Subverting autonomy

With its own agenda overriding the need to ensure an autonomous public broadcasting agency, the BJP-led Government pushes through the Prasar Bharati Ordinance.

PRAVEEN SWAMI
in New Delhi

SUSHMA SWARAJ now has reason to be pleased. In the six months she has been Minister for Information and Broadcasting, she has destroyed all prospects of the emergence of an autonomous public broadcasting agency, something that successive Congress(I) governments were unable to create since September 1990 when the Prasar Bharati Act was first passed. By pushing through the Prasar Bharati Ordinance late on the night of August 29, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition Government demonstrated how the Prasar Bharati Board, the guarantor of the broadcaster's autonomy, can be beaten into submission. The new ordinance was passed with the sole purpose of removing Prasar Bharati Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Surrindar Singh Gill, perceived by the BJP as politically hostile to it; in the process it has subverted the raison d'etre of granting autonomy to the public broadcasting agency.

The background to the Prasar Bharati Ordinance makes clear the Government's motives. Through this year's Lok Sabha elections, the BJP claimed that Doordarshan's coverage of its campaign was adversarial. The claim was questionable, for much of the election coverage on Doordarshan's Metro Channel was in fact attacked for its pro-Hindutva bias. But for the BJP, it was evidently not enough. It attributed Prasar Bharati's imaginary hostility to it to the supposed Left-wing sympathies of Gill and others appointed to the Board after the United Front Government had put Prasar Bharati in place through an ordinance last September. Sushma Swaraj let it be known that her principal objection to the U.F. Government's ordinance was that it had tampered with the provisions of the 1990 Act, which her party had backed. This included the removal of the clause providing for the supervision of Prasar Bharati's functioning by a 22-member Committee of Parliament to ensure that, among other things, the broadcasting agencies gave adequate attention to regional audiences and development issues.

ANU PUSHKARNA
Sushma Swaraj, Minister for Information and Broadcasting.

This, in fact, was the least of the BJP's concerns. Critics pointed out that the original Prasar Bharati Act mandated an age limit of 62 for the CEO, and that its revival would enable the BJP to get rid of Gill. But Sushma Swaraj insisted otherwise. After the U.F.'s ordinance was allowed to lapse in May, placing Prasar Bharati in a legislative limbo, she called a press conference to explain the Government's position. "When the National Agenda for Governance was prepared," Sushma Swaraj said, "a conscious decision was made that we would allow the ordinance to lapse, and that we would restore the old Act." This could be done, she said, through either a Bill or an ordinance. "But," the Minister emphatically added: "I don't want to convert Prasar Bharati into an ordinance Bharati... I would not like to repeat the mistake which the predecessor Government made." She was confident that "the Prasar Bharati Bill will be passed not only by majority but with unanimity in both the Houses of Parliament."

IF restoring the original Act was the BJP's purpose, Sushma Swaraj might just have been right. But the BJP's Prasar Bharati Bill, it transpired, was not in fact the original Act. A new provision had been inserted into Section 6 of the Act, which deals with the board members' term of office. It mandated that "any person holding office as a whole-time member immediately before the day on which the Prasar Bharati (Broadcasting Corporation of India) Amendment Act 1998 receives the assent of the President shall... cease to hold office on such assent." And Gill was the only whole-time member of the board. Acts of this nature generally have prospective relevance, but the BJP was unwilling to wait for the CEO to serve out his term. Opposition members of Parliament, many of them otherwise supportive of the need to bring back the parliamentary accountability provision of the Act, were now left in no doubt as to what the BJP's real objectives were.

WHY was the BJP in such a rush to remove Gill from Prasar Bharati? Since mere political discomfort could not be a legitimate reason for its action, the BJP launched a scurrilous campaign against the CEO. The first shots were fired by the Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, M.A. Ansari, who accused Prasar Bharati of being a den of "corruption at the highest levels". Gill reacted furiously to the charge, and a somewhat defensive Ansari responded that his allegation was not directed at any individual. By August, however, the allegations became increasingly shrill. Ansari said that there were gross financial irregularities in the purchase of expensive equipment for Doordarshan. Gill, he claimed, had misused his authority to make these acquisitions, and suggested that the purchase had involved kickbacks. No evidence was produced of wrong-doing. But Sushma Swaraj endorsed Ansari's campaign, using the allegations as a leverage to secure the passage of the new Prasar Bharati Bill she had introduced.

These tactics were not only dishonest but dangerous. The original Prasar Bharati Act and the 1997 ordinance had recognised the need to shield the board from political interference of precisely this kind. If Gill was indeed corrupt or unfit for his job, the Government could have invoked Clause 7(1) to initiate measures for his removal. This provision enabled the President of India to remove the CEO or the other members of the board "after the Supreme Court of India, on a reference made to it by the President has, on inquiry held in accordance with such procedure as the Supreme Court may by rules provide, reported that the Chairman or other such members, as the case may be, ought on such ground be removed." The option of launching an investigation for corruption and other criminal acts against the CEO was also open to the BJP. Neither course of action was chosen. Thus, the specific protections designed to guard members of the Prasar Bharati Board against any attack from the government were rendered absurd. The seriousness of the precedent the BJP has set is evident.

