Television, governance and social change: Media policy through India's first half-century of independence (Rajiv Gandhi)

Analysis of the Government of India's laws and policies regarding television (Doordarshan) provides insight into the concrete realities, rather than professed goals, of India's nation-building in the context of phenomenal class disparities, cultural pluralism and multilingualism. I first explore the development communications paradigm on which Doordarshan was predicated and the evolution of the legal infrastructure into which it emerged in 1959. Chapter 3 examines India's adoption of the development communications paradigm to justify early television experiments, including the largest ever undertaken, the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment of 1975–76. I then turn to the period of greatest threat to democratic media practice in India, the Emergency of 1975–77; the unsuccessful reforms of the Janata interregnum; and the politically driven investment in television made by Mrs. Gandhi upon her return to power. I then examine the unintended consequences of this governmental media monopoly, including the politicization of news programming under Rajiv Gandhi, making television a contentious political issue in the 1989 Lok Sabha (Parliamentary) elections; and the implication of Doordarshan in the rise of communal politics (through state-sponsored serialization of major Indian epics), in increasing consumerism, and in exacerbation of regional anti-Centre sentiments. The final chapter examines the end of the government's monopoly over the airwaves due to the advent of transnational satellite television and the growth of cable systems, and India's attempts to govern these technologies. Based on archival data, memoirs, government documents and numerous interviews with politicians, television officials, producers, advertisers and legal experts, I demonstrate how the development communications paradigm rationalized a governmental television monopoly that was politicized, centralized and hierarchical, creating a widening gap between government rhetoric and programming realities. The result has been a series of lost opportunities, in which Doordarshan undermines its greatest strengths: its wide reach, greater than that of any transnational broadcaster; its public, rather than commercial, rationale; and its extensive infrastructure that, unlike any satellite channel, could contextualize programming for local and regional informational and language needs.