Olympics-The India Story

by Boria Majumdar

  The Supreme Court’s 1993 ruling, however, was limited to the Hero Cup. It did not solve the basic dichotomy of satellite broadcasters challenging Doordarshan’s legal monopoly. Consequently, Doordarshan and the BCCI locked horns again in 1994 when the BCCI granted ESPN the right to telecast India’s series with West Indies as part of a $30 million deal which gave ESPN the exclusive right to telecast cricket in India for five years. Cricket was attracting foreign investors to India but the ministry of information and broadcasting was fighting tooth and nail to preserve its fiefdom. Once again, other government agencies opposed Doordarshan. For instance, VSNL,78 which had granted up-link rights to ESPN, accused the ministry of deliberately obstructing its plans. VSNL was forced to return the advance it had received from ESPN79 and VSNL officials were clearly unhappy at the financial loss:

  We do not need to put in any money for infrastructure because we already possess all the facilities but the Ministry of I&B will not let us do anything, even if it involves earning thousands of dollars for the country in foreign exchange…’80

  Again, the BCCI appealed to the Supreme Court, which in an epochal judgement on 9 February 1995 ruled that the airwaves cannot be a state monopoly as they constitute public property. The court made it clear that it was the state’s duty to see that airwaves were utilized to advance the fundamental right of free speech which could not be done in a monopoly. The broadcast media, the court said, ‘should be under the control of the public as distinct from Government. This is the command implicit in Article 19(1)(a). It should be operated by a public statutory corporation or corporations…’ The judges further added that the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression includes the right to communicate effectively, including through the electronic media. Ruling that the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 was totally inadequate, ‘intended for an altogether different purpose when it was enacted’, the judges ordered the government ‘to take immediate steps to establish an autonomous public authority…to control and regulate the use of the airwaves’.81 Thus ended the first Indian battle over broadcast reform. The state lost its monopoly and the ministry was ordered to evolve a new regulatory framework.

  ‘National Interest’: Cricket and the Last Broadcast Law

  So central has cricket become to Indian television that it is also at the heart of the second broadcasting law that India has managed to pass. More than a decade after the Supreme Court’s order, the Indian state has failed to evolve an overarching regulatory body to oversee broadcasting issues. Simultaneously, the ministry of information and broadcasting has periodically tried to fill the regulatory vacuum with draft legislation and summary executive directives, most of these designed to assert its control. Broadly speaking, it has consistently tried to put the genie of broadcasting back into the bottle at every step. Yet, almost every one of its measures has come up against serious challenges. At every step, the ministry’s controlling instincts have had to contend with either the courts, or strong public opinion, or heavy corporate lobbying by the new broadcast capitalists. In every case, except for the 2007 law on mandatory sharing of sports feeds, the ministry has had to cede ground.

  This last law is interesting because it is the only law pertaining to broadcasting that has managed to be passed in Parliament in over a decade. On at least eight occasions the ministry’s controlling drive ran aground in the face of thick opposition but in cricket it found a populist catalyst that allowed it to build consensus. Its roots can be traced back to the 2004 India—Pakistan cricket series when the ministry first forced Ten Sports, which had the broadcast rights, to share its live telecast of matches with Doordarshan to benefit non-satellite watchers. This seemed like a popular cause to espouse but apart from acquiring these sports broadcasts, ostensibly in the ‘public interest’, Doordarshan also wanted to make money by selling advertising spots. This was a serious threat to Ten Sport’s advertising revenues and its parent company Taj TV protested in a bitterly contested case in the Supreme Court, where Prasar Bharati was forced to deposit Rs 500 million as damage guarantee against possible revenue damages. It was also forbidden to sell advertising and forced to carry the Ten Sports logo for the series broadcasts.82 The ministry countered in late 2005 through new downlinking guidelines that made it mandatory for private sports channels to share feeds of all major sports events of ‘national and international importance’83 in the larger ‘public interest’. These guidelines went to the heart of free market considerations and private sports broadcasters who had paid large sums of money to acquire broadcast rights repeatedly challenged their legal validity in various courts, through 2006 and early 2007. On at least three occasions, judicial rulings restrained the Central government from interfering with their rights. On 9 May 2006, for instance, the Supreme Court refused to force Ten Sports to share its coverage of India’s cricket tour of the West Indies with the national broadcaster. A two-member bench of Justice Ashok Bhan and Justice L.K. Palta, went so far as to ask the government to ‘bring a law’ on the matter, saying, ‘You can’t act on guidelines.’84 Similarly, in August 2006, the Supreme Court again ruled in favour of Ten Sports which contended that it would lose Rs 80 million a day in advertising—for the July tri-series involving Sri Lanka, India and South Africa—if it was forced to share its signals with Doordarshan.85 ESPN-STAR, which had exclusive rights for India’s tour of South Africa in late 2006, also received protection from the Supreme Court for refusing to share its signals.86

