by Vinod Rai
India’s entry into the security architecture of the region followed, but not without difficulties. The most important progress was made with the United States. Defence cooperation began to take off in the early 2000s, with the next steps in strategic partnership; the India–US civilian nuclear agreement; the acquisition by India of major US defence platforms such as the C-130J and C-17 transportation aircraft and P-8I maritime surveillance planes; and India being designated a major defence partner.
Starting in 2000, India also normalized relations with Japan, following sharp differences resulting from its 1998 nuclear tests. The growing convergence and cooperation resulted in quadrilateral (India–US–Japan–Australia) humanitarian operations after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and maritime exercises in 2007. After China sent strong signals and changes in government took place in the four countries, progress slowed. Nonetheless, India now has frequent naval exercises with the United States (MALABAR), Japan (JIMEX) and Australia (AUSINDEX). Additionally, India has established regular high-level bilateral dialogues and trilateral India–US–Japan and India–Japan–Australia mechanisms. India has also initiated a different kind of security engagement with Southeast Asia. Among other initiatives, it has supported the Myanmar navy with technical assistance, provided facilities for Singapore to conduct artillery, mechanized force, and air exercises, coordinated maritime patrols with Indonesia and trained Vietnam’s combat aircraft pilots.12
As a reflection of these institutional, economic and security changes, India’s ‘Look East’ policy was upgraded to ‘Act East’. This was meant to widen the scope to encompass the entire Asia–Pacific; shift the focus beyond economic considerations to political, security, and social ties; and attempt to make progress more action- and result-oriented. While institutional engagement and security partnerships are proceeding apace, India’s commercial integration with Asia—and Southeast Asia in particular—has been underwhelming. Fast-tracking those efforts requires India to focus on developing northeast India and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; improve air and land connectivity with Southeast Asia; reduce non-tariff barriers; leverage India’s prowess in services, technology, and English language education; and liberalize visa regimes. Specific projects that are underway—completing the Kaladan Multi-Modal Project in Myanmar, extending and enhancing the IMT network, and connecting into Myanmar’s Dawei deep-sea port project—would represent concrete efforts at improving India’s connectivity with Southeast Asia.
India’s role in Asia has undergone multiple changes as both India and Asia have evolved. Today, a more active Indian role in Asia is desired and sought after by many actors in Asia. With the imperative of creating a peaceful, interdependent, and multipolar Asia, India has little choice but to participate institutionally, integrate economically and become an active security provider across the region. Important strides have been made in these respects since the turn of the millennium, but an increased focus, particularly on the economic dimension, may yet be necessary if India is to achieve its objectives.
XXI
Indian Media at Seventy: Five Big Challenges
Nalin Mehta
Is there a connection between the long forgotten US battleship that blew up in the Havana Harbour in 1898 and the current state of the Indian media? You will be surprised!
When the U.S.S. Maine inexplicably blew up at the height of tensions between Washington and Spain, then masters of Cuba, the newly emerging American media barons, having just embarked on a contest for readership, saw a fantastic opportunity to capture paying readers by rallying them to the flag. The media in the US then was just as bloodthirsty as Indian TV networks are now. Enmeshed in a battle for supremacy with Joseph Pulitzer’s The World, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal immediately argued, without much proof, that a Spanish anti-ship mine had destroyed the Maine and its crew. Nothing quite matches a bout of self-righteous hysteria about the ‘enemy’ to draw in patriotic audiences. Hearst, who created America’s largest newspaper chain, understood this better than most. He had dispatched reporters to Cuba to write on alleged Spanish atrocities. When his reporter cabled back: ‘There is no war . . . request to be recalled,’ Hearst famously replied: ‘Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.’1 Most historians agree the months of holier-than-thou press jingoism that followed forced the US–Spanish War engulfing the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, Guam and Cuba. While the war ended Spanish colonialism, the American decision to start it was intrinsically rooted in the no-holds-barred journalism and battle for eyeballs that the newly minted media barons inaugurated.
Decades later, revisionist American naval historians concluded that the U.S.S. Maine probably sank from an internal explosion caused by the combustion of coal kept next to an ammunition magazine. Nonetheless, an aggressive media looking to capture readers with muscular nationalism combined with a suspicious explosion meant that such subtle explanations were easily ignored, with profound social, political and global consequences.
It is a story with useful pointers for those constantly puzzled about the bizarre loudness of much of India’s media—especially the over-the-top breathlessness of TV news channels, and ‘do aliens drink cow milk?’ kind of exclusives. Were Hearst to visit an Indian TV news station today, he probably would not be surprised at all by the deliberate desperateness of permanent outrage spouted daily in the hope that somehow, anyhow, the viewer would stay on for just those few extra seconds. There are remarkable parallels between the shape of the Indian media in 2017 and the US media a hundred years ago: in numbers, penetration rates and competition.
