Journal of Digital Media & Policy - Special Issue: ‘(Re)Iterations, Transgressions, Recognition: Politics and Practices of Media Policies in South Asia’, Mar 2022

Due to the State’s militarized policies in the war-torn Pashtun areas (ex-FATA) bordering Afghanistan, the Pakistan government’s undeclared internet policy in this region has become an obstacle in the way of both exercising the freedom of expression and the attainment of digital access as a basic human right. This is in line with the colonial legacy of keeping this area a buffer-zone, strategically rendering it an information black hole. But the criminalization of digital freedom has also triggered local protests for media-making rights. Based on interviews with ‘tribal’ students, and using critical discourse analysis in combination with Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, we examine how the Pakistani State denies the tribal students their digital rights resulting in the loss of their time and the consequences of this collective loss. We found that the local frustration could not be limited to the lack of internet. Entailing an element of passive defiance, the tribal students are deserting their ancestral land to reclaim their bodies from the goliath of the State, hampering its necro behemoth that is using them as a complicit body in a disabled space.

Campaigns against hate speech related to race, gender groups and sexual orientation have received varying degrees of acknowledgement and recognition in global contexts. However, the same has not been true for caste-hate speech that affects a fifth of the world’s population. This article advocates that global policy-makers should consider caste a protected characteristic related to hate-speech policies. It further calls for recognition and inclusion of caste as a protected characteristic in all international covenants related to human rights and hate speech. It also sets out action plans to mitigate hate speech in everyday conversations that are increasingly mediated by and saturated in digital platforms.

There is a clear need for digital media policies in Sri Lanka to address violence and promote free expression, in the context of the espoused vision of a digital Sri Lanka. There is also a need to critically analyse the colonial and neo-colonial hegemonies that are inherent in the modern nation state, civil society and corporations, and how those are perpetuated through the policies they create and implement. This article proposes grounding media studies in our communities and centres the experiences of Melony, a cisgender crossdressing gay sex worker, who finds himself belonging/nonbelonging in the state’s vision for a digital Sri Lanka and the accompanying neocolonizing ideologies of social media platform companies.

This article unravels an unacknowledged moment in the public history of media regulation in India. In recovering this moment, the article speaks to us at two levels. Most immediately, it speaks to anxieties of ownership in the news media that have long marked scholarship of varied hues in media policy. In parallel, the article converses with wider debates on the role of institutional constraints and accordant interests in policy studies on the media and beyond. The takeaway here is about media regulation embodying the compulsions and opportunities of creating a framework of consensus. A consensus does not imply the absence of wrangles between actors but a relationship between contending actors that is in some way ordered. The moment under examination pertains to the early 1970s when there was wide-ranging enthusiasm and political support to address anxieties of ownership in the press. At the heart of a proposed regulation was the desire to cushion the press from influences and vulnerabilities of their proprietors. The earliest pronouncement proposed diffusing the ownership and control of high-circulating newspapers. Subsequently, the proposal got reoriented in terms of delinking ownership from big business. Astonishingly, even the revised proposal was never tabled in the the Indian parliament. Abandoning this intervention is intriguing, especially amidst the wide-ranging political enthusiasm over it, the ideological legitimacy of the ruling dispensation and rare legislative opportunity. This article is provoked to reconcile government’s intent in acting on anxieties of ownership with its subsequent silence, a rather considered one, in actualizing legislation. I begin by offering a framework to visualize risks to the press from the varied participant interests. Thereafter, I trace the ownership anxieties in earlier decades forming the deep context of the regulatory juncture signified by the so-called Ownership Bill. The article then details the life of the Bill between 1971 and 1974 as a particular confluence of policy and politics. Forming the immediate backdrop to the Bill’s ultimate withdrawal, this life cycle offers clues to the ‘failure’ of this regulatory endeavour. To reason the failure of this regulatory endeavour, I reflect on the institutional architecture confronted, and the political and economic expediencies of dominant interests. No doubt the state, as an apparatus, had hit against a complex set of institutional constraints, especially on the delicate matter of policy supremacy between the parliament and judiciary; but these constraints appear to be deftly evoked by the state, here as an interest, to shelve a legislation potentially jeopardizing its own stakes in the press. This considered silence essentially reiterated a framework of consensus that, while maintaining the vulnerabilities of different interests constituting the press, reiterated a particular order in the relationship between the state and the press as a whole.

From the perspective of a developing country, the selection of correct digital technology for state-owned television might appear as a decisive testimony of national interest. In selecting appropriate technology, factors such as user acceptance, commercialization prospects, network externalities or cost-effectiveness have significant influence. However, the causal element(s) that have the greatest impacts in the developing countries have not been discussed enough. This article thus aims to examine the technology selection process through the ongoing digital television switchover in the Bangladesh experience. In line with recent global escalation of changing broadcasting technology from analogue to digital, the International Telecommunication Union apprized the Government of Bangladesh (GOB) to complete the digital TV switchover by 2015. In 2021, the GOB had not yet completed it. This article primarily aims to discover why it has not been possible to complete the switchover in Bangladesh to date. With a few exceptions, little work has been done on how developing countries decide to choose a technology over another and how they exclude other latent technology for media industry. During the technology selection process, how the various options and parameters work and how they incorporate with the existing media policies are in need of examination. Although there may be some common parameters while selecting technology universally, within the developing countries, aspects of country-specific contexts might be different. Rather than verifying the technology chosen, this article aims to explain that how the selection process occurs within the television sector in the developing countries.

Using the case of a project called Media for Peace (2010–13), funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and implemented by the Ministry of Information and Communication (MoIC), Nepal, to revise media policies/laws and convert state-owned broadcasting into public service broadcasting, this article examines cultures of stakeholderism and the idea of stakeholder participation in the media policy process. It evaluates the idea of multistakeholderism critically. By analysing interviews, official documents and news reporting, the article shows that gradually a group of stakeholders, especially associations related to journalists, editors and media owners, became dominant in the post-conflict situation and political transition by using different strategies such as networking with each other, challenging, disowning and owning the policy process. This article argues that these stakeholders became dominant in the policy process by demanding for a mutistakeholder process and tried to influence the policy outcome by laying claim to the writing of the policy document.

How are communication policies made in a hybrid regime that is democratically elected but essentially authoritarian? Exploring the inner-workings of the policy-making processes in Bangladesh, the article employs a critical analysis of the major communication policies under the incumbent Awami League-led government (in their third term consecutively), including the Private Television Ownership, Establishment and Operation Policy 2012 Draft, National Broadcasting Policy 2014 and the most recent Digital Security Act 2018. Drawing from field-based data, document analysis and in-depth interviews, the article delves deeper into the politics of inclusion and exclusion of policy stakeholders, as well as the compromise, trade off and their consequences that often remain hidden from public scrutiny. The findings show, as Bangladesh moves towards a single party-ruled country, orchestrating an absolute control over broadcast media ownership and communications policy-making in general, the hope for media democratization through policy reforms becomes unattainable and turns into despair.

Review of: Community Radio Policies in South Asia: A Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach, Preeti Raghunath (2020)

Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 370 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-81155-628-9, h/bk, €109.99