ABSTRACT
When the makers of American Idol sold the India rights of their programme to Sony Entertainment Television they could never have imagined that the
Indian variant – Indian Idol – would one day act as a catalyst for cultural
and political forces that would draw the north-eastern states of India closer
to the mainland as never before. In the third year of Indian Idol, two young
men from the north-east, a region that has continually suffered for its phy-
sical and cultural distance from the mainland, made it as finalists on the
programme. The first was a Gorkha from Darjeeling, Prashant Tamang.
Employed as a constable in the Kolkata Police, he came from a region that through the 1980s had undergone a traumatic insurgency for a separate
Gorkhaland led by the Gorkha National Liberation Front. By 1989, the
conflict itself had been resolved with the creation of a Gorkha autonomous
hill district but the scars of those years still remained. The second was Amit
Paul, a Bengali from Meghalaya, a state with deep divides between the
tribal and non-tribal populations on the one hand and with mostly Bengali
‘Dkhars’ – outsiders – on the other. These two young men qualified as fin-
alists in the middle of 2007. What followed next bears detailed description to illustrate the nature of satellite television in India and its social meaning
in a country where the state monopolised television for the first five decades
of independence. As one media report pointed out:
