D Ashish Rajadhyaksha I am grateful to Tejaswini Niranjana and Madhava Prasad for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. 'Suggested Basic Guidelines for Programming and Advertising Content of Transnational Broadcasts', 147 formulated at a Seminar on Legal and Regulatory Aspects of Satellite Broadcasting (New Delhi Oct 1993), AMIC/Broadcast Engineering Society of India. Repr. in V.S. Gupta/Vir Bala Aggarwal, Media Policy and Nation Building: Select Issues and Themes. New Delhi: Concept Publishing (1996), pp 126-127. 2. An important legal intervention in this is Indira Jaising's writ petition at the Bombay High Court (Writ petition No. 1980 of 1986, Indira Jaising Petitioner V/s The Union of India & Ors. Respondents), where she had argued that the censoring of her statements on the Doordarshan programme Sach Ki Parchaiyan on the Muslim Women's (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill 1986 violated her constitutional right to freedom of speech. According to the petition, 'the purpose of television is to serve public good. The government therefore runs and holds the television on behalf of the public and as a trustee of the public. It is the medium which provides the maximum access to views for the public at large. In order to effectively exercise the right under Article 19(l)(a) of the Constitution, i.e. freedom of speech and expression it is necessary for members of the public to free access to at least Government controlled media subject only to the Constitutional safeguards of public order decency or morality. This right to express one's views is all the more important when the topic on which views are sought to be expressed a contemporary and widely debated topic and the person desirous of having such access is known to be closely connected with the subject.' 3. Section 35/zc of the Bill defines a public service broadcaster as simply 'any body created by an Act of Parliament for the purpose of public service broadcasting'. 4. See Nicholas Garnham, Structures of Television. London: BFI (1980) for an elaboration of the 'public service' model. In addition, there can be no reasonable logic by which licensed channels can be forced to uplink from India, which would make them voluntarily susceptible to Indian censorship laws, other than to see them as public services. 5. The Act intended to set in place an autonomous agency called the Prasar Bharati Corporation, to whom the assets of both Doordarshan and All India Radio will be leased in perpetuity. As many have pointed out, the differences between this Corporation and the proposed BAI have still to be ironed out: the Corporation was supposed to look after 'public service broadcasting', while the BAI would have become a kind of regulator of the rest of the media environment (see Economic & Political Weekly editorial, 'Hurdles to Cross', 32:44/45, Nov 8-14 1997, p. 2840, which points out that the Charter of the Prasar Bharati makes it the 'custodian of all the air waves' and asks where that leaves the BAI as licensing authority of those waves). 6. Reproduced from Gupta/Aggarwal, already cited, p. 95. 7. Rajeev Dhawan, 'Whose TV Is It Anyway?'. The Hindu, Bangalore, 14 February 1997. 8. National Workshop on the Broadcast Bill, 1997, RAPA, IDPA, Advertising Club, Bombay, IAA (Indian Chapter), Background paper prepared by Ashok Vaishnavi, Amit Dev and Kavitha Kumar 9. Voices For Change, Bangalore,l:2 (1997). The statement follows the 'Bangalore Declaration on Radio', a collective statement signed by 60 NGOs'during the Bangalore Consultation on Community Radio, Sept 11-14, 1996. See Voices 4:3 (1996) for the earlier statement. 10. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society, Mass: MIT (1991), pp. 79-87. 11. Prabhat Patnaik, 'Nation-State in the Era of "Globalization"', Economic & Political Weekly, 30:33 (Aug . 19, 1995), pp. 2052-53 Numbers 32-33