D Ashish Rajadhyaksha but what the state thinks the public should have'. The categories 3 and 4 were virtually written into both judgement and BHi^stnnately contradictory, subscribing to the commonly held assumption that the concept of 'public service' clashes with that of 'public property'. While Jaipal Reddy's preface acknowledged thc^t 'It is felt that the public service broadcaster alone will not be able to meet the needs and urges of the people in 133 terms of variety and plurality', the Bill nevertheless explicitly exempted a 'public service broadcaster' from being subject to the licensing process - a major concession - while offering no new clarification as to what such a service should do in these times given its acknowledged limitations.3 In this context it is perhaps necessary to mention, and this essay later explores some of the consequences of this, that the category of public service broadcasting- commonly seen as a British concept attributed to Lord Reith, the first Director General of the BBC and enshrined in the BBC's Royal Charter - has usually been associated with a certain mode, a genre, of broadcasting that that system instituted: of licensed agencies who use national public resources to broadcast to the public at large. Therefore it becomes important to assert that the very process of licensing that the Broadcast Bill sought to introduce is not just a matter of granting permission for commercial channels to exist but will - at least in the sense in which the process is understood in Britain in the instances of both ITV and Channel-4 - confer certain rights to th^ recipients of these licenses: the rights being that these channels too be considered public services of a kind.4 If the category of 'public service broadcaster' as explicitly exemptfrom any license requirements (sec 9/3 of the Bill) refers only to Doordarshan, this could emerge - even if it didn't at the time - as a problematic issue in itself that commercial channels will certainly contest, especially if the differences become too glaring - how are they not public service when they too telecast virtually for free, show Mera Bharat Mahaan ads, run computer courses and offer educational counselling (as Zee-TV says it does)? More significantly however, through the entire debate it remained unclear as to just what the status of Doordarshan was likely to be in the eyes of the proposed Broadcast Authority of India (BAI), and the already-existing Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) if the Prasar Bharati Bill had been rushed through parliament as the then-government intended to do.5 If Doordarshan were corporatized as an autonomous entity the question of whether it could validly claim a status significantly different from any of the other competing channels was not one that had been adequately raised and is, at any rate, more negotiable than one might have thought. A new category of 'public' was clearly being put in place in all this. This new 'property-owning public' was, at first glance anyway, a somewhat different entity - a different negotiating ground" from what we have known, and in much recent theory analysed, as the relationship between the post-Independence Indian State and its citizens in the past five decades. This essay will explore the logic of founding this new category of the public in broadcast media, where it will clearly, and quite directly, impact - alongside the obvious political issues - a Numbers 32-33