President’s rule in Bihar
WHAT was happening in Bihar until Mr Laloo Yadav tightened his stranglehold on it by belligerent means was generally described as "manageable chaos". During his second term as Chief Minister, the area slipped into "functioning anarchy".

The Group and groupism
IT is called G-15, meaning the group of 15 developing nations (which just concluded its summit), but it has 17 members and that is only a minor paradox. It came into being when the cold war was very much on and the USA and other countries incessantly talked of setting apart a percentage of their national income to help poor countries.

BUILDING A TOLERANT SOCIETY
by D.R. Chaudhry
HINDUISM is normally rated as a highly tolerant religious belief system. Because of its liberal ethos it could accommodate and assimilate divergent and conflicting belief systems. Now a high degree of intolerance being displayed by a section of its followers has come as a rude shock.

A dogma is not a religion
by Satish K. Kapoor
A TREE cannot be judged by its rotten fruit. Nor can a hoary tradition such as Hinduism be judged by its politicised fringe of fundamentalists. The Vedic seers prayed: “Oh God, lead me from darkness to light, from untruth to truth, from mortality to immortality”.

DD must get its act together
by Tavleen Singh
PRAMOD MAHAJAN and I were, by a fortuitous coincidence, on the same flight to Mumbai last week. It gave me the chance to spend nearly an hour talking to him about his controversial decision to withdraw autonomy to Doordarshan and about rumours in Delhi’s political circles of ‘a deal’ with Rupert Murdoch on the issue of DTH or direct to home television.

Pity poor Victor Bannerjee
by Amita Malik
WHEN I heard that Victor Bannerjee was to anchor the BBC programme Film India, my heart leapt with joy. For years Indian TV or at least TV directed to India, has needed a good anchor (the Indian role model being Barry Norman) for a worthwhile TV programme on the cinema. The nearest we have got to it is Nikhil Kapur who has kept up a steady minimum standard on Star Movies with his programme, This Week, That Year. Nikhil does his homework, he has style eloquence and clearly enjoys his programme.

75 Years Ago

Offering bribe to customs officer
THE Chief Presidency Magistrate today passed orders in the case in which Lilaram and Bibagtulla had been charged with having attempted to bribe Mr G.T. Austin, Superintendent of Preventive Customs, Madras, on the Ist of January.

President’s rule in Bihar

WHAT was happening in Bihar until Mr Laloo Yadav tightened his stranglehold on it by belligerent means was generally described as "manageable chaos". During his second term as Chief Minister, the area slipped into "functioning anarchy". As we have said repeatedly, no citizen's life and limb can be described as safe throughout the length and breadth of the province. Central Bihar has surpassed the rest of the area in wanton killings. It is sitting on a powder keg. It is not possible to police every village —not even in and around Jehanabad. Narayanpura is a small hamlet. It is not very far from Gaya. A cluster of villages around it is inhabited by Dalits and such persons as do not get even one meal a day to keep their body and soul together. Barely a fortnight ago, Shankarbigha, an obscure village, made bloody headlines. The carnage there was deprecated more severely by people residing outside Bihar than those living in the hapless part of the country. Ranvir Sena goons killed sleeping villagers indiscriminately. They were reportedly looking for leftist leaders but could not find any. They had weapons and they shed blood. Nobody from among the masterminds has been arrested yet. Narayanpura's Dalits were either having their frugal meal or sleeping after a long day of labour when they were mowed down. It would be wrong to believe that the number of those killed would stop at 12. Many wounded persons are lying in a critical condition in the main hospital at Gaya. Mr Laloo Yadav, along with the surrogate Chief Minister, Mrs Rabri Devi, has visited the place and shed crocodile tears. He had said at Shankarbigha that no culprit would be spared. All culprits, in fact, have been spared! The course of events on Friday conforms to the old pattern. Governor Sundar Singh Bhandari diagnosed the mania on Thursday as "a result of the lack of alertness on the part of the state administration". In effect, he held the law-keepers responsible for the slaughter. It would be naive to call the Shankarbigha and Narayanpura killings as sequels to the 1991 massacre. There has been no quiet period for at least a decade.

