician from starting his or her own channel—and what would be the difference between that and a party itself starting one? Indeed, several political parties already control television channels — the Left parties control Kairali TV in Kerala; Ms Jayalalithaa controls Jaya TV; the DMK had a virtual house organ in Sun TV till the Marans’ spat with party chief Karunanidhi—who then went and embraced the newly-launched Kailagnar TV. Indeed, this is merely an extension of the tradition in print, where the Congress Party controlled National Herald, the Left had the Patriot, and the Jana Sangh had Motherland. Even today, the CPI(M) controls a daily newspaper in West Bengal as well as official organs like People’s Democracy, and the Shiv Sena has Saamna.
While all political parties do not control daily newspapers in the same manner, the political affiliations of various newspapers and TV channels are an open secret. So a ban has no meaning, and may not hold if someone challenges it in court, citing the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech—which, surely, extends to political parties.
In any case, it is not even clear why Trai recommendations should be accepted. The popularity of religious channels clearly shows they service genuine demand, and they are a fact of life in many countries; so long as they do not preach hatred for other religions, there is no logical reason to not allow religious bodies to have their own broadcasting stations. As for the possibility of them creating communal discord, the law has solutions for that.
Nor is it clear why local bodies/panchayati raj institutions should not be allowed to have their own broadcasting facilities; in fact, the whole concept of community radio and TV was promoted in order to allow panchayats (and others, like universities) to do local programming. Only the naive will accept Trai’s argument that even the central government has distanced itself from DD and AIR after the creation of the Prasar Bharati, and hence allowing states and others to get into the business will give one political formation an advantage over others.
Trai’s preferred solution is to mandate ‘reasonable’ and equal access to all political parties — indeed, it suggests this be made mandatory for private channels, which surely begs the question as to whose channel it is anyway! Trai seems to believe political messages are given out in fixed chunks of broadcasting time, like advertisements, instead of the subtle manner in which they are actually delivered through ongoing news and views broadcasts — in which case, how is another political party going to ask for ‘space’?
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