So, what goes on before the bureaucrats carry out the politicians' bidding?
The Daily News & Analysis (DNA) hazards a guess (Minister for moral values; March 30, 2007 [Link]:
This is probably what happens: Dasmunsi and his babus watch all the television channels like hawks, looking for prurient stuff, stuff that will corrupt the morals of the nation. After all, they have been entrusted with the responsibility of protecting those morals and they intend to do their job thoroughly. They therefore pick on a channel and, voila, they zap their remotes and the station is shut down.
The Telegraph had a tongue-in-cheek piece (Past 50, the hottest govt job a man can get; April 4, 2007) [Link]:
Age: 50 to 58 years; Experience: 17 to 25 years pushing files; Qualification: IAS or Allied Services.
Do you make the grade? If so, you could have landed what many may label the most enviable job a man can have while serving the Government of India.
Consider the work at hand and the bonus: spend hours watching scantily-clad women on television, get paid for it and — save the best for the last — make sure that a billion compatriots don’t savour the scenes.
Unsung, nine bureaucrats who fit the bill have been working — or watching TV — assiduously to whip the nation back to the straight and the narrow every time a channel strays — as FTV apparently did when it aired a programme called Midnight Hot.
This is the council that recommends what the country should and should not watch on television.
The trackers are also ensuring that their master, I&B minister Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, need not always stay up till 2 am to catch the occasional television transgressor. The minister, forever leading the charge on the morality warfront, had once admitted that he sometimes stays up till the unholy hour to preserve the sanctity of the small screen.
So what goes on?
Headed by the additional secretary in the I&B ministry, the skin-scan committee is made up of joint secretaries from the ministries of health and family welfare, women and child development, law and justice, home and external affairs.
But true to the hallowed tradition of babudom, few of the middle-aged men and women — mercifully, there is no gender bar — think they’re having a good time.
“Enjoy?” one of them asked. The thought hadn’t crossed the gentleman’s mind. Watching FTV, MTV, AXN… was an onerous responsibility, and an add-on at that, over and above the daily grind. How could it possibly be fun?
The committee meets every now and then to tackle bunches of complaints from individuals and groups. Sometimes, it takes up cases on its own.
The buck, it seems, rests with the minister:
Over the past few years, 200 warning notices have gone out. Only about a third of them relate to obscenity — music videos are the usual targets. The rest deal with other violations of the programme code — for example, content that could be seen as hurting religious sensibilities or national integrity.
But bans were rare till Das Munshi, the Big Daddy of Decency, came along. Before his time, only about half-a-dozen — mostly pornography — channels were taken off air. In the first three months this year, two channels — mainstream AXN and now the fashion channel FTV — have been slapped a two-month ban.
“The final decision (of a ban) rests with the minister,” a member of the committee said. The panel points out the offence and after that it’s the minister’s call whether to ban or not.
The DNA op-ed piece had more to say about the minister concerned:
Dasmunsi has a penchant for wading in where he needn’t. He did it when the film version of Da Vinci Code was released and a section of the Christian clergy raised a chorus of protest. But it turned out to be so much sound and fury signifying nothing. Lately, television channels showing allegedly obscene programmes have been occupying his attention, though somehow all those skimpy dresses and pelvic thrusts in film songs seem to escape his attention.
We have said it often and we’ll say it again. Dasmunsi’s ministry is an anachronism in this day and age. It smacks of an Orwellian mindset, quite out of sync with where India is today. By all means haul up the law-breakers, but do it through an independent regulatory mechanism. A full-fledged ministry watching over public morals is the last thing we need.
Should that happen, we would need to do something drastic with this blog as well. Huh.
