Do away with I&B ministry

What should we do with Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi? The Information and Broadcasting Minister is so hyper-active that he needs to add a letter to his last name: Dash Munshi better suits his penchant for flying off in every direction at once.

He was, for example, the first to write (or shall we say, dash off) a letter asking our External Affairs Ministry to protest against the “racist attacks on Shilpa Shetty”. Before that he was the first off the starting block to denounce a video showing a Gandhi lookalike doing a pole dance. He followed that up by threatening to block the website which had shown the clip and extracted an apology from two TV channels for telecasting the videos. And now he has banned AXN for three months for screening the programme ‘The World’s Sexiest Ads’.

Fortunately for us, Dash Munshi will dash off to another ministry at the first opportunity. I & B is considered a minor ministry, with little influence and insignificant budgets.
All it offers the incumbent is a chance to flash their mug shots in newspapers and their sound bytes on TV. The size of these follow the universal rule of the media: the more outrageous the pronouncement, the larger the exposure.

That’s one reason I&B ministers rarely sit still. Was it Dash Munshi or his predecessor who asked for a special screening of Rang De Basanti so he could ‘approve’ the public exhibition of the film? So what if this made a mockery of the Film Censor Board? The minister had got his mileage, plus he had sent out the message that he, not the Censor Board’s Chairperson, had the final say.

But that’s par for the course. Who can forget Sushma Swaraj, I&B minister in the NDA government and her aversion to the ‘inappropriate’? She banned Fashion TV because it aired lingerie shows, and she issued a fatwa against AIDS awareness campaigns because they talked about condoms.

So, you see, Dash Munshi is not alone. He will dash off to greener pastures as soon as he catches the first glimpse of one, but by then he will have done his bit for us. Then he will be replaced by another factotum wanting to leave an indelible imprint on us too.

“What are the qualifications of those who ban this and ban that?” asked a senior film-maker this morning. I find that statement really touching: to think that there’s still someone around who believes that qualifications are required! We, who are more cynical, know they aren’t. Who was the last knowledgeable I&B minister? Inder Kumar Gujral? If so, that’s way back in 1975. I remember meeting his successor, VC Shukla who happily flaunted the wide-ranging powers the Emergency gave him. Many years later, I met PA Sangma on his first visit to Bombay. Even my hugely lowered expectations didn’t prepare me for this encounter: Sangma’s priority No1 was to make movies on the labour movement. It turned out his pre-political experience was in leading trade unions. Good for him, not so good for the film industry.

But as a maturing democracy, we must go beyond looking for enlightened individuals. What we need to evolve are enlightened institutions. Institutions where rules, conventions, yard-sticks and what have you are so firmly embedded that the Munshis and the Swarajs and the Shuklas and the Sangmas can come and go without being noticed. When it comes to the particular case of the I&B ministry, there’s really only one solution to protect us from future stark raving incumbents. And that is to disband the ministry completely.

What purpose does it serve anyway? The market place (i.e. public opinion) is a great arbiter of taste: very rarely do publications or TV channels or film producers want to
offend their own constituency of readers/viewers and advertisers. In any case, there’s an independent Press Council, and there are other statutory bodies like the Film Censor Board which act as watchdogs on our behalf to ensure that exploitative or debasing material doesn’t get public display. Ultimately, there are the law courts which step in when they need to, to uphold certain standards of decency and morality.

Beyond these we don’t need anyone. We certainly don’t need politicians with no knowledge, no qualifications, no experience and no nothing except appalling gall, to tell us what we can watch or read or hear. We are grown up for God’s sake, and most of us are far more adult and far more mature than the strutting politicians who temporarily hold centre-stage.