The Possible Histories of Indian Television tilting of the balance came with the now-famous supreme court judgement of February 1996. In a dispute originating from the state-owned Doordarshan's claim that it had the prior right to telecast cricket matches, and other similar events, occurring on Indian territory. Justice P.B. Sawant ruled as follows: The airwaves or frequencies are a public property. Their use has to be controlled and regulated by a public authority in the interests of the public and to prevent the invasion of their rights.6 This judgement appeared to drive a wedge between the presumed identity of the people-nation and the' state-representing-the-nation;7 for the court also directed parliament to enact laws that would place broadcast media in the hands not of the government, but of a public statutory body. A large number of legal theorists and media activists interpreted this judicially-proclaimed distinction, between the state and "the public/ as practically inaugurating an autonomous and authentic public sphere. But a less credulous response was that it signalled for all practical purposes a shift from the state to the market in the task of reinforcing India's passive revolution. For while the court stressed that the media should not be left to market forces (in the interest of ensuring that "a wide variety of voices enjoys access") the Cabinet note on the Broadcasting Bill of 1997 echoed these words to argue the opposite: .... [A] wider choice and plurality of views can be facilitated only by promoting private broadcasting.... Additionally, licensing and auctioning of channels would bring in the much-needed revenues for developing and improving the quality of public broadcasting-Global capitalism favours the "informational mode of development," rendering the old redistributive welfare state obsolete. It also undermines the hegemonic responsibility of the modern state—its responsibility, as Madhava Prasad puts it, of "universalizing the citizen-function".8 Thus, in place of the state, .... we now have a system of representation that reverts to economic power as the basis of selection. Television is emblematic of this transformation, serving as a cultural site for the realization of a system of economic representation.9 Given the deep-reaching complexities of these debates, a present history of Indian television would have to deconstruct the "choice" between a state-managed pedagogic service and the freedom of the consumer-citizen. For, underlying this starkly-posed choice is a historical continuity in the operative definition of what constitutes "the public". THE INSTITUTION OF PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION Television was clearly instituted in India as a public service.10 It was, of course, fully financed and controlled by the state to begin with, but it was in some measure shaped by the principles Journal of Arts 6' Ideas