Institutional constraints and accordant interests: The speckled life of an ‘Ownership Bill’ in India

Abstract

This article unravels an unacknowledged moment in the public history of media regulation in India. In recovering this moment, the article speaks to us at two levels. Most immediately, it speaks to anxieties of ownership in the news media that have long marked scholarship of varied hues in media policy. In parallel, the article converses with wider debates on the role of institutional constraints and accordant interests in policy studies on the media and beyond. The takeaway here is about media regulation embodying the compulsions and opportunities of creating a framework of consensus. A consensus does not imply the absence of wrangles between actors but a relationship between contending actors that is in some way ordered. The moment under examination pertains to the early 1970s when there was wide-ranging enthusiasm and political support to address anxieties of ownership in the press. At the heart of a proposed regulation was the desire to cushion the press from influences and vulnerabilities of their proprietors. The earliest pronouncement proposed diffusing the ownership and control of high-circulating newspapers. Subsequently, the proposal got reoriented in terms of delinking ownership from big business. Astonishingly, even the revised proposal was never tabled in the the Indian parliament. Abandoning this intervention is intriguing, especially amidst the wide-ranging political enthusiasm over it, the ideological legitimacy of the ruling dispensation and rare legislative opportunity. This article is provoked to reconcile government’s intent in acting on anxieties of ownership with its subsequent silence, a rather considered one, in actualizing legislation. I begin by offering a framework to visualize risks to the press from the varied participant interests. Thereafter, I trace the ownership anxieties in earlier decades forming the deep context of the regulatory juncture signified by the so-called Ownership Bill. The article then details the life of the Bill between 1971 and 1974 as a particular confluence of policy and politics. Forming the immediate backdrop to the Bill’s ultimate withdrawal, this life cycle offers clues to the ‘failure’ of this regulatory endeavour. To reason the failure of this regulatory endeavour, I reflect on the institutional architecture confronted, and the political and economic expediencies of dominant interests. No doubt the state, as an apparatus, had hit against a complex set of institutional constraints, especially on the delicate matter of policy supremacy between the parliament and judiciary; but these constraints appear to be deftly evoked by the state, here as an interest, to shelve a legislation potentially jeopardizing its own stakes in the press. This considered silence essentially reiterated a framework of consensus that, while maintaining the vulnerabilities of different interests constituting the press, reiterated a particular order in the relationship between the state and the press as a whole.