My piece in today’s Wall Street Journal Asia on the Broadcasting Bill here (subscription required).

I have reproduced the piece below.

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When Richard Gere kissed Shilpa Shetty, the star of Britain’s “Big Brother” program last year, India’s moral police professed shock, and many called for media censorship. What they didn’t say was that New Delhi’s policy makers were already well on their way to doing just that.

This November, India’s parliament will consider the Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, the country’s most sweeping attempt yet to infringe on free speech. The proposed law is the result of a Supreme Court decision that came down in 1995, when the court mediated a dispute over telecasting rights of a live cricket match. The justices deemed India’s airwaves a scarce resource and “public property” which should not be monopolized by the government or private broadcasters but regulated for national interest. It recommended that New Delhi create an independent statutory body — an oxymoron in itself — to act as the custodian of airwaves.

That bill ignores decades of evidence that government control over the airwaves just doesn’t work in a democracy. Britain may have created the British Broadcasting Service in 1922, ostensibly an independent body to regulate media, but it was later stripped of that role and the British media market opened to competition. The United States created the Federal Communications Act of 1934 to monitor against private monopolies and also regulate content and coverage in public interest. This relic has also undergone dilution over the years and given way to the somewhat less restrictive Telecommunications Act of 1996.

No matter; the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting intends to replicate their peers’ mistakes decades later. The Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill 2007 sets out a comprehensive policy on broadcasting that is concerned with both carriage and content. It proposes to set up the Broadcasting Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) which will ostensibly be an independent authority; establish an independent content code; and develop the system for censorship and certification.

If the bill passes — which is likely under a left-leaning Congress Party coalition — the government’s powers will be greatly extended. The legislation prohibits any person from broadcasting any channel or program without a license from an authority designated by the government. The proposed agency isn’t really an independent authority and would be run by bureaucrats handpicked by the government. Thus the government would be able to arm-twist the media through the BRAI medium of licensing and registration, which allows it to mandate content as well as impose severe penalties on unlicensed broadcasters. The bill requires all shows to be broadcast only if they are in the greatest interest of the general public — a judgment that will be made in New Delhi.

Policy makers also propose to free ride off of the profitable parts of the private sector. The bill makes it mandatory for every cable or satellite service to provide two government-owned channels: “Doordarshan,” the long-running national government broadcaster, and one regional channel for the respective state government. The government also proposes to force private broadcasters to share live telecasting rights of any sporting event of national importance with the state-owned channels.

Just in case anyone objects to these repressive rules, the bill requires every channel to register with the BRAI — which may refuse registration if it is of the considered opinion that the content of the channel is likely to “threaten the security and integrity of the State,” “threaten peace and harmony or public order,” or “threaten relations with foreign countries.” The central government has also reserved the power to prevent a broadcast or revoke the license of a broadcaster in case of external threat or in “exceptional circumstances.” In a pluralistic democracy like India, which has every conceivable kind of moral and religious police, whose ideas of what’s proper would prevail?

The man best positioned to answer these questions is the minister for information and broadcasting, Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, who is responsible for this legislation. After the Gere-Shetty kiss was aired, Mr. Dasmunshi declared that he felt the media had been “irresponsible” for showing the image many times over, offending sensitivities with “frivolous news”; thus making a case for stringent regulation of news channels. So would Mr. Gere’s affectionate embrace of Ms. Shetty be deemed an “exceptional circumstance”?

While the minister’s views are cause for alarm, they pale in comparison to the “content code” drafted by the ministry. The code stipulates, for example, that broadcasters shall not present the figure of a woman as mere “sexual objects.” Noble as the idea may be, it’s scarcely a good reason for censoring the press, especially when pornographic material is already banned in its entirety. Similarly, the code prevents broadcasters from distorting religious symbols or practices in a derogatory manner.

The government has called the code a “roadmap for self regulation” whereby the broadcasters will follow the guidelines and manage their content accordingly. But the government’s track record in regulating content doesn’t inspire confidence.

This July the government banned an underwear advertisement for being vulgar and suggestive; oddly enough, no one was wearing underwear or appearing nude and it only showed a woman doing her husband’s laundry. In January, the Ministry banned AXN, a cable network, for two months for airing a show called World’s Sexiest Commercials. In May, the same policy makers banned Fashion TV, another cable channel, for a show called Midnight Hot, on grounds that it violated public decency.

Both shows were aired after 11 p.m. and the channels are considered mainstream everywhere else in the free world. But Mr. Dasmunshi responded to criticism of the bans by saying, “If out of 75 complaints we banned only two channels, why the hue and cry?”

The larger design of this government is to control political free speech. This legislation, if passed, will come down heavily on channels conducting “sting operations” to expose corrupt government officials or scams. This seems ominous given the ban last week on Live India for conducting a “fake” sting operation exposing an alleged prostitution racket. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting banned the channel for a month as it aired material which “incited violence and contained content against maintenance of law and order.”

Media censorship was seen last during the 1970s, when Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule. The suspension of all civil and political rights soon followed, as well as political censorship. It was the only dictatorship that modern India has ever witnessed. While this legislation cannot be compared with the Emergency, the agenda to control free speech is alarmingly similar.

