The Judgement: Re-Forming the 'Public' the term 'public'. In the numerous representations made to the Sharad Pawar Joint Parliament Committee (JPC) which provided the main focus for looking at the entire issue, and more recently in the controversy surrounding the Prasar Bharati Board, this term was used to translate familiar ideological differences into what was sometimes a new and unfamiliar arena. The 1^2 term was implicated in at least four usually independent but also often conflicting areas as: 1. Being 'in the public interest'. In contrast to relatively more familiar legal definitions of the term, such as those surrounding the debates on public interest litigation, here the concept split up into two further categories. One invoked democratic language: for example, I&B Minister S. Jaipal Reddy's preface to the Bill arguing that it is 'our great democratic traditions' which make it 'imperative that our citizens are well informed and given wider choice in matters of information, education and entertainment', or by AMIC's suggested basic guidelines for transnational programming and advertising, which went further in equating 'concepts of democracy, peace and cooperation' with 'recognising and projecting the family as the basic unit of society'1. A second use, in bureaucratic shorthand, seemed to imply that the term simply meant 'non-commercial', exemplified by the UGC-sponsored educational TV service in the afternoons on Doordarshan. The question, non-commercial for whom?, extended by this logic to suggest that anything that was not explicitly pay-TV - anything that the public apparently didn't have to pay for - could well be characterised as non-commercial in the future. Democracy and commerce thus came together to open up an area of negotiation, on just how suppliers of 'public interest' material could reap financial benefits, or at least incentives, from this service. 2. As having 'access to the public'. In terms of providing a representation for the public, translated into Indian conditions this meant all political parties having access to television. Although explicitly stated as an important function of broadcast media by the Supreme Court judgement (quoted below) and touted by most commentators as an important criterion of all future broadcasting law, just how - in what form - the public will have access to television was simply never raised as an issue.2 More commonly, therefore - but in an important category shift - this concept came to mean the rights to receive electronic media, sort of in the sense in which the Special Plan for Expansion of Television envisaged in the 7th Five Year Plan promised to make television available to 70% of the Indian population within five years. 3. Most crucially of all, and in a new kind of use, as literally 'public property', and therefore 'in the service of what the public wants'. Given the virtual impossibility by now of even assuming that 'the public' wants anything but entertainment, this definition clearly clashed with the first: if we shall restrict software to what the public actually wants, then why on earth should it remain non-commercial?, as advocates of the currently-banned DTH (direct-to-home) service have often argued. This was however not as crucial as the conflict that follows. 4. As a 'public service', widely and commonly interpreted as 'not what the public wants Journal of Arts 6' Ideas