  By early 2007, the dispute between private sports broadcasters and the ministry had reached boiling point. The immense confusion over legal structures meant that virtually every cricket series involving India was preceded by bitter court battles and tremendous uncertainty for viewers. In January 2007, Nimbus’s initial refusal to share broadcasts with Prasar Bharati led to many cricket watchers missing the first few games of the India—West Indies series. Unlike ESPN-Star or Ten Sports, Nimbus’s new sports channel, Neo Sports, was still not available in all parts of India. Even viewers with satellite connections were unable to see it and the Delhi High Court finally asked Nimbus to share its feed with Doordarshan after a seven-minute delay.87 Apprehending the anger of the average cricket fan, the central government, on 3 February 2007, promulgated an ordinance that turned its mandatory fee-sharing guidelines into a law. This became the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Bill that was passed by Parliament on 9 March. It stipulated a 75:25 revenue split between the rights holder and Doordarshan.88 The Parliamentary debate over the bill reflected two things: the serious concern in the government over the legal challenges to its guidelines and the immense potential of cricket for building public and political opinion. Harnessing political support for an overall law on broadcasting was difficult but when it came to cricket, things were easier. When questioned about the infringement on the private market, Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi repeatedly pointed to the public’s right to watch cricket, though the Bill itself was not cricket-specific:

  Cricket is a popular game of the masses… A long battle continued in court to get the terrestrial rights. Fifty million TV homes depend on terrestrial television in the villages, semi-urban areas, even in the rural areas to watch the matches…It was, therefore, a bounden duty of the Government to think something which can justify the cause of the people in the greater public interest. We had to bring the Ordinance keeping in view that the World Cup Cricket is coming up…one should also appreciate that out of the total fund generated through tickets in the whole world, more than 75 per cent is generated from the Indian market alone. But, the tragedy is that the Indian common viewers cannot see the match.89

  The appeal to the rights of the cricket-watching public found favour with most Parliamentarians, cutting across party lines. The response of Dasmunshi’s predecessor, the BJP’s Ravishankar Prasad, was typical:

  Cricket, today, is not only a game, but it is almost a passion in India…We are one with you that the ordinary people of t
he country, who have got a simple antenna of the terrestrial [sic] should have the right to see the cricket matches because cricket, today, is not only an elitist game, but it has reached in rural areas also…If there are 4.5 crores of terrestrial homes in the country, the people must have the right to view the games…So, many litigations are going on. Therefore, in that way, our party appreciate[s] your concerns through this legislation. We are with you.90

  The Bill raised serious issues that were worthy of debate: the myth of Prasar Bharati’s autonomy and its commercial advantages through state patronage, deeper questions about the validity of the state’s right to rule on what constituted a sporting event of ‘national importance’ and the rights of private operators who had paid large amounts of money for broadcast rights through open market bidding. Nimbus, for instance, claimed it would lose 12 per cent of the projected earnings from its $612 million contract to broadcast Indian cricket over the next four years.91 But there was hardly a dissenting voice in the Parliamentary debate as speaker after speaker reiterated cricket’s ‘uniting’ potential and the ‘rights of the common man’ to watch the game.92 In 1995, cricket had been the catalyst for the Supreme Court’s landmark judgement that freed the airwaves for private players. In 2007, the national passion for the game was again a catalyst for a major change in broadcast law, but this time it allowed the government to get back some measure of control.

  Match ke Mujrim, Munna Bhai and Cricket as a Metaphor for Life

  Cricket has clearly been central to the rise of Indian satellite television. In fact, the industry has appropriated the game to develop a unique programming model of its own.93 The Indian television news industry, for instance, unlike in any other country in the world, has consciously ridden on cricket’s shoulders to such an extent that by 2006, cricket-oriented programming, in terms of costs, had emerged as one of the most expensive news gathering activities (of all other news genres), if not the most expensive activity (on all news channels)’.94 So dependent is news television on cricket, for revenues and for viewers; so prominent is cricket in news programming, that it would be fair to call this process the ‘cricketization’ of Indian television. The reasons for this cricketization lie within the economic structure of the industry and the inherent nature of capitalism itself. The unrelenting drive to construct and capture a national market for maximizing profits led television producers to turn to cricket as the lowest common dominator of what might be termed ‘Indian-ness’ but television’s unrelenting focus, by its very nature, substantially redefined and reinforced these linkages. Given the narrow base of television ratings that increasingly define programming, cricket has emerged as an easy option for success. Cricket, along with Bollywood, has a pan-Indian appeal cutting across socio-economic and regional categories. News of a small-town crime in Mathura may not interest anybody in Kerala but news of the Indian cricket team interests people in every region of India. This is why when news editors want to lift the ratings of any show they look towards cricket. Star’s India COO Uday Shankar draws a deep connection between cricket and national identity to explain its emergence as a prime attraction on television, even more so than Bollywood:

  I think as far as Indian identity is concerned, cricket overtakes even Bollywood. While Bollywood is a big source of entertainment, its conscious articulation as an Indian medium by the common people is not so pronounced.