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Ms. Rajagopalan is a lawyer based in New Delhi.

This post was written with a different purpose, but it’s up here for now. It’s Trane’s birth aniversary and inkeeping with last year, here is the tribute. It’s similar to what I wrote previously.

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“I would like to bring people something like happiness. I would want to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he will be cured…”
-John William Coltrane

Coltrane did all that and much more.

Not many think of Coltrane as a freedom fighter, like one does of Martin Luther King or Gandhi, though he was perhaps the most melodious proponent of the freedom movement. As the civil rights movement reached its peak in the sixties, Coltrane expressed it through his music which critics often called “angry”. His solos were long, relentless and at tempos at which often the musicians and the audience failed to keep up. It was as if he was playing for a different purpose all together. Like if he broke free from the traditional chord changes and scales of modal jazz, his improvisations would simultaneously make the world free. And perhaps he did.

Coltrane’s upbringing was typically southern and religious, as he was born to a family of ministers in Hamlet, North Carolina. Not surprisingly, he grew up a victim of racial segregation. In 1943 he moved to Philadelphia and played blues and jazz standards for the Navy Band. One of the main influences on Coltrane was Charlie Parker and he later went on to play with Monk, Gillespie and Ellington.

While Coltrane played with many “cats” as a side man, his first big break came when Sonny Rollins, a tenor player and close friend, refused to join Miles Davis’ Quintet perhaps just to give Coltrane the break. During this period both Davis and Coltrane experimented with free jazz, and jazz critic Gitler called Coltrane’s style “sheets of sound”; to describe the short, fast-paced solos which felt more like cascades. In 1959 Coltrane recorded Kind of Blue with Davis , perhaps the most lyrical jazz album ever written, and Coltrane came to be recognized as a leader in free jazz. Soon he left Davis and led his own extraordinary quartet with McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison in 1961.

Ellington, with whom Coltrane recorded in 1962, often dismissed the concept of modern jazz. He felt there were two kinds of players; the individualists and the hundreds who follow the music shaped by one man. Coltrane was perhaps one of the most influential individualists jazz has seen. Giant Steps and Mr. PC have so many chord changes and progressions played at unimaginable tempos that it forever changed the way jazz was written.

No one worked as hard as Coltrane to find a new and fresh sound. So hard, that his playing was often dubbed loquacious and redundant by many. It is now folklore that Trane, as he was affectionately called, would be so impatient to play that he would leave the bandstand after completing a solo and continue to play in the men’s room allowing other members to complete their solos and return to play without a break. However, a favourite with Davis , who once said “I didn’t understand this talk of Coltrane being difficult to understand. What he does is to play five notes of a chord and then keep changing it around, trying to see how many different ways it can sound. It’s like explaining something five different ways”.

Coltrane’s adaptation of the famous Sound of Music track, My Favourite Things in 1961 is far superior to the original slow waltz sound. In Afro Blues Impression Live version of My Favourite Things one can hear joy, anger, impatience, rain, freedom, calm and melancholy, achieving exactly what he set out to do. But his most insurmountable work came in 1964 with A Love Supreme which was an expression of his discovery of spirituality and his devotion to God. With its four parts, Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm, music and religion became one. With this one expression, Coltrane wanted to “speak to their souls”.

September 23rd is like any other autumn day except; he Sun is at one of the two points on the celestial sphere where the celestial equator and the ecliptic intersect and astronomically the autumnal equinox makes the day and night equal; and one of the greatest jazz musicians was born eighty one years ago.

While the equinox is about equilibrium, everything about Coltrane was excessive. He had to play every chord and note known. He overdosed on sugar, alcohol, heroin and eventually LSD. Even spirituality was excessively experimented as he tried to embrace all religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Kabbalah and even took up yoga, vegetarianism, astrology and philosophy.

Yet through his composition Equinox he leaves his listeners with joy, calm and a sense of freedom; and all that he sought in his own torrid musical journey.

Mary Kissel, the editor of the edit pages in WSJA, has an excellent piece today on Chandni Chowk.

It started fairly innocently. Mary asked me to list the interesting places to visit in Delhi and I thought Humayun Tomb, Red Fort and my favourite Chandni Chowk. She was as excited as I was apprehensive about sending her alone.

She surprised me. She took about three seconds to get used to the madness and then maneuvered her way around the market saying China had already prepared her for such a situation

Now the coolest thing about Mary is not that she can write like this, but that she is a foodie who is not to scared to try out anything new and has a special place for Indian food. From parantha’s to sandesh to besan ke laddoo she wanted to tickle every taste bud. I was only too pleased to accompany her.

As we tried not to get crushed by the madness in CC, between the food and the shops we squeezed in philosophical discussions about Smith and an almost perfectly competitive market and the division of labour and specialisation and spontaneous order. Mary describes it all far more succinctly in her piece, so I’ll stop here.

But I must say, just days before leaving Delhi, this experience was all that I really needed. A friend, lots of food, some silver and the smell of everything bought, sold and provided in Delhi and most importantly a feeling of being free. So thank you Mary, for the experience, the piece and for taking my very own Chandni Chowk to the pages of WSJ.