The fallout of the heightened caste-class conflict has made the entire belt violence-prone. "Ranvir Baba ki jai" is no battle-cry. It is an announcement of death by goons employed by upper-caste people. If Mr Bhandari appeals to the Centre to declare Bihar a disturbed area, he would not be exceeding his moral brief. No extra vigilance has been seen in the heartland of Dr Rajendra Prashad's and Lokanayak Jayaprakash Narayan's area of birth. We have pleaded for President's rule time and again. President K. R. Narayanan has a philosophical understanding of the agony of the Dalits. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has no time to visit Bihar. Home Minister L.K. Advani finds the world too much with him and there is no compulsion for him to look at Shankarbigha and Narayanpura. Congress President Sonia Gandhi would go to that spot of mourning to wipe some tears which she would find non-existent because time would dry the eyes up. She is among the protectors of the proxy ruler. What can one do in such a situation? Bihar has been taken to the brink of disaster. If some lives have to be saved, President's rule imposed on Friday night has to be strictly enforced. paramilitary forces have to be given full control of the law and order machinery. The hour of the devil that struck long ago refuses to yield to peaceful time.

The Group and groupism

IT is called G-15, meaning the group of 15 developing nations (which just concluded its summit), but it has 17 members and that is only a minor paradox. It came into being when the cold war was very much on and the USA and other countries incessantly talked of setting apart a percentage of their national income to help poor countries. Globalisation and WTO were a distant idea and the IMF and World Bank were stiff and insensitive. South Korea was only a tiger cub and not a roaring adult. G-15 has in its genes a confrontationist streak, conceived as it was to take on the West and demand reparation for centuries of exploitation and unfavourable terms of trade. The Third World is happy clutching at the mirage of barrier-free trade and free flow of capital to break out of the shackles of poverty and social backwardness. It remains a dream despite the nightmare of East and South-East Asia, Mexico and now Brazil. G-15 has taken on itself the role of speaking on behalf of the developing countries in the three continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America, evolving a common strategy and presenting a united front to the G-8, the rich countries club. And all this is proving to be very difficult, more difficult than ending poverty.

At one end is Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamed, and he sees in globalisation of trade and services, including the massive movement of dollars, a new form of colonialism. He argues that if the world succumbs to the lure of free trade, the beneficiary will solely be those countries which have much to trade and also have the power to fix the price. The same for the emerging regime of free entry and exit of capital. No prize is offered to name the sure winners in this eve-of-millennium game and also the sure losers. No, assert those members who were on the side of the West during much of the cold war. They want to engage the rich block in negotiations and not in a verbal shootout. The peace brigade spends much of the time during the summit meetings in containing the damage the so-called hot heads cause. The latter are more keen on letting off steam, and perpetual mediators like India devote all the time in trying to reconcile the two irreconcilable approaches. Where is the time then to concentrate on the primary task of wrenching some concessions from the G-8 and rewriting some international laws to protect and promote the interests of the developing countries? Of course, there is no time or energy left. This is reflected in the spectacular underachievement of G-15.

BUILDING A TOLERANT SOCIETY
Social roots of intolerance
by D.R. Chaudhry

HINDUISM is normally rated as a highly tolerant religious belief system. Because of its liberal ethos it could accommodate and assimilate divergent and conflicting belief systems. Now a high degree of intolerance being displayed by a section of its followers has come as a rude shock. But Hinduism is not a one-dimensional phenomenon. It has a dual face. It suffers from a unique contradiction. It is tolerant as well as intolerant; it is liberal as well as constricted. This is the dilemma of Hinduism and without understanding this in its correct perspective, it is not possible to understand the current wave of intolerance in India.

Semitic religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam derive the strength of their world view from one holy book and one prophet. But there is no such thing in case of Hinduism. There are scores of religious scriptures and hundreds of deities in the Hindu pantheon. It is this eclectic nature of Hinduism that is responsible for the diversity of its composition and catholicity of its vision. This imbued it with a spirit of tolerance and freedom, enriching its tradition greatly.

But the process of impoverishment and emasculation got embedded into the fabric of the rich Hindu tradition in the wake of the evolution of the Hindu social order in the post-Vedic period. The caste structure and the patriarchal family system, as its two most important constituents, made it highly intolerant and repressive. Tolerance and freedom got confined to the top of the pyramid, leaving those at its bottom to contend with a high level of intolerance and repression. This threw the bulk of the population comprising “ati shudras” (SCs), “shudras”, (OBCs) women and tribals at the margins of the Hindu social order. Lowly castes were reduced to subhuman existence and woman was rated as inferior to man. And tribals, with their peculiar belief systems and deities, were more of pagans and animists than Hindus, and were thus not a part of the Hindu social order as such, Manusmiriti, the most important treatise on Hindu social order, prescribes harsh punishment for the lowly for violation of the social code but lets off those at the top lightly for a similar transgression. It stipulates that woman has to live under male tutelage right from her infancy to her last breath.

