The history of the evolution of Indian electronic media

 
By
Randeep Wadehra

India on television by Nalin Mehta
Harper Collins. Pages: xiii+393. Price: Rs. 495/-

Television came to India by accident in 1959 when the multinational Phillips gifted some television equipment to India. But there was no place for this medium in the ‘Nehruvian State’ that emphasized on running the commanding heights of economy wherein it was considered irrelevant to the government’s development agenda. Thus attempts to develop it as mass medium remained absent till Indira Gandhi came to power. This is when television was transformed into not only a, what Mehta calls, “Trojan horse” into the citizens’ living rooms but also a gigantic propaganda tool for the ruling party, a vast patronage network with little space for creativity and initiative. Later on Rajiv Gandhi did attempt to bring about glasnost but failed. However, the idea became a reality years later with the arrival of satellite television. But, before that a quiet struggle to break DD’s stranglehold on news retail had started. Newstrack, world’s first private video news magazine, created a niche by working outside the established system while Prannoy and Radhika Roy’s NDTV preferred to work from within the system initially, using DD’s infrastructure for telecasting such path breaking shows as The World This Week and News Tonight. In fact their endeavors epitomize the beginning of the end of state monopoly on TV news broadcasting (private radio news broadcasts are still banned in our country). Today there are more than 300 TV channels in India, out of which at least 106 broadcast daily news in 14 languages. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of 24 hour satellite news channels rose to more than 50, broadcasting news in 11 languages.

In the 1980s TV was consciously turned into a mass medium as a political/developmental strategy. An agent of the socialist state, it simultaneously accommodated the steady growth of Indian capitalism, gradually turning commercial from the late 1970s onwards with the introduction of advertising. The development of a national television network in the 1980s, accompanied with television advertising, augmented the creation of a ‘new consumer class’ and this formed the basis for a new notion of collectivity expressed as ‘the middle class’. But this makeover of DD and its co-option by the forces of capitalism happened in strictly controlled conditions. News programming remained a zealously guarded sanctum sanctorum, even though a great deal of like entertainment was farmed out to sponsors and private producers. All programming, however, was subject to strict bureaucratic and political control.

However, it took the political establishment some time and effort to accept the arrival of new technology with some confidence. For example, in Dec 1993 KP Singh Deo – the then Union I&B Minister – had declared the private satellite channels as ‘diabolical invasion from the sky’. Although, eventually, the concerns regarding CNN-isation/MTVisation of Indian television were proved to be baseless, bogey of neo-colonization was raised and jingoism reached scream levels when the minister dubbed those who did not watch DD as anti-national.

While the new satellite TV technology fuelled debates on the cultural impact of television, it also heralded the lessening, and eventual disappearance, of the vice-like grip of the State.

Talking of cultural impact, this book – though mainly focused on news channels – observes that the serial Ramayan on DD heralded the revival of Hindutva. This may not be far off the mark but if there had been more in-depth study I am sure the credit would have gone to Chanakya that unabashedly promoted nationalist fervor – mixed with Hindutva undercurrents. The frequent references to “Ma Bharati” by the protagonist and his depiction as a tireless nation-builder via temple pathshalas certainly were ultra-right in theme and content. However, coming back to the news channels, the book is right in averring that BJP successfully ‘mediated’ the anti-BJP coverage of 2002 Gujarat riots to reach out to its constituency. However, the contention that Babri Masjid would not have been demolished if private news channels had existed in 1992 is open to debate, because here too the coverage could have been mediated to BJ

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 No where you have mentioned the name of former prime minister Mr P V Narashima Rao, who actually liberised economy, which gave a boost to Indian Television Industry

V Gokulananda | July 8, 2010