<=¥ ‘medium of the radio for which | have a certain affection, even though | am a filmmaker and it is television, not radio that pays for my bread. | am referring here to the mysterious lack of any interest in the creation of an alternative radio network. Radio has a long history in india, it is also the cheapest and most ubiquitous means of communication in india. Even the remotest hamlet in the interiors of India, will have radio sets, and the radio, like the bicycle is the one form of technology that everyone can afford and access because it is cheap. One would have thought that such a scenario would have prompt- ed a widespread alternative radio culture based on low cost transmitters, initially set up as pirate stations and then bat- tling for legitimacy through public actions. | find this even more surprising given a recent Supreme Court judgement that declared the airwaves to be public property, and situated them as a public resource independent of the control of the state and market. Thus the situation is in a sense ripe for the mushrooming of local radio stations run by anybody who pleases, that can flood the airwaves with any manner of subversive content. If the state wishes to crack down upon them, then the ground is ready for a protracted legal battle that bases itself on the right to freedom of expression and the fact of airwaves having been declared public property by judicial fiat, thus contravening existing laws that controls access to broadcast- ing, (the infamous and draconian Telegraph Act of 1885). But unfortunately, this is precisely what does not happen. Debates on the autonomy of the media continue to rotate around the sterile question of corporate versus state ownership of the media. Few years ago, when a group of independent film makers and media practitioners to which | belong, the Forum for Independent Film & Video, attempted to initiate a debate ‘on public access to broadcasting as a fundamental right they were either thoroughly ignored , or told off for stirring up trouble. On a number of occasions | personally have been told by respectable left-liberal intellectuals and NGO activists that free access to the media would only mean that fundamentalists would open radio and television stations and dissem- inate fascist and communal propaganda. The possibility of a libertarian culture on the airwaves is perhaps too threatening for the South Asian cultural elite, which is why the bugbear of ‘opening the fascist floodgates’ is such a handy and conve- nient excuse. Meanwhile the spectacle goes unchallenged except by exhausted and token protests. The spectacle lives and breathes in the hardsell of a new consumer culture on satellite television, in the cardboard mythological on state tele- vision, in the violent nationalism of commercial cinema, in the political circus of slick current affairs and news shows and in the proliferation of fundamentalist sermons and communal propaganda in the name of religious programming on cable channels. In such a situation if any group of people anywhere in South Asia had tried to operate a free thinking, open radio station, with a small transmitter, and supposing that this radio station would have on the off chance also featured open debates about everyday life, reports from the workplace, from factories and schools, letters from prisons, features about the way in which the police was hounding Bangladeshi immigrants from cities or terrorising gay people in public parks, or played songs against nuclear weapons, they would have simply landed up in prison, for violating antiquated broadcasting rules. And frankly no one would even know, or have given a damn. Until and unless free and equal access to the media becomes recognised as a political question, just as access to drink- ing water, or land, or housing, or a clean environment are recognised as a political questions, unless access to the media not just as recipients but as producers is not seen as a question that relates to the way in which power articulates itself in our society, this is bound to remain the case. And this recognition cannot come from those who work with the media alone, though they can help engender it. In South Asian societies it will have to be demonstrated through practice that only a participatory media culture can bring back a lost vitality into our exhausted public spaces. In a cultural climate where all forms of po! | expression and so- cial communication are rigidly controlled by a complex structure of mediators and representatives who negotiate the mes- sages that are transmitted between people and power through the forms of representation (and here by forms of represen- tation | mean both the political structures of representative democracy, as well as the ‘representational’ function of the dominant media - holding up an acceptable picture of the world) there may in fact be a great hidden social urge for un- mediated, direct and spontaneous expression . For expressions that either ignore or confront power in new and surprising ways. That reject the older forms of spectacular protest for subtle, if low key acts of everyday resistance, that are hard to locate and identify, and thus impossible to punish or appropriate. Traditionally, the peoples of South Asia have had aa rich se eneneneneBenBeBBBBBeBHEeHEBEBEEBEEEEEE SB B 1