B P Sanjay
The modernization label ascribed to Nehru has spawned many debates in analysing his policies with regard to the onerous and unenviable task of nation building. Nehru¿s views towards the press is framed in oft repeated references to the fact that he believed in retaining the contours of freedom of expression subsumed in the freedom of the press as is normally suggested and argued. For Nehru, "freedom of expression was an inalienable human right. He was for criticism of persons in authority and a free press. A free press for him was an essential attribute of the democratic process. He would rather have a free press with all its attendant ills than a suppressed or regulated press."[i] Nehru also believed in regular interaction with the press. His press conferences have been described as one of the instruments for promoting democracy:
"The Nehru era, it is perhaps needless to add, was the journalists` delight. Jawaharlal Nehru was rigorously regular in holding press conferences — as a rule once a month — because he considered the press conference as one of the instruments for promoting democracy. Of course, the numbers were small then and there was no television. A commission room in Vigyan Bhavan and, before it was built, a committee room in Parliament House could accommodate us all. Mercifully, security was also minimal. On the dot at the appointed time, Nehru would take his seat at the dais and start the proceedings. He had devised an excellent system of inviting the Press to mention the broad topics it wanted to discuss. He would then jot them down, have his say on a subject, allow any number of supplementary questions on it, and then move on to the next topic. The verbal feast usually lasted 90 minutes."[ii]
The Nehruvian era was marked by an overwhelming belief in mass media and its perceived role in development and nation building. While it is difficult and perhaps ambitious to comment on the general trends in social sciences at that time it can be safely said that the power of media was assumed to be very high supported by successes in especially war and conflict contexts. Terms and concepts such as publicity, propaganda and public opinion were freely used with implied caution about its impact under Fascist dispensations. Advocacy for mass media, especially broadcasting, was very high and at the same time it was also recognized that relegating entertainment and upholding development and nation building was perhaps more viable to a leadership that had established modernization as an underlying framework for its policies and programmes.
The modernization paradigms pertaining to mass media were crystalised in communication scholarship emanating particularly from the US. The passing of the traditional society, mass media and national development, mass media and political development and diffusion studies pertaining to health and agriculture were the main drivers in upholding the argument for the development of mass media in developing nations. "In the years subsequent to independence, India had ventured out to become progressive and industrialized in keeping with the west-inspired dominant paradigm of development of the 1950s through 1970s. Mass media were seen as instruments to change the mind-set of the people and to create a climate for modernization and development through centralized economic planning, large-scale industrialization and the expansion of basic communication infrastructure (Lerner, 1958; Schramm, 1964; Rogers, 1976)."[iii]
On this front ideological differences and the camps we wanted to be in did not matter, as belief in mass media was overwhelming. For example, erstwhile Soviet Union and Mao¿s beliefs and practices endorse the overall belief in communications for achieving national integration. These were sufficient counters to override any opposition on this score. While socialist oriented philosophy guided the approach to broadcasting in the formative years the press seemed to have inherited and promoted capitalism and consumerism since Independence. Specifically with regard to Press, Robin Jeffrey has noted that the formation of Audit Bureau of Circulation, The Registrar of Newspapers in India and National Readership surveys "refract both the efforts of government and the forces of capitalism."[iv]
The Nehruvian approach towards institutionalising the Planning Commission and the centralized approach towards development coincided with his belief that plans and programmes have to be carried and communicated to the people. His letter[v] to the Chief Ministers of various states in the early fifties symbolizes the need for creating awareness and the importance of information. His belief in press freedom perhaps withheld his otherwise persuasive abilities to seek their cooperation in his modernization efforts. He addressed his concerns to the press by asking them to cooperate.[vi] The press, based on its experience during the nationalist and Independence struggle, had perceived an adversarial role for itself. Further, the elite bias towards the English language press to some extent alienated the administration from people¿s problems. For example, circulation of English dailies was higher than Hindi dailies and this is evident from the annual reports of the Registrar of newspapers for the Nehruvian era.[vii] The inherited legacy of the Indian press had strong association with British and American conceptions of freedom and democracy and the role of the press.