The highly stratified and iniquitous social order spelt untold misery for the bulk in the Hindu social set up. The Sufis and “sant” poets of the Bhakti movement in medieval times provided some solace by preaching universal humanism but failed to unleash a social movement to change its structure. The nineteenth century Hindu reformers tried to reform Hinduism from within without questioning its basics. Coming to modern times, Mahatma Gandhi vehemently attacked the caste system and talked of woman uplift but all this never figured as a significant issue in the discourse of other important Congress leaders. It eventually fell to the victims to work out their own salvation. Jotirao Phule and Dr B.R. Ambedkar from Maharashtra and Ramasamy Naicker of Tamil Nadu launched a powerful crusade against the inegalitarian Brahmanical ideology. The emergence of the gender question as an important part of the liberation discourse in our times posed a potent threat to the patriarchal family system. Mandalisation of politics during V.P. Singh’s brief rule, ensuring a slot for the OBCs, in the administrative structure, further hastened the process.

It is the growing challenge from below posed by the marginalised and subaltern sections of society, the dregs and the wretches of the Indian earth, for their due place under the sun that has given rise to the growing intolerance of the sections which have been in occupation of the top of the Hindu social pyramid. The best way to maintain it in its pristine purity (“sanatan” is the term for it) is to treat the Hindu social order as a monolith, ignoring all its diversities and stratifications. The Hindutava talk of one culture, one nation and one people is to be seen in this light, ignoring the hard fact of Indian society being an amalgam of diverse nationalities, cultural and religious streams.

Hindutava, as defined by Veer Savarkar, encompasses all those who treat India as their “pitrubhu” (fatherland) and “punyabhu” (holy land). Muslims and Christians cannot be its integral part because their source of religious belief lies outside the Indian soil. They can stay in India only as second class citizens, as stressed by Guru Golwalker. Hate object is necessary to build mass hysteria among Hindus to promote the cause of Hindutava. First Muslims were picked up for this purpose. Babri Masjid was picked up as a symbol of Muslim oppression of Hindus. Its demolition emboldened the Hidutava forces and now they clamour for Mathura and Kashi.

After setting the score, albeit partial, with Muslims, now Christians have been picked up as a hate object. They are under attack for their alleged forcible conversion of Hindus, especially tribals. But the Hindutava forces have failed to produce a single instance of forcible conversion as a demonstrative illustration. It is largely a desire of the lowliest sections of Hindu society to escape the agony of the caste oppression, which is responsible for conversions. There are instances of some Dalits in western U.P. villages adopting Sikhism during the heyday of the Sikh militancy to escape the caste oppression. The answer is to reform the Hindu social structure but this goes counter to the “sanatnic” essence of the Hindu social order. While laying down a 40-point Hindu agenda, the recently concluded “Dharma Sansad” of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) at Ahmedabad impressed upon the Vajpayee-led Central government to show “enough courage to re-instate Bharat in its true ‘sanatan’ and righteous form”. The choice of the word “sanatan” is significant in this context. The careful selection of Hindu reformers as objects of veneration of Hindutava forces is another significant pointer. Swami Vivekanand is the darling of these forces now a day. A man of Vivekanand’s sensibility would not approve of vandalism, arson and murder. But he has been co-opted for the regressive Hindu agenda because he did not question the caste structure in Hindu society. Swami Dayanand, a radical Hindu reformer of modern times, is being kept at bay by the Hindutava forces. He should be nearer to them because it was he who launched a systematic campaign of reconversion (“shudhi”), being pursued these days by the Hindutava forces. Swami Dayanand is to be eschewed as a dangerous terrain as he crusaded against the caste system, which is the core of “sanatan” Hindu “dharma”. Thus, Hindutava is the sectarian and regimented face of Hinduism. It is a device to homogenise the Hindu society, by ignoring its diversity and plurality. The attempt to whip the diverse elements of the Hindu social order into a monolith in the name of Hindutava is aimed at perpetuating the hegemony of the Brahmanical ideology which is facing a stiff challenge from the emergent forces around issues of caste, gender and equity. This tends to make its votaries and zealots more and more intolerant, repressive, and at times violent.

