Our television channels must feel piqued because the Sandeep Kumar case became sub judice so quickly, depriving them of the chance of regaling viewers with salacious tidbits day after day. Just the fact of being sub judice may not have deterred enterprising TV personnel if the court hadn't also ordered all links to the video to be blocked, even if this was a bit like locking the stable door after the horse had fled.
When the trial-by-media fashion started in Britain, the press (not television) dominated the scene. Ten national Sunday newspapers sold 27 million copies in that high noon of the newspaper explosion, and the eight national dailies under 16 million. "With the vilest of motives, to increase profit," thundered Sir Victor Gollancz, the publisher, "the million-circulation newspapers have gone all out to titillate those sadistic and lascivious instincts that lie dormant in almost everyone; for this is the way, they think rightly or wrongly, to get more readers and down their rivals."
It's different here. Not everyone can read, even among the literate. Few read English and fewer still understand it. But everyone can see. Everyone can hear. Almost everyone in this rabidly consumerist society has access to the idiot box. It has such immense influence on the multitude even in the West that the TV screening of Bonnie and Clyde prompted an imitative spurt of murders and robberies. The impact is far greater on millions of impressionable Indians for whom cinema is the only entertainment, and the small screen shines in Bollywood's dazzle.
TV does have some serious content. But that's not what interests people like the Kolkata kiosk owner I asked for a lime drink I had enjoyed in Delhi. First, he denied its existence, as is wont with his kind when out of their depth. When I insisted the drink did exist, he asked if it had "come on TV"! If a commodity hasn't blazed across the small screen, it might as well not exist for the man in the street.
He and even his betters must wallow in the exciting minutiae of the Sheena Bora murder case. Sex, money, power lust, enmity and the sheer unnaturalness of the relationships spice what is to them high-society gossip. The details and sequences are often so intimate that one can't help wonder about the source. It crossed my mind the information may have come from venal elements in the police. Or, perhaps, the force is using TV for its own purposes.
In the earlier Aarushi Talwar murder case, too, the media pandered to the secret cravings of viewers and rode roughshod over the right to privacy for the sake of entertainment.
The channels, especially anchors who try to project themselves as a cross between Gandhi and Shah Rukh Khan, will undoubtedly justify vulgarity with a lofty motive. So did self-righteous British newspaper tycoons. When someone complained that the now defunct News of the World recorded crime, Lord Riddell, then the proprietor, retorted, "No, it records punishment."
The Daily Mirror group's egocentric Cecil King was even more bombastic. He maintained that by highlighting violence, his papers diverted people from committing murder. "Crime vicariously enjoyed in print is a substitute for violent crime itself," he wrote. "If some people can read about murder, their murderous instincts will be sufficiently satisfied to remove the temptation to commit an actual murder themselves." We know of course from Bonnie and Clyde and other such episodes that the exact opposite is true.
All this strengthens the case for some kind of supervisory authority. But I hesitate to suggest a government board whose members may not have a clue about the questions of taste and decorum that are at stake and may see everything in narrow political terms. My main problem with the local censor during the Emergency was not that he wanted to ram a particular line down my throat but that his social perceptions were so hidebound. He thought it offensive to call a Bihar politician who gloried in his caste constituency and hoped to replace Jagjivan Ram as a "Chamar leader". An official censorship board would be packed with similar unimaginative bureaucrats.
Perhaps this is something for the industry to take up. Even our stridently populist channels should be able to produce a handful of talented, experienced and respected individuals who are able to combine target rating points with civilised standards. This is one instance when what the people need is more important than what the TV managers think they want.
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