The limited access to press by the government for propagating its development programmes led to a default faith in broadcasting which had safely passed into the hands of the Central Government. Much has been said and written about broadcasting initially by retired senior administrative and programming staff and later by others. While bureaucratic intervention and snippets of policy history are evident in these writings-political, economic and sociological perspectives are the subject matter of contemporary scholarship. The Nehruvian era of broadcasting inherited the Reithean legacy where AIR set out after independence to `improve` the masses by giving them not "what they sought to hear but what they ought to hear". "The objectives of broadcasting in India sought to provide information, education and wholesome entertainment, keeping in view the motto, Bahujan Hitaya; Bahujan Sukhaya i.e. the benefit and happiness of large sections of the people, and strive to produce and transit varied programmes designed to awaken, inform, enlighten, educate, entertain and enrich all sections of the people, with due regard to the fact that the national broadcast audience consists of a whole series of public"[viii]
Nehru¿s tenure as Prime Minister was marked by at least two powerful ministers of information and broadcasting, Patel and Keskar. In the initial phase, with Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the first and ostensibly the most influential Minister for Information & Broadcasting, at the helm of affairs, a scheme to build up `pilot` stations with one KW medium wave transmitters was taken up to expand radio broadcasting infrastructure in state capitals and in border areas and to include the linguistic and cultural areas that had remained uncovered. The re-modeling of programmes towards a "nationalist image, a countrywide broadcast of national programmes and the promotion of Hindi as the national language" became a guiding principle. Subsequently, it also saw an unusual but short-lived experiment in the use of folk media for social communication.
B.V. Keskar, perhaps the longest serving minister (for 10 years) of information and broadcasting patronized classical and folk music. His aversion to ¿cheap and vulgar¿ film music and the concomitant rise of Radio Ceylon¿s commercial service is well known. The inevitable launch of Vividh Bharati is regarded as a response to stem the rising popularity of Radio Ceylon. Critics of Keskar¿s policies have other theories including his strong roots in one form of Maharastrian culture that disdained particular varieties of music. Nehru¿s tenure was also marked by the unsavory episode pertaining to the Voice of America offer for setting up a transmitter in the wake of set backs during the conflict with China. This episode in a way also indicts the Nehruvian era for not building and cultivating a communications infrastructure that could reach out to the people in such crises. Apart from lapses in foreign policy, which have been analysed extensively, the role of the then media set up deserves closer scrutiny by scholars.
Critique of Nehru approaches to modernization and its top down and trickle down ideas has been the subject matter of past and contemporary scholarship. The ideas are reflective of the overall concern about the failure of certain development options worked out and implemented in the first two decades of our independence. To some extent the faith in broadcasting was overwhelming but in a way it had not translated into any significant allocation for development of broadcasting in India. The number of radio sets (to some extent reliable as we had the licence raj then) was around 50 plus Lakhs. It had grown from around 5.5 Lakhs at the time of Independence to nearly 55 Lakhs by 1965-the end of the Nehruvian era.
A realistic assessment that individual ownership of radio sets was perhaps beyond the means of the intended listeners led to the formulation of a scheme for community listening. It has been observed that by 1965 the number of community listening sets had escalated to 150,000 and the scheme did not thrive due to replacement of batteries and maintenance problems.
On television, clearly there was considerable resistance and perception that it was luxury that India could not afford. It was also based on the already clear impact of the medium in other countries. The limited transmission and launch of television albeit on an experimental basis in 1959 could very well be considered token and reflective of the radio establishment¿s enthusiasm rather than any Nehru diktat. Scholars may like to pore over his pronouncements to argue the contrary but clearly the medium was not on the nation¿s agenda. However, the Chanda Committee in it chapter on television does note the pro and con arguments regarding the medium which was reflective of the thought processes during Nehru¿s tenure.
The philosophy of broadcasting and its use for development was premised on providing exogenous expert inputs. The role of radio in green revolution has been acknowledged so much that a rice variety propagated through radio came to be known as radio rice.
The foundations for Science and Technology that Nehru laid and the creation of the Department of Atomic Energy and its subsequent diversification to space programme has one significant contribution through the ideas of Vikram Sarabhai and his team. It was also the formative years of satellite development internationally and there was a slow but deliberate movement towards capitalizing on certain civilian spin offs that certain military/defense technologies offered. Space technology was one of them and communication satellites were the frontier products. It has already been mentioned that resource allocation for broadcasting sector did not necessarily match its perceived importance. Justifiably there were other competing priorities.