The Indian media’s current convulsions offer a paradox of Dickensian proportions:
For the Indian media, it is unquestionably the best of times and it is also, unfortunately, the worst of times . . . We have never had such a wide audience or readership but our credibility has never been so tested. We have never seen such a flowering of TV channels and such a spreading footprint of newspaper titles, but the market is more consolidated than ever around the top few players. The quality of what we offer to our public has never been better but that same public can see that the ethical foundations of our actions have plumbed new depths. The impact of the media on India’s public discourse has never been so instant and its reach so pervasive, but many ask whether that impact is for good or ill.2
The state of the media is inextricably intertwined with the larger story of India and it is important to frame it by answering four key questions: what does the Indian media industry actually look like? How does its trajectory compare with that of media in other liberal democratic countries? Where is it going? And why should the media matter to every Indian? As the republic completes seventy years, these questions frame the five big challenges facing India’s media industry:
World-famous, but Only in India
It is easy to get drunk with numbers about the Indian media industry. At a time when print newspaper circulations are rapidly shrinking in every major global media market, India, along with China, remains a global outlier for newspapers. It has the highest number of newspapers in circulation in the world;3 produces the largest number of films each year; boasts of the second largest number of TV viewers at 780 million4 and 476 million digital consumers. The numbers are not surprising, given our population.
However, it is striking that in global terms, India’s media is not that big an industry. It was worth about USD 19.6 billion in 2016 with an annual growth of 9 per cent, which is barely a quarter of Google (USD 89.5 in revenues in 2016), a nineteen-year-old company, younger than most of India’s TV channels.5 As Star TV chairman and CEO, Uday Shankar, has pointed out: ‘If the entire Indian media was a company, it would rank seventh or eighth in India. Media is a globally growing industry but our participation in that ecosystem is zero and India is hardly factored into the global thought process of technology or content.’6 Indeed, Hollywood or the global TV market is not keen on developing India-specific products, which is not the ca
se for China, or the United States. This is because, in global terms, India’s media and the entertainment market are still not meaningful in monetary value. While this is slowly changing, India’s media industry is world-famous, but only in the country.
Media Has Converged but Still Bound by Licence-Permit Raj Legacies
It is increasingly irrelevant to talk about print or television or digital or telecom companies as separate businesses in a world of digital convergence. Yet, regulatory constraints ensure the business models and politics of individual Indian media sub-sectors are still circumscribed by legacies of the licence-permit raj.
India remains the only major liberal democracy where private radio channels cannot broadcast their own news. The government of India, between October–December 2016, finished phase 3 of the auction for radio frequencies nationwide, where 266 frequencies were offered in ninety-two cities.7 Yet, radio channels can only relay news that the All India Radio produces because of an old colonial straitjacket that saw radio news as being too volatile a medium to be allowed to go private.
In a country where retail prices of essential commodities are not controlled, and even diesel prices are being de-regulated, prices of TV channels (except HD channels) are regulated by the government. Until the eighties, the state didn’t really invest in television, arguing that broadcasting was a luxury of the affluent that could wait till grandiose plans for economic progress bore fruit. The explosion of private broadcasting in the last twenty years transformed its status in governmental eyes from a bourgeois luxury into a hoi polloi essential, whose prices needed to be controlled.
In an effort to ensure that television prices didn’t shoot through the roof, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) ruled in 2006 that no individual pay channel could be priced at more than Rs 5.35 per month for consumers.8 At first glance, this appears a sensible and consumer-friendly policy, but it is one which, in reality, has seriously distorted the economics of Indian television. This is because good content costs money. The price ceiling disincentivizes investments as channels know they can’t recover costs from subscribers. Thus, channels only invest in programmes attracting advertising and remain hooked to the daily roulette of the ratings game with its vicious cycle of programming, appealing only to the lowest common denominator.
A network like HBO in the US is worth comparing. Emphasizing thoughtful, nuanced programming, HBO eschews advertising and is funded purely by the subscriptions of nearly 30 million customers. It has significantly fewer customers than its competitors, but due to secure and predictable income from the latter, it spends more on the quality of its programming. The first season of ‘Games of Thrones’ cost between USD 50–60 million to produce,9 which is more than the entire annual programming budget of most major Indian networks.
