Bills, Codes and Women
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Posted by Ammu Joseph September 18th, 2007 |
As media-watchers in the US prepare responses to the FCC studies, I thought I’d mention that posts by Carolyn Byerly and Jennifer Pozner in August informed several of my recent articles on the latest, still controversial efforts by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in India to regulate the relatively young but burgeoning private broadcast media in the country.
The draft Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, 2007 (a.k.a. Broadcast Bill) and the Self-Regulation Guidelines for the Broadcasting Sector (a.k.a. Content Code) unveiled by the Ministry in the third week of July have raised quite a bit of heat and dust within the Indian media community.
Much of the discussion has focused on the Code, particularly the section relating to news and current affairs programming, and its likely effects on freedom of expression. Although initial reactions from the media industry reflected some unhappiness with the Bill’s provisions relating to media ownership, that issue has subsequently (ominously?) slipped out of sight.
Thanks to objections from the broadcast industry as well as a number of unrelated political crises (including one precipitated by the US-India nuclear deal!), the draft legislation did not make it to Parliament during the monsoon session, which ended last week. And broadcasters have been given an unspecified but clearly limited period of time to come up with their own guidelines and system for self-regulation.
Although women media professionals as well as women activists in India have long been concerned about gender representations in the media, neither group has been particularly active in responding to the legislation. One can’t blame them. The Bill includes just one reference to women, obviously a fairly casual attempt to be politically correct, and the Code’s efforts to “protect” women appear both too much and too little.
I felt obliged to comment on the lone reference to women in the draft Bill in my response to the legislation, sent to the Ministry in August. But there was really nothing much one could say except: “The provision that one third of the members of the proposed Broadcasting Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) and two of the six members of the Public Service Broadcasting Council (PSBC) should be women is welcome as an effort to achieve gender balance in such institutions. However, it is important to note that gender is not the only criterion that needs to be considered in efforts to ensure inclusivity and broad-based representation of different sections of society, and that due attention must also be paid to aptitude and qualification.” The latter comment, which may seem strange, was necessary because such semi-official institutions are often packed with political appointees boasting neither attribute.
The Code is a bundle of contradictions. The confusion is, in fact, implicit in its title and nature: guidelines for self-regulation issued by the government! It is also replete with ill-defined terms that can be misused for undemocratic ends and can backfire on women – e.g., “good taste,” “public sensitivity,” “general community standards of decency and civility,” “excessive violence, nudity, obscenity and vulgarity,” etc.
As I pointed out in my comments, “The rise in moral policing (official and unofficial), as well as censorship by mob, in recent years already constitutes a serious threat to freedom of expression, with the media and cultural/artistic work bearing the brunt of such anti-democratic activities. There is a real danger that the Code in its present form will provide grist to the mill of such forces.” The protests against Canadian film-maker Deepa Mehta’s “Fire,” and the shooting of another of her films, “Water,” were among the several incidents that have specifically targeted visual explorations of women’s sexuality and oppression.
The section of the Code introducing categorisation and certification for television programmes (along the lines used for cinema) includes a number of themes. One of them deals with “Sex, Obscenity & Nudity” and, predictably, that’s where women are brought in. The stipulation that content should not “present the figure of a woman, her form or body or any part thereof in such a way as to have the effect of being indecent or derogatory to women or depict women as mere objects or symbols of sexual desires or behaviour” is typical.
The details of what is not to be permitted even in programmes meant for adult audiences would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing that Indian officialdom is still so narrowly focused on body parts: for example, “female breasts” (sic) loom large on the list of prohibited items!
For anyone interested in the more serious aspects of this attempt at media regulation in India, here are links to three of the eight articles I’ve written over the past month and some. Since these refer to examples from other countries (including the US), they may be of additional interest internationally (NB Editors responsible for the first and last headlines!):
Public missing in Broadcast Bill debate, Whose media are they anyway?, and Don’t shackle the waves
An update on the situation should appear on India Together later this week.