Negotiating the Political in the Indian Community Radio Sphere

The community radio movement in India, about two decades old now, has had to contend with ‘the political’ from its inception. Advocates and activists for opening of airwaves in India for third-sector broadcasting, independent of the state and the market, were cautious to eschew an argument based on communication rights, something that would have surely be construed as overtly political by a government that was wary of the demand for community radio. Instead, campaigners deployed an already prevalent paradigm of communication for development which seemed somewhat benign and acceptable to the regime.

Not only did this strategic decision by the movement turn into a trap, but was also compounded by other policies, such as the prohibitions placed on broadcast of news and ‘political’ content by community radios. During this past over a decade of their existence, many community radio stations, while trying to deliver on their mandate to use community radio as a tool for enhancing people’s participation in development, have had to muddle through the political question. In the process, the community radio sector has fallen short of its own campaign expectations that community radio would help reverse the hierarchy of access, promote alternative voices, support social movements, revitalise neglected cultural forms, build solidarities among and empower the marginalised, and propagate for the right to communication for all.

This paper will critically examine the complex ways in which the community radio sector in India has been negotiating the ‘political’ in their programming as well as through their engagement with the state. The chapter considers some key challenges of the community radio sector in India—content restrictions, state funding, monitoring and surveillance, and the NGOization of community radio— in order to analyse how this complex web of patronage and surveillance results in keeping CR stations, from the state’s perspective, at a safe distance from the potential ravages of the political. In the end, I discuss the possibilities for rebooting the community radio sector in India based on discourses of communication rights and freedom of expression.

Vinod Pavarala is Senior Professor of Communication and UNESCO Chair on Community Media (since 2011) at the University of Hyderabad, India. After obtaining a Ph.D degree in Sociology from University of Pittsburgh, USA, he taught at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA and IIT-Bombay, India before joining the University of Hyderabad. His teaching and research have been mainly in the areas of communication for social change and community media. He has been actively involved in research, policy advocacy, and capacity building in the field of community media not only in India and elsewhere in South Asia, but also in East and West Africa and parts of Europe. He is the author of Interpreting Corruption: Elite Perspectives in India (Sage, 1997); Other Voices: the struggle for community radio in India (Sage, 2007; with Kanchan K. Malik). His most recent book, Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves (Routledge, 2020) is co-edited with Kanchan K. Malik. He has published several articles in scholarly journals and contributed book chapters to a number of edited volumes. One of his ongoing projects, supported by AHRC, is a collaborative one with John Downey (Loughborough) on the issue of news media framing of citizenship in India. Prof. Pavarala currently chairs the Community Communication Section of IAMCR