IN the event, Sushma Swaraj did manage to push the Bill through in the Lok Sabha. Various reasons have been attributed to the passage of the Bill with a larger-than-expected majority. The reasons range from inner-party disputes to corruption. The most plausible explanation, however, is that many members were unhappy with the ordinance put in place by S. Jaipal Reddy, Information and Broadcasting Minister in the U.F. Government. Many MPs voiced concern over Jaipal Reddy's decision to remove Clause 13(1), which provided for parliamentary supervision of the functioning of the Prasar Bharati Board. The removal of the clause, they believed, would turn Prasar Bharati into just another commercial broadcaster, unaccountable for its commitments to "promote social justice", combat "the evils of untouchabililty", protect "the rights of the working classes", and stimulate "national consciousness on the status of women". The BJP ensured that the Bill was not referred to the Standing Committee of Parliament, citing the time needed to move it in the Rajya Sabha as a pretext. MPs who voted on the Bill, therefore, had only a minimal informed basis to weigh their decision.

Sushma Swaraj finally moved the Prasar Bharati Bill on July 31, though it had been introduced at the beginning of the Budget session. No cogent explanation of this delay has been given, but during the debate in the Lok Sabha, several MPs suggested that it had been engineered in such a way as to ensure that there was no time for the Bill to be considered in the Rajya Sabha. In the Rajya Sabha, where the Government does not enjoy a majority, MPs demanded the prompt introduction of the Bill. On August 3, they offered to extend its session so that the Bill could be considered. When demand for its introduction intensified the next day, Sushma Swaraj argued that as it was a money bill, the process could not be initiated until presidential assent had been received. She was stalling for time. As a joint resolution of 124 Rajya Sabha members pointed out, "it would be most inappropriate and unethical on the part of the Government to take the ordinance route of the legislation when the Bill is passed by one House and the other House is in session and prepared to consider it."

Faced with an inevitable defeat in the Rajya Sabha, that unethical route was just what the Government had decided on. Although the Lok Sabha session was extended by six days to enable a discussion of the Justice M.C. Jain Commission Report, no additional time was granted to the House to consider the Prasar Bharati Bill. Sources told Frontline that the presidential assent Sushma Swaraj claimed to have been waiting for was in fact granted around 3 p.m. on August 4, along with the money bill on MPs' salaries. The Rajya Sabha sitting on its last day continued until 10 p.m. The Government, therefore, had a clear seven hours to move the Prasar Bharati Bill in the Rajya Sabha. The BJP had realised by this time that it could not pull off the kind of coup it executed in the Lok Sabha again. Put simply, even MPs who did not endorse Jaipal Reddy's ordinance were too distrustful of the BJP's motives and agenda to entrust it with the task of appointing a fresh Prasar Bharati CEO and board.

The Prasar Bharati Ordinance was, as many MPs had predicted, pushed through with the Parliament session safely out of the way. Without even the fig-leaf of a claim that it was needed because of some exigency that arose after the session ended, the ordinance was delivered to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry after 9 p.m. on August 29, and to Gill himself after midnight. "They probably thought I was planning to launch an armed attack on Doordarshan in the morning," the former CEO said sardonically. With Gill out of the way, a committee made up of Vice-President Krishan Kant, Press Council Chairman Justice P.B. Sawant, and a Government nominee, the journalist T.V.R. Shenoy, will now have to find a new CEO, as well as a Chairman to fill the place of Nikhil Chakravartty, who died recently. Who the successors will be is far from clear. It is said that among those the Government is pushing is a journalist known for his violently Hindu-fundamentalist writing. Observers believe that the BJP-led Government would like to ensure that it retains firm control of public broadcast media through a possible election campaign, and reintroduce programmes with a strong dose of religious and mythological sentiment, which were expelled from Doordarshan under Gill.

But before that happens, the BJP Government will have to pass two further hurdles. Gill, for one, has moved the Delhi High Court, arguing that his removal from office was motivated by political malice and that the Prasar Bharati ordinance is unconstitutional. Although a Bench consisting of Justices R.C. Lahoti and C.K. Mahajan refused to restrain the Government from appointing a new CEO, they made it clear that this would be subject to their final orders in Gill's case. Second, the ordinance will have to be ratified by Parliament within six months. Failing this, it will meet the same fate as the U.F. government's ordinance.

But the damage has already been done. Prasar Bharati's autonomy was always premised on the major political parties being committed to its future. Now, Sushma Swaraj has set a precedent for removing inconvenient chiefs. The Minister, who believes that screechy snatches of Vande Mataram on telephone lines build national pride, will then have no cause to complain about propaganda.

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