It was hoped by many that the BJP-led government at the Centre, headed by a moderate Vajpayee, would halt the march of the strident Hindutava forces to keep the liberal and secular fabric of the Indian society intact. There is enough political space for a right-of-the centre party like BJP in the Indian political system. This could be possible if the BJP were an independent political entity. But its relationship with the RSS is symbiotic. It is linked with the Sangh parivar through an umbilical cord. It is unthinkable for the BJP to snap it. The pathetic helplessness of the Vajpayee-led government in the face of the growing assertion of the Hindutava forces is to be seen in this light.

The attempt by the west-centric liberal intellectuals to analyse the Hindutava phenomenon by applying the parameters of fascism in the west would not do. Though it may resemble fascism as it grew in the west in certain ways, yet it is typically indigenous and its roots are to be located into the age-old Hindu social order, which has come under immense strains on account of the emergence of new social forces. The challenge cannot be met by dumping Hinduism in toto as many over-zealous secularists tend to do. There is need to sift grain from the chaff. The liberal and tolerant ethos of Hinduism must be defended to save it from the sectarian and intolerant forces of Hindutava. Culture and ideology are more important sites of contestation than politics in this fight. All secular, democratic and liberal elements must join this battle if the Indian society has to retain its pluralistic character.

BUILDING A TOLERANT SOCIETY
A dogma is not a religion
by Satish K. Kapoor

A TREE cannot be judged by its rotten fruit. Nor can a hoary tradition such as Hinduism be judged by its politicised fringe of fundamentalists. The Vedic seers prayed: “Oh God, lead me from darkness to light, from untruth to truth, from mortality to immortality”. They never stated that the road to light, to truth or to immortality lay through Hinduism alone. The fact of the plurality of religions is clearly recognised in the Bhagavadgita (IV.11). The Shivamahima Stotram (verse 7) says: “As different streams having their sources in different places, all mingle their water in the sea, Oh Lord, so the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee”.

Exclusivism is alien to the Hindu tradition. So is bigotry and intolerance. Hinduism does not have one Prophet or Messiah for all times to come but a cluster of saints, sages, seers and reformers who have appeared from time to time to guide humanity onto the path of righteousness. It does not have one Holy Book to which every one must pay obeisance but a huge mass of sacred literature, which caters to men of different mental dispositions. Even the Vedas are not regarded as a particular set of sacred books but refer to the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different ages, as pointed out by Swami Vivekananda at the Chicago Parliament in 1893.

Different schools of thought - theist, atheist, agnostic, henotheist, pantheist, polytheist, monotheist or absolute monist - coexist in Hinduism and are regarded as variant modes of understanding the supreme reality. Hinduism believes that Truth can be expressed in a hundred thousand ways - each being true in its own way. It is thus ridiculous to enumerate certain fixed dogmas and force everyone to adopt them. Swami Vivekananda remarked in this context that the Christian was not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. “But each must assimilate the others and grow according to its own laws of growth”.

Historically, Hinduism has been the most tolerant and accommodative of all religions providing refuge to tormented minority groups like Syrian Christians, Parsis or Jews. It has no tradition of crusades, the Inquisition or religious extermination as that of Waldenses, Lollards or Albigenses in Christianity. It does not burn its Brunos at the stake or pressurise its Galileos to change their scientific perceptions if they run counter to defunct religious beliefs. It does not bifurcate humanity into the Faithful and the Unfaithful and command the former to overawe the latter through Jihad or religious war.

Members of the Hindu faith are not known to have offered people a choice between embracing a particular religion and death. They have not burnt, sawn or bricked the members of other faiths alive; built pyramids of severed heads, killed millions like guineapigs for refusing to change their religion or indulged in systematic demolition of the abodes of worship of others, like some Islamic rulers of medieval India.

The destruction of Babri Masjid was an isolated case, an aberration of sorts, a departure from the age-old tradition of toleration and it was condemned by a vast majority of Hindus. What prompted it - politics or some ingrained indignation in the Hindu psyche? Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, American saint-scholar and an acknowledged authority on religion, provided the answer: “The monument was a central icon of Hindu resentment toward Muslim destruction of 60,000 temples”. But how long can we allow the past to influence our actions in the present if at all we are serious about ushering in an era of peace, goodwill and communal harmony? Let us pray with the Vedic Rishis:

“May all beings look on me with the eye of a friend;

May I look on all beings with the eye of a friend.

