Legal developments concerning the SUN TV group’s crisis compel us to come to terms with the peculiar context of Tamil Nadu’s television sector. The reasons for this peculiarity are not to be found in Tamil Nadu alone. They also point to goings-on in the Central ministries of telecom, information and broadcasting, and home affairs.
The Tamil Nadu media world, and its TV sector in particular, require a critical perspective to uncover the deeper meanings of its strange political economy. What makes it strange is the subversion of conventional relationships. That conventional relationship, as far as the nexus between media, business and politics is concerned, is mostly straightforward. A political party may own the media organisation and may make both its political and media agendas public. As members of the informed public, we may find clues about the possible linkages with the agendas of business groups close to the party. Or a business group, with links to the party, may own a media organisation.
Fifth, the case of television in Tamil Nadu is connected to the predicament of Arasu Cable, the master MSO launched by the state government in 2007. The entity went into a deep slumber when the IAS officer manning the post at Arasu during the last DMK administration came into conflict with the DMK family because of his action against the Marans’ SCV.
Arasu Cable was revived when the AIADMK returned to power in 2011, with a plea that it would be a counter to the monopoly practices of SCV. But there are reports of “political interference in pushing channels in and out of the prime band”, the same charge that made the Sun TV group’s MSO infamous. In theory, a state-run MSO in a state that witnessed the nasty fallout of the SCV monopoly was a good strategy to retrieve media diversity and pluralism. But in practice, Arasu Cable could not shirk its image of an entity controlled by the party in power.
There was allegedly an unprecedented monopoly exercised by the Sun TV group under the last DMK regime, as film distribution and exhibition came to be tied with the fate of television rights for new releases on channels linked with the ruling family. The calls for cross-media ownership laws became more strident in Tamil Nadu.
The present crisis has its origins in the atypical ways in which the broadcast sector’s growth was cultivated for propagandist purposes by the Congress at the height of Indira Gandhi’s tenure as I&B minister, and then as prime minister. The unregulated manner in which this model was made to cast its imprint — when the end of the Cold War made it possible overnight to procure incredibly cheap Soviet-era satellite transponders by politically influential entities already raring to enter the sector in states like Tamil Nadu — is at the root of the present crisis.
Except for one instance of legislation — the 1995 Cable Television Networks Regulation Act (amended in 2011) — and bringing in the regulator of an entirely different sector, Trai, to take charge of the broadcast sector, India remains the only large democracy without a dedicated media regulator. This has resulted in innumerable ethical and professional violations.
The case of the Marans/ Sun TV reflects Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s notion of the “real” (at once monstrous and impossible to capture symbolically). We, as citizens, are faced with the Zizekian “real” in terms of the implications of an entirely unregulated private TV sector, with no public service broadcast competition from Prasar Bharati, where every second hundreds of channels distort news, programme and advertising content and contribute to the death of media pluralism and of the medium itself. By Zizekian logic, this case must only be read in terms of another Zizekian instrument, the “fetish”. Fetish is a lie to relate to the “symptom” (obscure objects desired by unregulated late capitalists), to come to terms with the monstrous reality of the largest unregulated media sector in the world.
The writer is professor at the department of journalism and communication, University of Madras.
