Uh-oh, itna sannata kyun hai bhai?

The reasoning for new rules/laws, unilaterally imposed without consent of parliament, was a demand expressed by civil society, parents, including courts, and the parliament itself! Representation pic/Getty Images

I first came across the term Overton Window, late, 2020, sitting on a couple of news channel debates to do with the government's overt need to censor content, in particular, of subscriber-based web platforms - Netflix, Amazon, etc. Or OTTs, as streaming services are called in India.

The state's carrot and stick policy to control most discourses, debates and news on Indian television is by now laughably legendary. Even by those standards, it seemed odd that there were a group of TV/film actors, including a news anchor, almost actively demanding government censorship, on themselves!

Who does curbs on speech and expression, in general, affect the most? Those who make a living from it, first. Namely, artistes and journalists, foremost! The Overton Window roughly relates to introducing a far-out political thought/policy (in this case govt censorship) in the public domain. Softly test and expand the shade-card of what is acceptable to people. And cement it thence.

The news panelists were doing this job with much gusto. Although they hadn't been briefed well on the reasoning for state censorship - they were fumbling all over the place with it.

In a matter of months, to the surprise of no one, the government put out its set of rules and guidelines to control Internet in India. The number of pages of jargon, demarcated between censorship of social media content (under IT ministry), and online news plus OTTs (bizarrely clubbed as one, under Ministry of I&B), would have confused most.

The reasoning for new rules/laws, unilaterally imposed without consent of parliament, was a demand expressed by civil society, parents, including courts, and the parliament itself!

The minister held that the OTTs had been repeatedly asked to self-regulate, but they hadn't. Sure, they'd probably drawn up their own guidelines, he casually conceded, but it didn't involve any external monitoring. But, hey, isn't that what we mean by self-regulation?

Which is also what the government wrote in its press release its rules were attempting to achieve - besides being "progressive, liberal and contemporaneous." The background to these rules refers to sexually alarmist/deviant content like rape, child pornography, and the menace of fake news.

The foreground concerns committees and departments, commissions and reports, as if cops and courts don't exist. I see clueless employees of Internet firms circling around government offices all day!

Since no OTT subscriber I know has patiently been through the said documents, here's the chronology of what self-regulation, as we understand it now, means. The government has a grievance portal for OTTs (also for online news), where you can lodge a complaint.

For? Having consumed something that, to start with, no one ever forced you to - they're not even free to air. This is besides a resident grievance officer, on every OTT platform, who must accept your grouse within 24 hours.

Action must be taken within 15 days. What if ignoring your complaint (go watch something else, or make your own to counter what you have) is the response? You approach a self-regulatory body, headed by a retired Supreme/High Court judge, appointed from a panel set up by the government itself!

What next? A meeting every two months thereafter of reps from ministries of I&B, women & child development, law, justice, home, external affairs, defence, electronics & IT… Woah! Net result? Censor/block content (obviously).

Sure these rules seem heavily skewed in favour of a rando's right to take offence, over a usually silent majority's right to consume what they like (causing harm to no one) - just because they didn't complain, against a complainant, perhaps? And of course the hardworking creators' right to create.

Over everything else, it's essentially all about whether the government alone agrees with a particular grouse. I'm not even getting into social media and their new governing rules.

Without which, I'm told, three-fourths of take-down notices on Facebook have anyway come from governments of India and Turkey! The latter, one can sense, is a democracy - but only when it comes to voting; not much else otherwise, least of all opposition/dissent.

So how come no one is complaining over a looming litany of complaints, given the skewed set of ‘self-regulatory' guidelines? The entertainment/creative industry heavyweights/guilds have largely gone silent.

Are they measurably satisfied with what the government rules mercifully don't specify? Which is an ancient Hays Code, from 1930s Hollywood, expressly prohibiting nudity, ridicule of religion, immoral standards of life, etc? Or, do they believe the Indian legal system would have been no better with help/redressal anyway?

Or, is it simply one's willingness to give up on liberties so easily, which makes you wonder if we deserved them in the first place? Or, do they believe the proof of the pudding is in the eating - the implementation of government-led censorship on the ground - allowing for benefit of doubt. So why worry, until worry worries us!

Besides, it's not even an industry issue, as much as it concerns every single consumer. That (move) was easy, though. It's yesterday's news already. Some TV anchors/channels have probably moved on to expanding Overton Window on newer subjects still. Keep an eye there perhaps?

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.