Freedom is like virginity. You either have it or you don’t. There are no in-betweens. You can’t promise freedom with clauses and caveats. So, when the government says the Broadcast Bill it is bringing to Parliament is not meant to curb the freedom of the media, but only to ensure your and my freedoms, you can be sure there’s serious doubletalk. This is not a space the State is supposed to enter, certainly not in a robust democracy as we claim ourselves to be.
Every day new controls are being put in place to gag the media. Ostensibly these are licensing issues, regulatory issues. But the truth is: more and more control over media is being exercised by the State. Why should news on FM be a no-no? Why should TV content be restricted to U-certified stuff ? Are we a nation of only children and dimwits?
Nowhere in the world do I hear so many blips as I hear on Indian TV channels, signalling the deletion of so-called offensive words or expressions. Nowhere in the world are entire scenes chopped off the nation’s finest award-winning movies just to satisfy regulatory authorities. And now comes the latest nonsense: the move to certify all movies with smoking scenes as A. Ergo, you can’t watch such movies on TV.
Brilliant. You see people smoking on the streets. You see people smoking at home. You can even see people smoking on the big screen if you are 18. But you can’t see people smoking on TV because the law disallows ‘A’ films from being shown on TV.
If you think that’s farcical, research shows that most kids in India smoke by nine and have sex by 13, but our censorship laws ensure that you can’t see two people snogging on the big screen before you are 18 and never on the small screen, irrespective of whether you are 18 or 80!
The truth is, every government loves to control media under some pretext or the other. They want to control newspapers to prevent defamation. They want to control TV to stop obscenity and sensationalism. They want to control the internet to protect us from terrorists and pornographers. And radio? I guess they have just run out of pretexts.
What they want to control is actually news. Everything else is a cover. There are too many skeletons tumbling out of cupboards.
There are too many political scandals breaking out. There are too many scams that can no longer be brushed under the carpet. Free media’s a nice thing to boast about but its tough to live with, as every government knows. Indira Gandhi even tried to impose an Emergency. It only backfired and the media emerged far stronger.
But that hasn’t stopped successive governments from still trying to browbeat the media. The latest Bill is the worst ever. The State now wants to arrogate to itself the right to storm into any press, any broadcasting studio, any cyber cafe to stop news from reaching you and me.
And, horror of horrors, it demands that the law cannot intervene. Even Idi Amin’s Uganda and Saddam’s Iraq would have been ashamed of such a bill. How come India 2006 is even considering it?
