ABSTRACT
The question the Indian Left needs to ask itself most urgently today is whether it would suffice for both its communist and non-communist variants alike to protest against the current government proposal to bring in a broadcasting bill that seeks to limit the operations of a ‘free’ media? If the intended broadcasting bill is an act of state censorship—which it doubtless is—would it do for the Indian Left to simply see it as such and resist it? Only a praxis, which is based on a full comprehension of this systemic tension, can constitute a really interventionist critique of the political economy of the mass media. To put it broadly, the principal concerns of the proposed bill are regulation of market-share of TV companies to purportedly prevent media monopolies from coming up so that homogenisation of opinion can be checked.