If prices were decontrolled, would watching television be unaffordable for most Indians? Absolutely not. In a country with the world’s largest terrestrial public broadcaster, this is a moot question. Doordarshan runs more than thirty free channels in two dozen different languages with a free DTH service. The state spends about Rs 3500 crores annually on public broadcasting services.10 This is excluding channels run and financed separately by the Indian Parliament—Lok Sabha TV and Rajya Sabha TV. For high-cost programming like cricket, there is already a law in place to ensure that all private channels share their broadcasts free of cost with Doordarshan in the national interest.
The price cap actually distorts the market, artificially controlling ebbs and flows rather than protecting the viewer. It is a legacy of the fact that unlike print, which was already a vibrant industry in 1947, TV and radio were controlled by the state until the early nineties. TV came to India by accident in 1959, when the electronic giant Phillips left behind some television equipment as a gift after an exhibition in Delhi. India had only sixty-seven TV sets when Nehru died in 1964 and TV became a mass medium only in the eighties before the satellite boom of the nineties brought down the state monopoly on broadcasting.
Table 4: Estimated TV Sets in India: 1964–2016
Year TV Sets in India
1964 67
1979 6,00,000
1982 20,00,000
1992 34,800,000
2000 84,000,000
2012 148,000,000
2016 183,000,000
Source: Nalin Mehta, India on Television: How Satellite News Channels Changed the Way We Think and Act. (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 43; Nalin Mehta, Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us About Modern India (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2014), and BARC, 2017.
India today is the world’s second largest TV market after China. While forces of globalization and liberalization since the 1991 economic reforms have changed the contours of the media industry, control mindset continues to bind the sector in subtle ways.
No Curbs on Political Ownership
India remains the only major liberal democracy where politicians and political parties can own traditional media platforms. For example, major investments in news television since the early-2000s have been from politicians, real estate, chit fund and money market companies and large corporations. This pervasive trend has led to these categories of owners having deep stakes in the majority of the news TV business in most Indian states. Such companies make up over 80 per cent of the news TV business in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Odisha, between 60 and 70 per cent in Punjab, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and the northeast.11 A decade ago, only a handful of states like Tamil Nadu had channels like Sun TV or Jaya TV, set up as propaganda arms of rival political parties. Now, this is the norm across India.
Politicians have as much of a right to free speech as everyone else and, in theory at least, each propaganda voice should cancel each other out. The trouble is twofold. First, it completely loads the democratic field in favour of political players with access to big under-the-table funding and crowds out less wealthy players. Second, the easy money that politicians bring into the game completely distorts the market, driving out all serious, neutral players.
One of the most under-analysed ways through which politicians control the news is by controlling cable operators. States like Chhattisgarh and Punjab have evolved their own models, where television is controlled by political parties through private TV networks, as well as cartelization of the cable industry. The practice of politicians buying into the TV business is a slippery slope. Several news channels have become conduits for black money and ill-gotten wealth. They also provide unfair advantage to their political owners and diminish the public space.
There are umpteen recommendations by the TRAI that warn against fixing the field in favour of politicians with the money to splurge; fair access in the political arena; unfair uses of state power and on grounds of equity—most recently in April 2014.12 Several other countries already have such laws in place mandating strict limits against political ownership of commercial media outlets. India must follow suit.
Regulatory Twilight Zone
Information and Broadcasting ministers of recent years have suggested abolition of their ministry.13 Notwithstanding political differences and ultimate intent, these comments by successive ministers point to the nature of the ongoing debate over the role of the state in sectors opened up after liberalization; the deep regulatory crisis affecting many of these; and the implications for governance.
In the early-nineties when first faced with the challenge of independent private television, the guardians of the state initially buried their heads in the sand, and then, in time-honoured fashion, blamed the proverbial foreign hand. The developments were described by an erstwhile I&B minister as ‘diabolical invasion from the sky’,14 while another wondered ‘Are we going to succumb as we did 250 years ago to gunpowder’.15 Different arms of the government took different views—some for opening up, some against—and then, as with most things that politicians are unable to decide on in India, the Supreme Court came to the rescue, liberating airwaves from government control, giving legal sanctity to a
private TV revolution and asking the Centre to create a new autonomous public authority to control and regulate the new reality. That was in 1995. Over two decades later, India is still waiting for such a law.
Members of Parliament did unite thrice—in 1995, 2002 and 2011—to pass or amend laws to govern specific aspects of the industry, on distribution and cable operators. They also united, expectedly, on a life-and-death matter: the right of the Indian people to watch cricket. A law was passed to ensure that Doordarshan could, in the ‘national interest’, telecast every international cricket game played in India without paying a single paisa for it. Yet, every attempt to create a new law encompassing the wider superstructure of the new reality of Indian television has failed (Table 5). Almost every I&B minister since 1995 has tried to put the genie of private TV back into the bottle. Every minister has stumbled.