May we look on one another with the eye of a friend.” — Yajurveda. 36.18

Recent acts of violence against the Christians are the handiwork of sick minds and should not be allowed to proliferate. A barbaric act like that of burning of the Australian missionary and his two children cannot be called religious by any parameter or under any circumstance. The purpose of religion is to elevate the human spirit, not denigrate it by inciting hooliganism or crime. What is the sense in making obeisance to images, holy books or places of worship if one ignores the living images in which the Almighty actually resides? The Upanishads describe man as the sole doorway to the mystery of existence. The Bhagavadgita speaks of his eternal glory. The Aitreya Aranyaka describes him as the abode of the Supreme Reality (Ayam purusho brahmano lokah). It needs to be understood that a fallen structure may be rebuilt but a person sacrificed at the altar of religion can never be brought back to life.

What provides wind to the sails of communal bodies is the issue of conversions. Although statistics show that the percentage of Christians has fallen during the last one decade, the propensity of missionaries to make numerical gains has remained unabated leading sometime to confrontation with communities or people, conscious of their identity or heritage, who would better starve and remain illiterate than get converted. According to a report, Christian missionaries are spending over $ 165 million to convert Hindus. Advertisements are said to have appeared in foreign newspapers soliciting financial support from Christian families for the establishment of churches in India. This is what causes suspicion and consternation in Hindu minds. The fact that the Vatican condemned eastern mysticism as “false doctrine” in 1990 (in a letter by Cardinal Ratzinger approved by Pope Paul II) and directed Catholic convents, clergy and catholic monasteries to shun “Eastern meditation, Yoga and Zen” betrays exclusivism tinged with a sense of infallibility and contravenes the dialogic approach to religious harmony mooted by the Christians themselves.

It is worthwhile mentioning that resentment over the proselytising activities of missionaries is not a recent phenomenon. Most leaders of the Indian renaissance of the 19th century were irked by persuasive, reformist or alluring tools of conversion used by foreign Christian missions to India. Rev. William Adam was commissioned to convert Raja Rammohun Roy, founder of Brahmo Samaj and a top Hindu intellectual and social reformer, in the hope that it would help in the wholesale conversion of Bengali Hindus. Ironically, Adam was himself converted and officially turned out from his own Order. The Shuddhi movement of the Arya Samaj founded by Swami Dayananda was a reaction to Muslim and Christian proselytism. Swami Vivekananda expressed his anguish over conversions both at the Chicago Parliament and in his subsequent lectures in the West. In Detroit, for example, he remarked:

“You train and educate and clothe and pay men to do what ? To come over to my country to curse and abuse all my forefathers .... If all India stands up and takes all the mud that is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and throws it up against the western countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of that which you are doing to us. Did we ever send one missionary to convert anybody in the world? .... Welcome to your religion, but allow me to have mine”.

Mahatma Gandhi was also opposed to religious conversions. While speaking to a group of missionaries he once asked if they were genuinely interested in the welfare of tribal people, why did they protest if some other organisation worked for their amelioration. It is high time the Christians changed their world view and stopped saving the souls of others. The supreme example of Bhagat Puran Singh of Amritsar who spent his entire life in the service of humanity without converting anyone to Sikhism (in contrast to Mother Teresa) should become a role model for the Christians to follow. God is impressed by good deeds not numbers.

The fire-brand Hindus need to realise that Indian Christians, unlike their counterparts in the West, are not known to have “burnt heretics, witches or carried on a religious warfare among themselves or against infidels”. Rather, they have contributed, in their own way, to the cause of education and social reform.

Ralph W. Emerson observed that religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference. It is the insularity of religious outlook that foments intolerance. Fanaticism is that sacred disease when zeal in religious matters outruns judgement.

Can God be incarcerated in a sanctum sanctorum? Can religion be reduced to a dogma or a fighting instrument? Can one Faith lay exclusive claim to spiritual truths? Is any Icon better than a living human being? Need man’s blood be splattered for mendacious causes betraying religiosity? The answers to these questions are bound to be in the negative.