What satellite technology in due course promised was a choice between terrestrial based expansion versus satellite technology. This choice was more relevant for television and clearly there was a conflict between the arguments contained in the Master plan of AIR and the leapfrog potential that satellite technology promised for introducing and expanding television in India. The satellite technology brigade was led by Sarabhai and crystalised by his thoughts on television and development. A NAMEDIA document subsequently labelled this enterprise as the Nehru-Sarabhai approach to communication and development.
The Sarabhai approach advocated the use of satellite and satellite based communication technologies for telecom, meteorology and broadcasting. The arguments for broadcasting, particularly, television are crystalised in the text book case of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (1975-76) which essentially reversed the logic of broadcast development as a spread phenomenon from the urban to rural areas to rural first and that too in the most backward districts of six states. Nostalgically it can be argued that the villagers in the backward districts of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh etc had experienced direct reception of television programmes much earlier than the urbanites.
Community listening earlier and community viewing through SITE had certain egalitarian social objectives and to some extent had overcome certain social dynamics in a village context. However, its instruction overload negated the good intentions and laid the foundations for fulfilling their nascent appetite for entertainment. What followed after SITE and Mrs. Gandhi¿s desire in centralized communication system firmly entrenched broadcasting as an important media unit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Her detractors in the euphoria after winning elections in 1977 did very little to restore the credibility of the media.
The Nehruvian faith in the so-called BBC model of broadcasting has many admirers but few practitioners. The structure of Prasar Bharati occasionally reminds us of its so-called autonomous structure. The Supreme Court¿s intervention has no doubt de monopolized broadcasting albeit in a very narrow sense.
The proliferation of television channels, the commercial expansion of the FM radio sector and ferment in the print media sector frequently raise questions about media and its role in social sector communication. The struggle for community broadcasting is currently locked in the so called GoM reference and may well come after the commercial players have earmarked territories and drafted their binding conditions for such stations. Seminarians never forget to recall the Nehruvian concern for creating awareness through communication media. His faith in a free press and a promised ideal towards a BBC like broadcasting set up are often hailed. A significant contribution that in a way had an induction effect was Nehru¿s avowed policy of non-alignment. Although in his lifetime the ideas never got articulated in communication related issues. The call for a New World Information and Communication Order in 1980s refers to certain basics that echo the ideas of Nehru. Since his death the paradigms have been revised and we have new paradigms that talk about participation and horizontal communication structures. It may well be an interesting topic for scholars to thread and link the foundations of modernization and its link to communication policies in the Nehruvian era.
[i] K.E. Thomas, "Jawaharlal Nehru as Journalist," Vidura, March-April 1991. p.27
[ii] Inder Malhotra, "PM and the Press," The Hindu, November 20, 2002.
[iii] Kanchan Kumar, History of Broadcasting. Click here for link.
[iv] Robin Jeffrey, "Monitoring Newspapers and Understanding the Indian State," Asian Survey, Vol. 34, No. 8, August 1994, pp. 748-763.
[v] "It is no good my complaining, because it is our fault, if we cannot put across to our people the magnitude of the work that is being done in India at present…"Quoted in M.V. Desai, Communication Policies in India, Paris: Unesco, 1977, p. 75.
[vi] Nehru while inaugurating the annual session of the All India Newspaper Editors¿ Conference in August 1954 exhorted the press to create a mental approach among the people based on Gandhji¿s principles. He urged the press to share in the gigantic task of development that was proceeding apace all over the country. He complained that inadequate attention was being paid by newspapers to social questions like the rights of women…elimination of communal bigotry. By providing a correct background "newspapers could exercise continuous pressure and bring about a change in public opinion. Click here to see.
[vii] In 1959 it was 1128 (in thousands) for English dailies compared to 667 for Hindi. Although the number of Hindi dailies was two times more than English dailies. Similarly it was 1273 and 767 respectively in 1961. In 1963 it was 1453 and 782. See comparable chart in K.E. Eapen, "Daily Newspapers in India: Their status and problems," Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 44. No. 3, autumn 1967, pp. 520-532.
[viii] Kanchan Kumar, History of Broadcasting cited earlier.