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The Prasar Bharati Gill

When a dog bites a man, that is not news because it happens so often. But when a man bites a dog, that is news." In a hundred years, nobody has improved on John Bogart's famous definition.

It isn't news when Mulayam Singh Yadav and Laloo Prasad Yadav criticise the BJP. It is news when they support the BJP in the face of Marxist opposition. That, believe it or not, was the achievement of Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj, who succeeded in getting the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal to vote for the Prasar Bharati Bill.

In fact, the Lok Sabha passed the Bill without pressing for a division. True, Jaipal Reddy, Sushma Swaraj's predecessor in Shastri Bhavan, whined a bit. And the Congress's P C Chacko offered token criticism. But passage of the Bill was assured when only 11 of the 140-odd Congress members in the Lok Sabha turned up.

The Prasar Bharati Act conferring considerable autonomy on Doordarshan and All India Radio was originally L K Advani's baby, when he was the information and broadcasting minister in Morarji Desai's government. Memories of the Emergency were still fresh in 1978. "You were asked to bend," he told the print media, "But you chose to crawl."

It wasn't necessary for Indira Gandhi's henchmen to tell the electronic media to bend, they had always been part of the official machinery. (This was 15 years before Star and CNN ushered in the satellite revolution.) Advani was determined to prevent such abuse of authority again. But the concept ended up in suspended animation when the government fell.

It took 17 years for Parliament to enact the Prasar Bharati legislation. (It was rather like the Women's Reservation Bill; everyone supported it in principle but nobody wanted to lose control of the electronic media.) And when the Bill finally passed, the Congress government fell.

It was here that Jaipal Reddy enters the picture. In October 1997, Reddy pushed through an ordinance amending significant portions of the Act. The original legislation had put a limit on the age of members of the Prasar Bharati board and ensured a measure of parliamentary control. All that changed.

Today, Jaipal Reddy grumbles that Sushma Swaraj pushed the new Bill through simply to get rid of one man -- S S Gill, the BJP-hating chief executive of Prasar Bharati. But Reddy has never explained why he insisted on an ordinance amending a law passed unanimously by Parliament. Wasn't it to give Gill his chair?

Constitutionally, an ordinance -- basically an order passed by the President when Parliament isn't sitting -- automatically lapses if it isn't ratified by the legislature in a specified time. The legal basis for Gill to remain in office ended in May 1998. But the minister didn't sack the obnoxious Gill outright.

Instead, Sushma Swaraj chose to take Parliament's sanction, presenting the same Bill that Reddy had changed. Gill's backers tried to push the matter to a select committee, a tactic that would have smothered it for four months. But the absurdity of pondering over legislation that had already been discussed threadbare was apparent.

The only party that refused to see sense was the CPI-M. (I suppose a party that insists on the continued relevance of Marxism is a specialist in lost causes!) The Communists have vowed to take the battle to the Rajya Sabha.

But Gill is on his way out. The Lok Sabha clearly indicated its disapproval of his antics and of the shady manner in which Jaipal Reddy pushed him into the job. (Indrajit Gupta, Union home minister at the time, says the ordinance came as a surprise even to the United Front Cabinet.)

There may even be an element of poetic justice. The Rajya Sabha may not have time to discuss the Bill. If so, Sushma Swaraj may opt for an ordinance, booting Gill out with the very instrument that he was booted in with!

S S Gill may have been more of an irritant than a real menace. But his silly habit of running down the Vajpayee ministry in public -- very crudely at that -- sealed his fate. The BJP-led government needed to demonstrate that it is indeed in command, something a section of the bureaucracy affects to disdain.

No senior bureaucrat was shifted out after the new ministers took over. Gill has the distinction of being the first. Well, he can console himself that he deserved what he got -- an opinion obviously shared even by the two Yadavs!

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T V R Shenoy