The realisation of spiritual oneness of mankind alone can usher in an era of love. True religion is a matter of being and becoming. The Vedic seers declared: “Look not for the truth in any religion; it is here in the human soul, the miracle of miracles ... the emporium of all knowledge, the mine of existence. Seek here”.

DD must get its act together

by Tavleen Singh

PRAMOD MAHAJAN and I were, by a fortuitous coincidence, on the same flight to Mumbai last week. It gave me the chance to spend nearly an hour talking to him about his controversial decision to withdraw autonomy to Doordarshan and about rumours in Delhi’s political circles of ‘a deal’ with Rupert Murdoch on the issue of DTH or direct to home television. The Minister of Information & Broadcasting was more than eager to talk and said that before I started asking questions he would like to give me some background on what exactly his plans were.

On Prasar Bharati he began this background briefing with a question. “Tell me” he said “do you really think that autonomy for Doordarshan is necessary any more? With so many private channels around doing pretty much what they like is there any harm in government continuing to control Doordarshan?”

He then went on to point out that in his view it made little sense for a major government asset to be controlled by a handful of people, appointed usually for their closeness to a particular government, who often had no professional understanding of television. Besides, he added, it was the government that continued to spend nearly Rs 1500 crore a year on keeping Doordarshan. “Do you know that there has never been a professional audit of Doordarshan so nobody knows why it continues to need this kind of annual funding”.

The Minister said that his priority was to professionalise the functioning of Doordarshan rather than to bother himself with whether it needed autonomy or not. It was clear to me by the end of our conversion that Prasar Bharati was virtually history. But, should this be something we mourn about?

Frankly, no. As anyone who has tried to get programming on Doordarshan will tell you there has been little difference between the way the Prasar Bharati board functioned and the way things were before ‘autonomy’. In fact, while S.S. Gill was head of the Prasar Bharati Corporation he behaved exactly as he had done when he was Information & Broadcasting Secretary all those years ago. Personally, I had no occasion to solicit any programming from him but I heard from those who did that he treated producers with exactly the sort of arrogant disdain that we have come to associate with government officials in general and those who control such vital assets as Doordarshan in particular.

Getting a programme onto Doordarshan-pre Prasar Bharati-usually meant going on bended knees to Shastri Bhawan or Mandi House (headquarters respectively of the I&B Ministry and Doordarshan). It involved much begging and pleading even if you had a good product to sell or it meant pulling some hefty political string. After Prasar Bharati the only thing that appeared to change was that you did the same sort of thing before some member of the board. My own conversation with a member who shall remain nameless went like this. “May I come and see you I have some ideas I would like to discuss with you”. “There’s no point. We are not taking any new programming because we have programmes that have been commissioned eight years ago that have still not been shown”.

It sort of tells you, doesn’t it, why Doordarshan is losing business as rapidly as it is? According to a recent issue of a business magazine Doordarshan’s share of television advertisement revenue is down from 83 per cent to 27 per cent. Clearly, putting it in the charge of an autonomous corporation has done nothing to improve either its performance or its methods of functioning. So if, Mr Mahajan is serious about professionalising Doordarshan then he needs support. He could begin by doing the commercial audit, he told me about, and then doing another audit of the kind of people Doordarshan employs and the vastness of their numbers. He might discover that there are almost ten officials to every professional and in that probably lies the answer to why Doordarshan has become increasingly unwatchable instead of more competitive despite the satellite channel blitzkreig.

When our conversation turned to DTH the Minister was slightly more guarded. He denied that there had been any ‘deal’ yet with Murdoch and said only that he would be putting several checks and balances in place before anything happened. When I asked how long the process would take he said it could take as long as a year before anything really happened.

The funny thing is that anyone who has a satellite dish on their roof is already receiving DTH and the only thing that will change when KU band transmission is allowed is that you will need a much, much smaller dish to receive many more channels. In other words, what is being stopped is only a newer technology. And, the main reason why it was disallowed by the last government, when Jaipal Reddy was Information Minister, was because it was felt that Star TV would get an unfair headstart since it has been ready with its DTH plans for a while now.

The odd thing is that by disallowing it then the government’s decision became as controversial as allowing it would probably have been because it was seen to have been influenced heavily by Star TV’s competitors. Mr Mahajan now admits that DTH is unstoppable for much longer but adds that he would like ‘as many players’ as possible to be in the running including, perhaps, Doordarshan.

