Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (19 page)

46. This began in the late 70s with the boom in the VCR market.

From this Perspective…
111

47. See Kinjal Shah and Seema Raisinghani, ‘India—Cable TV Special Report’,
Fitch Ratings
, June 2003, p. 2.

48. The channel was initially launched on the new Asiasat-1 satellite by Hong Kong based billionaire Li Ka Shing, who sold his stake to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1993.

49. These were Star Plus (with never seen before programs like
The Bold and the Beautiful,
Santa Barbara
,
Baywatch, Oprah
and
Donahue
), BBC News World Service (an international alternative to DD), MTV (sexy videos, trendy Video Jockeys) and Prime Sports (with games like basketball and entertainment like WWF Wrestling).

50. MTV and BBC left the Star bouquet to go solo in 1993. Prime Sports in its newer avatar Star Sports entered into a 50:50 Joint venture with ESPN in 1996 and Zee’s promoters bought out Star’s stake in 1999 to form their own formidable network.

51. Zee’s initial programming mix included the daily soap
Tara
, with its scandalous smoking, drinking, swearing and adulterous single women and weekly game shows like
Tol Mol Ke Bol
(the Indian avatar of
The Price is Right), Antakshri
(the popular Indian song game, now televised for large studio audiences) and
Saanp Seedi
(Snakes and Ladders, played in a studio with the slimy host Mohan Kapur).

52. Dr Chandraprakash Dwivedi, Former Head of Programming Zee TV, Bombay, May 1998, as quoted in Vanita Kohli op. cit., p. 141.

53. For example, the Bollywood song countdown show—
Philips Top Ten
.

54. For a list of the top 100 programs in India as measured by AC NIELSEN’S TAM people-meter—India’s sole television rating agency, visit http://indiantelevision.com/tvr/

indextam.php4 and http://indiantelevision.com/tvr/telemeter/indexteltam.php4 The site maintains separate rankings for Cable and Satellite Programmes and Terrestrial programmes, as provided by AC Nielsen.

55. Waseem Mahmood, ‘Policy Analysis of Electronic Media Practices in South Asia’—a report prepared by the Baltic Media Centre for UNDP’s PARAGON regional governance program, 30 August 2001, p. 7.

56. Ronnie Ganguly, ‘Indian Media Industry’ (Bombay: JP Morgan Asia Pacific Research 12

May 2005), p. 6.

57. Source—Various industry estimates in Vanita Kohli op. cit., p. 60 and Ashwin Pinto,

‘68 million C&S homes in India: NRS 2006’
Indiantelevision.com.
29 August 2006.

http://www.indiantelevision.com/mam/headlines/y2k6/aug/augmam122.htm 58. National radio had begun in India in 1921 and though the state controlled All India Radio (AIR) that began in 1932 greatly increased its reach during the post-independence years, it was slow to respond to public tastes—preferring instead to adopt a paternalistic ‘we know what’s best for you approach’ towards its listeners.

For example, it took several years and severe competition from the Sri Lanka based Radio Ceylon before AIR launched
Vividh Bharti
(its ‘light’ service airing film based songs) in 1957.

59. The government suddenly disallowed private FM in 1998—however, intense lobbying by the public and media companies ensured that the space was once again opened up in 2000.

60. FICCI Frames 2006 Report, op. cit., p. 13.

61. Ibid, p. 12.

112
Gay

Bombay

62. Source—Email posting to the
Khush
-List Yahoo! Group ‘Abt the Radio Mirchi Show’

by Nitin Karani, dated
4
May 2004.

63. Source—Email posting to the
Khush
-List Yahoo! Group ‘Get Your Gay Valentines Out!’

by Vgd67, dated
14 February 2006.

64. The Internet was present in India from the early 1990s in the form of ERNet (Educational and Research Network—a division of the government’s Department of Electronics or DoE) and NICNet (the government’s National Informatics Centre Network).

While ERNet aimed at providing Internet connectivity to the country’s leading educational and research institutions, NICNet-served government departments and organizations. There was also the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) Internet service for the software exporters falling under the STP scheme of the DoE. On 15 August 1995, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL)—the government owned company that held the telecommunications monopoly in the country, launched the Gateway Internet Access Service for providing public Internet access. For three years, the company continued to operate as India’s only Internet Service Provider (ISP), using the Telegraph Act of 1885, a pre-independence British law, to give itself extended powers while blocking the entry of private ISPs. Information source—Anindo Ghosh,

‘Outlook White Paper: Private Internet Service Providers in India’ 15 October 1997.

