In a modern democracy, the information and broadcasting minister’s job ought to hover precariously on the brink of redundancy. Both Ms Sushma Swaraj in the previous regime and Mr Priya Ranjan Das Munshi in this one deal with this insecurity in exactly the same manner. For those adult Indians who value their adulthood and private freedoms, this is both annoying and comical. Ms Swaraj and Mr Das Munshi are both terribly concerned about that notoriously vague principle — “public morality”. It is bad for Indians (usually male) to watch inadequately clothed people (usually female). Therefore, with scant regard to rationality and any sort of open debate, they summarily decide to ban private television channels. The easiest things to fasten on are the private fashion channels. So FTV’s Midnight Hot, and before that AXN’s World’s Sexiest Commercials, have been banned for a period of time. In doing so, Mr Das Munshi cuts a sorry as well as an unpleasant figure. The peremptory and profoundly undemocratic nature of such a ban, reducing adult citizens to sex-crazed minors who need to be protected — by, of all things, the State — from their own, dark proclivities, makes the I&B ministry look like a dour and prurient body uncertain of its own function and therefore asserting itself with a vengeance.

Besides, none of the existing laws provides clear and up-to-date objective guidelines for the regulation of content. Hence objections to such programmes invariably invoke meaningless notions like “public morality”, “good taste”, “decency” and “the denigration of women”. The standard question this provokes — “Who decides what these words and phrases mean?” — is worth reiterating, even at the risk of stating the obvious. Television sets can be switched off, and children’s viewing regulated by their guardians. Neither of these simple acts of regulation needs to be the prerogative of the State. Besides, the entire issue of the denigration of women by the exposure of their bodies needs to be thought through intelligently, sensibly and without hypocrisy, preferably by women themselves, and not exclusively by ministers and bureaucrats, mostly men, who take upon themselves the grave task of protecting women from al kinds of presumed dishonour. At a more fundamental level, architects of a minimalist State should question the very existence of ministries for such things as I&B and culture.