For Doordarshan to be in the running it needs first to get its professional act together and start behaving like a television network instead of a government department. The Minister, though, needs to give himself a deadline by when this is going to happen and if he fails to put it on its professional feet by then the government should seriously consider privatising. It makes no sense at all for taxpayers money to be poured into a business that could and should be making lots of money.

Pity poor Victor Bannerjee

by Amita Malik

WHEN I heard that Victor Bannerjee was to anchor the BBC programme Film India, my heart leapt with joy. For years Indian TV or at least TV directed to India, has needed a good anchor (the Indian role model being Barry Norman) for a worthwhile TV programme on the cinema. The nearest we have got to it is Nikhil Kapur who has kept up a steady minimum standard on Star Movies with his programme, This Week, That Year. Nikhil does his homework, he has style eloquence and clearly enjoys his programme.

If the choice of Victor raised high expectations it was with good reason. Even more than his sophisticated style, Victor is one of the most modish screen personalities around, he has vast experience on the stage and screen as a director, actor for Satyajit Ray, David Lean amongst others, he has depth knowledge of the Indian cinema and he is an international personality with impeccable credentials for a programme of this type. All the more pity, that the producers have botched it up good and proper. There are enough minimum quality films being made in every region, sometimes on small budgets, without UTV, which clearly seems to be out of its depth, making a desperate effort to pick up the loudest, crudest and most pedestrian of films from the market-place, and then expect Victor Bannerjee to go to town on their worst commercial products. I feel strongly that both the BBC and UTV are utterly confused about what viewers would expect or want from a programme which started off with every advantage, not least of all a star anchor of the calibre of Victor Bannerjee and then waste, if not insult, him with such puerile stuff. Viewers want to be told about the better films made in India and not the worst.

The BBC needs to remember that Indian listeners and viewers have a very different image of the Beeb and are not amused to see it prostrating itself to be desi, throwing its values to the wind. The BBC seems to be on sure ground when it chooses its men anchors and performers (Prannoy Roy, Rahul Bose, Siddharta Basu are recognised star anchors). Its choice of women has been much less happy, where certain popular Mumbai values seems to operate. Last last week, when Preity Zinta did an interview with herself it was the height of inanity. I repeat, the BBC should stick to its own standards and not conform to popular Mumbai values which are available in plenty on other channels in endless count-down programmes. It will be a sad day when the BBC enters the filmi rat race at this low level, only to fall flat on its face.

I have only known two people who can weave magic with a five-minute TV programme. Some time ago, Saeed Naqvi produced a series of gems about religious tolerance on Doordarshan. They lasted five minutes each and he took us to gurdwaras, mosques, churches and temples right across India to show us people of other faiths thronging them for blessings. It was an eye-opener. It is time that some channel revived them because they are a standing record of India’s religious tolerance. The second five-minute programme which created history was Jaspal Bhatti’s Ulta Pulta, devastating satires on the Indian way of life. It is symbolic that when Bhatti figured in the Star News programme Sawal Aap Ka last week, most of those who rang back reminded Bhatti, whose Punjabi feature film had just been released, that he had created history on television and on no account should he desert TV for the large screen I would like to add my voice to theirs. Much as I enjoyed Bhatti’s feature film, which had digs at the police (including a snide reference to the K.P.S. Gill episode). I still feel that TV is his forte. We have very few satirists on TV and here’s to his continuing on that medium.

Tail piece: That was a very good report by Sunil Sethi on Star News on the Antonio Martinelli exhibition. The subject was just up his street. Away from the harsh glare of the cameras, Sunil became his natural self and came across pleasingly.

75 YEARS AGO

Offering bribe to customs officer

THE Chief Presidency Magistrate today passed orders in the case in which Lilaram and Bibagtulla had been charged with having attempted to bribe Mr G.T. Austin, Superintendent of Preventive Customs, Madras, on the Ist of January.

His Worship had no doubt that Lilaram instigated Bibagtulla to offer Rs 8000 to Mr Austin as bribe for return of books, which Mr Austin had seized as customs officer and for future favours, and that Bibagtulla offered the bribe to Mr Austin in pursuance of a conspiracy between the two accused.

They were found guilty under sections 161 IPC and sentenced to six months’ and three months’ rigorous imprisonment respectively. The accused were let off on bail.