Takeovers, suspensions

Indian govts need to stop being arbitrary with TV channels

Indian governments' approach to the media is nothing if not arbitrary. Two recent events, one involving the government of the state of West Bengal and one involving the Union ministry of information and broadcasting, serve to effectively highlight this fact. West Bengal's Trinamool Congress-led government has been badly hit by the fall of the Saradha Group, a deposit-taking firm that has been discovered to be little more than a Ponzi scheme. The state government, which is supposed to be trying to dig itself out of a hole of debt that makes it one of the most fiscally troubled states in the country, has already announced a Rs 500-crore repayment to investors in the Saradha Group, a use of public money that is unwise. It creates moral hazard problems, suggesting the state backstops any and all Ponzi schemes if they grow large enough and have enough political connections. Now, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has said that her government will "temporarily take over" the two television channels the disgraced group owns, Tara Newz and Tara Muzik. All employees will be paid Rs 16,000 immediately, and Rs 36 lakh will be released from the chief minister's relief fund, normally used for natural emergencies, to help run the TV channels.

Of course, television channels with political connections aren't precisely a new thing. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, the Karunanidhi family owns a network -- Kalaignar TV, and its allies the Maran family is the promoter of the giant Sun TV Network. Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, meanwhile, controls Jaya TV, which shows excerpts from the Tamil Nadu assembly interspersed with various meetings the CM has had during the day. But there's a big difference between that and a government using taxpayer money to actually run a channel. Of course, West Bengal has a long history of nationalising private enterprises that have run into trouble; but surely the state's leader has learned, or been told, that that habit was what caused most of her state's problems in the first place. Nor is this an intervention such as the corporate affairs ministry conducted with scam-hit Satyam, in which a high-level committee including members of the private sector essentially salvaged what was recoverable of that company's assets and contracts, with no taxpayer money at risk. The latter approach, so successful with Satyam, does not seem to have been even considered in this case.

It hasn't been considered perhaps because the Indian political system seems to think that arbitrariness when it comes to the media, especially the electronic media, is perfectly acceptable. Why has Ms Banerjee singled out the Tara channels, out of all the Saradha assets, for recovery? Will future television channel collapses in West Bengal be treated similarly? Ms Banerjee has not answered any of these questions. Nor has she explained what prompted that move. Meanwhile, at the Centre, similar arbitrariness, if even more farcical and absurd, is being played out: the ministry of information and broadcasting has directed the television channel Comedy Central to go off the air till June 4 for "offences against good taste" and "public morality". The ministry's notification, where the said offences are detailed in dry bureaucratese, is itself a hilarious masterpiece of red tape. Most regular television viewers will be lost in wonderment as to why, precisely, Comedy Central has been singled out when there is a veritable torrent of bad taste on several other channels on Indian television. More to the point, isn't taste, bad or good, something that is inherently arbitrary? So why is the ministry trying to decide what it should be? Governments, both at state and centre, need to learn to grow up and start treating the electronic media with the institutional care and appropriate distance that would be warranted for any other, less visible, industry.