  But cricket is perhaps consciously the most nationalistic activity that Indians indulge in. So to that extent, there is no cricket minus India. Every time that you watch cricket you are sub-consciously or consciously reminded of the Indian identity…Now in terms of importance, cricket has left Bollywood far behind. It is next only to big political stories and really big economic stories…And very often it overtakes political and economic stories as well.95

  This is why cricket sells and is big on news television. Shankar’s equation of cricket with Indian nationalism is revealing. Certainly this is a link that sociologists and historians have stressed, ever since C.L.R. James inaugurated the discipline of sport history with the statement: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ Presaging the rise of modern sport history and sociology, his classic Beyond a Boundary stressed how cricket either helped form or supplemented social practices based on the intersecting lines of colour and class in colonial and postcolonial societies.96 It initiated the study of sport as a relational idiom, as a magnifying glass amplifying the values, symbols, fissures and tensions of a society. Indian cricket literature, in the past decade, has taken this line of enquiry and a great deal of scholarship has stressed its political dimension. There is no doubt that cricket’s hegemony on television is tied to nationalism, and television, for its own purposes, has played a big role. As Arjun Appadurai has noted:

  …television has now completely transformed cricket culture in India. As several commentators have pointed out, cricket is perfectly suited for television, with its many pauses, its spatial concentration of action, and its extended format. For audiences as well as advertisers it is the perfect television sport.97

  Cricket’s sheer length and complexity make it one of the most telefriendly games on the planet. For instance, a TAM study in 2002 found that in comparison to soccer, cricket offered far greater and more effective opportunities for advertisers—in the stadium as well as on television.98 This partly explains why in 2001 as many as 473 brands advertised on cricket-related programming, accounting for 16,400 advertising spots on television.99 For television in general, cricket is a predictable news event, for which advertising can be bought and sold well in advance. This is why Indian television has been cricketized. Television focus on cricket as a spectacle has reinforced the link between cricket and what Appadurai calls the ‘erotics of nationhood’:

  …cricket, through the enormous convergence of state, media, and private-sector interests, has come to be identified with ‘India’, with ‘Indian’ skill, ‘Indian’ guts, ‘Indian’ team spirit, and ‘Indian’ victories, the bodily pleasure that is at the core of the male viewing experience is simultaneously part of the erotics of nationhood. This erotics, particularly for working-class and lumpen male youth throughout India, is connected deeply to violence, not just because all agonistic sport taps the inclination to aggressiveness but because the divisive demands of class, ethnicity, language, and region in fact make the nation a profoundly contested community. The erotic pleasure of watching cricket for Indian male subjects is the pleasure of agency in an imagined community, which in many other arenas is violently contested.100

  During Pakistan’s tour to India in early 2005, Star News started a programme called Match ke Mujrim (Criminals of the Match). Set up like a court trial, the show was telecast on the evening of every match and featured a ‘trial’ of four Indian players who did not perform well on the day. It was performed in front of a live audience and featured a prosecution attorney, former Indian captain Bishen Singh Bedi, and another former cricketer as the defence lawyer. The two would present their case and ask viewers to vote on which Indian player was the villain of the day through SMS. Despite vehement criticism in the media, the show generated a tremendous response for Star News. On the day India lost the Bangalore test against Pakistan, it was staged live out of a public park in the city and more than 10,000 people turned up at the venue. This was in addition to the 20 million or so viewers Star News claimed to have access to. During its one-hour duration, when its phone lines were open for voting, Star News received 35,000 phone messages. This means that nearly 600 people were calling in every minute. The average SMS count for a typical episode, though, hovers between 5,000 and 10,000.101 For the Star News CEO who initiated this programme, the justification was simple:

  For an average Indian cricket lover, a player doing something that costs India the match is the closest thing that comes to treason on a daily basis …

  When people are let down then, unlike in the case of politicians, who still people feel they can fix when someday the guy comes to seek the
ir votes…With cricketers they have no such comforts.because cricketers in this country make so much money…people feel the guy can still get out to a very casual shot and there is nothing I can do about it…We have channelized that popular anger in a very democratic forum…We felt it would be good idea to give people a forum to vent their anger and their point of view…

  The kind of interventions we make in other activities like politics, civic and municipal administration, economics.we have started doing that in cricket. In the same way that I would look at who’s responsible for misery during Bombay floods…who is responsible for this goof-up in administration… Here we look at who is the culprit in the match.102

  Indian news television is constantly searching for a national ‘public’ while attempting to create a national ‘market’. Match ke Mujrim encapsulates this process. It extends the link between cricket and nationalism to a seemingly logical conclusion: players are gladiators for the nation; if they lose, they are traitors.