The Judgement: Re-Forming the 'Public' directed with the Russian Yuri Aldokin, 1982) and his serial Bharat Ek Khoj (1988), or the nationalist megaserials Hum Log (1984-85) and Buniyaad (1987-88) - and in turn itself complains to be a victim of market forces.45 This split, between two areas of State operation extended into two definitions of State 146 functioning, is effectively now complete with the Supreme Court's judgement. The State-as-government is no longer capable of cultural production that can in any way be described as 'authentic', mainly because it has no longer a conception of what the 'nation-state of the future' would be like. As a consequence the public is elevated as possessing a gaze that is explicitly not controlled by this definition of the State, but rather, recalls its originary functions as a now-transnationalized homo nationalis. The mediation that is now required is not so much between the 'population' and the 'nation-state of the future' as between the 'population' -elevated to the level of a fully consuming 'public' - and a transnationalized, abstracted, civil society. This civil society is ambiguous, and ironically it is the job of the government of the day to put it in place in such a way that it represents the hypothetical alternative of a 'good' State which, while it can only be seen in symbolic terms, can nevertheless be materialised in the way that the technology of the future would claim to govern the 'nation-state of the future', claim to underscore its eternal goodness. In time, as in the past, this move too will generate a set of practices which will help us clarify just what it means in terms of individual viewers, of cinema or television, and individual users of digital technologies. Only then would the real evidence be in place. AFTERWORD This essay was originally presented in February 1997 at the workshop on 'Gender and Media', Hyderabad. It was written at a time when the Broadcast Bill had just been released, and it is contextualized by the intense debate that ensued, among journalists, media practitioners and political groups. The fall of the United Front government and the subsequent broadcasting policy by the BJP-led coalition have fundamentally transformed the terms of that debate. Former I&B Minister Sushma Swaraj's nationalism, in allowing uplinking facilities for indigenous channels, in reconfiguring Prasar Bharati once again as subservient to parliamentary control, and most recently the Prime Minister's 'task force' on Information Technology - a central thrust of which is to indigenize the internet - are important markers in the transformation of broadcast media policy in the past year. However, despite the re-injection of indigenism as a category into the 'state versus people' divide that the original Supreme Court judgement had opened up, the impact of liberalization - and the role of new media in determining the very category of a newly liberalized citizen subject - continues to hold relevance if seen in a rather longer time-frame. In this sense, it is suggested that despite the changed evidence, the basic arguments in this paper continue to hold relevance even today. October 1998 Journal of Arts 6' Ideas