C.M. Ibrahim may not be the minister he once was, thanks to S. Jaipal Reddy as well as Jayanti Natarajan, but his legacy survives. And not, surprisingly, in the Information and Broadcasting Ministry mandarins but in the echelons of the bureaucracy where `national interest' covers a multitude of governmental monopolistic stances.

Nowhere is this most evident than in the sudden distancing of the I&B Ministry, under its new media-conscious minister, from the thinking that went into the Broadcasting Bill.

The shift is evident not just in the discovery that mandatory uplinking might just lead to foreign networks leaving for foreign shores altogether but also in the belief that elements such as cross-media control hitherto upheld as having been borrowed from advanced nations such as the US and UK may have been incorrectly applied.

So when you hear Jaipal Reddy repeating for the nth time that he is merely the foster father of the Bill, don't be surprised. That's exactly what his bureaucrats now say about themselves. The question that begs the answer, therefore, is who will claim paternity?

Now that Ibrahim is suspiciously silent in public on the document that he was once so proud of, there appears to be only one taker for the role, and that is the Cabinet Secretary, T.S.R. Subramanian. He is reported to have told US officials that ``broadcasting should not be and could not be treated as part of the opening up of the economy and the liberalisation process'' and that there is no reason to worry about the proposed legislation as it is based on the laws of the UK and the US, a fact his own colleagues are now disputing.

His statements are in keeping with both the Ministry of Home Affairs view on the Bill when it was submitted to them in draft form as well as that of the Committee of Secretaries when it met earlier in the year.

The Ministry of Home Affairs felt very strongly about the ``interest of national security'' and even wanted the Home Secretary to be included in the Broadcast Authority of India (a suggestion that was quashed by the I&B Ministry).

The Committee of Secretaries recommendation focused almost exclusively on the Bill being urgently needed to control the `powerful digital Direct-To-Home services likely to be introduced in the country in the near future'. This was the thinking that permeated the final draft that was circulated for the approval of the Cabinet (so important was it considered that it found mention in the second clause itself).

The Committee of Secretaries also reportedly recommended that in order not to jeopardise the ``security interests of the country'', as and when an applicant approaches the Wireless Adviser to assign a frequency, a reference will have to be made to the Intelligence Bureau. That's not all. The Intelligence Bureau would then have to make a reference to the Research and Analysis Wing.

This is the thinking Subramanian dubs as liberal, not conservative! This is also the thinking that was first propounded in an unsigned two-page note that was circulated in the I&B Ministry in September 1996, which said DTH (which is a `sort of private communication on public airwaves between the DTH company and the viewer' what communication isn't?) is dangerous unless its management and control is left in Indian hands.

Of course, because Subramanian's points are made to US officials, they immediately acquire ultra-nationalistic overtones and questioning it would invariably label one as a neo-imperialist agent.

But there is a space between foreign broadcasting interests and national (both government and private) interests. It is illogical to assume that the State and private Indian broadcasters know national interest best.

What about the poor viewer, the mythical common person that the Joint Parliamentary Committee will soon apparently go in search of in Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai? Why should one assume that Zee TV's Subhash Chandra Geol would know the national interest (which one presumes is to be equated with public interest) better than his Australia-born partner Rupert Murdoch and his almost all-Indian team? Why listen to either? Why cannot the viewers decide on their own, given the absence of responsible politicians?

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.