Published on the world wide web—http://www.india50.com/isp.html#6

65. Source—NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies) Internet Survey 2000, as cited in Puneet Gupta, ‘India’s Internet: Ready for Explosive Growth’,
ISP Planet Market Research
. Available on the World Wide Web—http://isp-planet.com/research/india_stats.html

66. Ibid.

67. Source—‘Internet Indicators: Hosts, Users and Number of PCs by Country’,
ITU

(International Telecommunication Union)
, 16 September 2004. Available on the World Wide Web—http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/

68. Source—Kauffman Bros. Equity Research Industry Report on ‘Internet and Digital Media’, 22 September 2006. Analyst Sameet Sinha, p. 1. Accessible from the NASSCOM

website—http://www.nasscom.org/artdisplay.asp?cat_id=447Kauffman 69. AP, ‘Gartner Report Finds India’s Computer Market Robust’,
Yahoo! Asia News,
16 November 2004. http://asia.news.yahoo.com/041116/ap/d86d17602.html 70. ‘80 Million More PCs in India by 2010’,
Rediff.com.
15 December 2004. http://in.rediff.

com/money/2004/dec/15pc.htm

71. Popular blogs include
Talking Closets
(http://talkingclosets.blogspot.com/),
Queer
India
(http://queerindia.blogspot.com/),
I
∗
heart
∗
Bombay
… (http://sourapplemartini.

blogspot.com/) and
The Reluctant Observer
(http://mike-higher.livejournal.com/).

72. Gurcharan Das (2000), op. cit., p. 9.

73. The country was divided into sectors comprising the four metropolitan cities (Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras) and 19 other telecom circles and services in each sector were structured as a duopoly (only two cellular mobile operators per telecom circle).

However, by 1997–98, despite the attractiveness of the Indian market, there were only about 8,00,000 cellular subscribers in the country. The operators had paid huge licence fees, which had resulted in a high cost structure, un-affordable tariffs for their services and thus, a low growth of the market. The government took the first of its two prudent decisions in 1999, which helped rejuvenate the industry. It announced From this Perspective…
113

a completely revamped National Telecom Policy (NTP), much more beneficial to the operators than its previous regulations. This almost immediately translated into lower tariffs for consumers, greater subscriber uptake for operators and increased cellular coverage in the country. Cellular tariffs dropped by over 90 per cent between 1999 and 2001 and there was a parallel drop in the cost of mobile handsets. Cellular operators began to venture into more and more cities and towns of the country. The year 2001 also saw the entry of the state owned BSNL and MTNL as the third cellular operators in each circle, using WLL (Wireless in Local Loop) technology, as had been mandated by the NTP 1999. Further, in July 2001, cellular licences were awarded to the fourth cellular operators in different telecom circles. All these moves saw the cellular subscriber base increase to approximately 5.5 million users by the end of 2001.

Information and Statistics sourced from the official website of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), an industry association comprising all the cellular phone companies operation in India. See—http://coai.com/

The government took a second prudent decision by allowing the use of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology-based operators to enter the market and compete on par with the hitherto GSM (Global Services Mobile) technology-based players in 2002. This enabled the entry of companies like Reliance India Mobile and Tata Indicom into the fray and it was then that the cellular market in the country really began to sizzle. It began to add a million new customers every month at first and soon, an astonishing 1.8 million customers per month Source—AFP, ‘Mobile Phones the Talk of India as Landlines Lose Out’
Sify News
, 25 October 2004.

74. In October 2004, the number of mobile phones in the country surpassed the number of landline users (44 million) for the first time. See—

(
a
) Arindam Mukherjee, ’98 Tra La La 1000’,
Outlook
,
4 April 2005. http://www.

outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20050404&fname=VTelecom+%28F%29& sid=1

(
b
) Official Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) statistics. See http://coai.

com/

(
c
) Anand Parthasarthy, ‘Mobile Phone Growth Signals India’s Telecom Maturity’,
The Hindu
, 16 October 2004. http://www.hindu.com/2004/10/16/stories/

2004101603401300.htm

75. Saritha Rai, ‘India Leads World in Cellphone Expansion’,
The New York Times
, 15 September 2006. http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/15/business/cell.php 76. Indrajit Basu (UPI), ‘India’s New Telecom Callers’,
The Washington Times
, 25 June 2004.

