At the same time as India gets ready to launch the 'second phase' of neo-liberal economic 'reforms', the Bharatiya Janata Party-dominated government is trying to ram through a Hindu sectarian agenda in culture and education. One of its more important moves recently has been to seize control of the supposedly autonomous Prasar Bharati Corporation, which runs India's public television, Doordarshan, and All India Radio.
In mid-November, the government sacked two directors of the Prasar Bharati (PB) Board, Romila Thapar and Rajendra Yadav, by invoking the principle of biennial 'rotation' of members. It did this because the government is not legally empowered to remove or appoint directors. Thapar is India's best-known historian, a world-class scholar, and a highly regarded public intellectual. Yadav is a reputed Hindi writer and commentator. Both are known for their independent views and their commitment to genuinely autonomous public media.
The government's midnight coup against Thapar and Yadav was a shocking violation of the spirit of media autonomy. The action deserves to be condemned not least because the PB came into existence after a quarter century of debate marked by the reluctance of successive governments to cede control over the powerful state-owned electronic media and vest it, in the model of the BBC, in a broad-based board which would not be answerable to the government. In a country where nearly half the population is illiterate, the electronic media enjoys a privileged status and has enormous reach.
The government could have applied an objective criterion to retire two of the six directors, such as in the drawing of lots, which had been proposed by the PB Board itself. Instead, this malicious targeting of Thapar and Yadav, termed "intellectual violence" by Jaipal Reddy, the man who helped establish the PB, showed up the BJP's motive. And that is to remove anyone who would oppose the BJP's attempt to control the powerful body. It is now widely expected that the two new directors to be appointed will be those whose worldview complements that of the BJP's own.