Zee Chairman Urges Bjp Legislators To Oppose Bill
Zee Networks chairman and co-promoter of Zee TV, Subhash Chandra, yesterday addressed a meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Partys parliamentary party to impress upon the members the need to oppose entry of foreign companies in the countrys visual media as well.
Chandra, who made a slide-based presentation on the proposed broadcasting bill, strongly opposed cross media ownership and advocated setting up of an independent central regulatory authority for the purpose of uplinking.
However, Chandra was grilled by some of the parliamentary party members for not having done enough for the promotion of Indian culture though his programmes.
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He said the situation was being corrected and promised to act according to the BJPs swadeshi spirit.
Chandra addressed the BJP members of Parliament for about 10 minutes towards the end the parliamentary party meeting.
Chandra has lately been at loggerheads with the foreign co-promoter of Zee TV, Rupert Murdoch, who also controls STAR TV.
The issue has been the growing Indianisation of STAR Plus after the former Doordarshan director-general, R Basu, joined STAR as its chief executive officer in India.
The BJP members refused to see deeper meaning in Chandras address and tried to dismiss it as a routine affair.
The partys deputy Lok Sabha leader Jaswant Singh said: It was not an extraordinary thing.
According to Singh, Chandra wanted to address the MPs as he wanted to share with them his apprehensions on the proposed broadcasting bill which recommends uplinking from India, amongst other things, to all broadcasters.