http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040624-010347-8465r.htm 77. India’s NASSCOM has co-opted IT Enabled Services within its ambit and includes ITES

figures in its reporting. Source—Carol Upadhyay, ‘A New Transnational Class’,
Economic
and Political Weekly
,
27 November 2004, footnote 2. Article archived on http://www.

epw.org.in (Membership required)

78. Source—NASSCOM website. Key highlights: http://www.nasscom.in/Nasscom/

templates/NormalPage.aspx?id=28485. Facts and figures: http://www.nasscom.

in/Nasscom/templates/NormalPage.aspx?id=28487

79. ‘IT Exports to Account for 30% Forex Inflows by 08: Maran’,
Economic Times
, 20 October 2004.

114
Gay

Bombay

80. For an excellent overview of India’s emergence as an IT superpower, read
The
Horse that Flew: How India’s Silicon Gurus Spread their Wings
by Chidanand Rajghatta (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2001). Also read Devesh Kapur’s essay ‘The Causes and Consequences of India’s IT Boom’ in
India Review
1(2), April 2002, 91–110.

81. Douglas Sanders, op. cit., p. 21.

82. Vanita and Kidwai (2001), op. cit., p. xxiii.

83. Douglas Sanders, op. cit., p. 21.

84. Arvind Narrain, op. cit., pp. 33–34.

85. Aditya Bondyopadhyay, ‘MSM and the Law in India
’
, Position Paper (Naz Foundation International, undated).
Received via email, on request from NFI London office, on 14 November 2003.

86. Alok Gupta, ‘The History and Trends in the Application of the Anti-Sodomy Law in the Indian Courts’,
The Lawyer’s Collective
(Bombay, 2002) Vol. 16, No. 7, p. 9, as cited in Gautam Bhan and Arvind Narrain,
Because I Have a Voice: Queer Polics in India
(New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006), p. 7.

87. Paola Bacchetta (1999), op. cit., p. 159.

88. Bhan and Narrain (2006), op. cit., on p. 8, the authors refer to this concept taken from Michael Foucault,
Ethics
,
(Vol. 1), London: Penguin, 2000.

89. See for example—

(
a
) Anju Singh, ‘An Unnatural Opposition to Section 377’,
Indian Express
(Bombay), 1 October 2002.

(
b
) Anubha Sawhney, ‘A Flaw in the Law? Officially’,
Times of India
(Bombay), 23 August 2004.

(
c
) Vivek Divan, ‘We’re Only a Part of You’,
Pioneer
, 26 March 2006. http://www.

dailypioneer.com/displayit1.asp?pathit=/archives2/mar2606/sundaypioneer/

assignment/assign2.txt

(
d
) Arvind Narrain and Vivek Divan, ‘Revise Section 377’,
Times of India
, 12 January 2007.

90. See
Combat Law: The Human Rights Magazine,
Volume 2, Issue 4, October-November 2003. The entire issue is dedicated to different aspects of LBGT activism in India, mostly relating to Section 377.

91. See ‘HC Asks Center to Clarify Stand on Homosexuals’,
Telegraph
(Calcutta), 16 January 2003. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1030116/asp/nation/story_1578382.asp 92. See—

(
a
) PTI, ‘Allowing Homosexuality Will Lead to Delinquent Behavior: Indian Govt.’,
Rediff.com.
8 September 2003. http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/sep/08sex.htm (
b
) Kavita Chowdhary, ‘Center Says Being Gay Will Remain a Crime, It’s Reason: Our Society Doesn’t Tolerate It’,
Indian Express,
9 September 2003. http://www.

indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=31224

(
c
) Siddharth Narrain, ‘Sexuality and the Law’,
Frontline,
Volume 20, Issue 26, 20 December 2003–2 January 2004. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2026/

stories/20040102002209500.htm

(
d
) Shibu Thomas, ‘Mumbai Gays Against Center’s Stance’,
Mid-day
, 15 September 2003. http://web.mid-day.com/news/city/2003/september/63897.htm (
e
) Arvind Narrain, ‘What A Queer Administration?’,
Hindustan Times
, 3 December 2005.

From this Perspective…
115

93. The full text of the government response has been uploaded as a Word document on the website of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California Santa Barbara—www.ihc.ucsb.edu/research/ subaltern/events/facworkshops/