A woman’s 16-year crusade for a national channel for Sindhis

It was the late 2000s when Asha Chand made it her life’s mission to advocate for a Sindhi public broadcasting channel. 

While skimming through channels on her television, she had noticed telecasts in Sanskrit, Urdu, and Gujarati, and wondered why there wasn’t a channel in the language that belongs to her community and which she believes is gradually fading away. 

The next day, she spoke to the chairperson of Sindhi Sangat, an NGO she had founded, and wrote a letter to the then information and broadcasting minister. Over the years, she carried out advocacy campaigns to send letters to ministers, prime ministers, Prasar Bharti representatives, postcard and online signature campaigns, filed dozens of RTIs, and petitions in court.

But it seems to be back to square one 16 years later for Chand, who is now 73.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court dismissed her petition, saying that a Sindhi channel was not the only way to preserve a language. Senior lawyer Indira Jaising, arguing on behalf of Chand and her NGO Sindhi Sangat, had argued that public broadcasting was the most important means to preserve anything. But the bench disagreed. 

‘Partition scattered us’

“We don’t have a territory of our own. Partition has scattered us all. This has impacted our roots,” Chand told Newslaundry. 

Chand comes from a family of writers, whom she credits for her passion for the language. She is the daughter of Sundri Uttamchandani, a writer and Sahitya Akademi Award winner, and AJ Uttam, a freedom fighter who was among those who had campaigned for Sindhi’s inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution.

“Isn’t the best way to pick up a language is by hearing it? The court says it is not the only way but how do I tell them that it is the easiest way to reach people in our community? It can reach every nook and corner of the world,” she said.

Chand, who studied in Mumbai and worked in a bank, said she was “restless” in her job, and started publishing unprinted books based on her mother’s works, which eventually led her to advocate for the language’s wider recognition and reach. 

Her NGO, registered in Mumbai, was founded in 2000 to create awareness of and to promote Sindhi language, culture, and heritage. They do this by conducting learning programmes to promote the language, hosting events, having competitions, publishing information about the language, and more. The idea, according to her, is to “use the powerful medium of the Internet to reach Sindhis across the globe at any time”.

She has since moved to Dubai, but travelled to India for the court hearings. “We care about our language much more than money. Government after government had promised to do something for us but if they wanted to, they would have done it. It shouldn’t have to take these many years.”

Case 

Chand’s case relied heavily on Article 29 of the constitution, which provides for the protection of cultural and educational rights of minorities, and also states that any section of citizens in India with a distinct language, script, or culture have the right to conserve it.

“There is a heightened duty on the state to provide the means and avenue of communication for a language which has no state, in line with the interests of protection of minorities which are also protected as a fundamental right including the right to preserve the language and culture as protected by Article 29,” read an excerpt of her petition. Sindhis have to be protected particularly as the partition scattered the community and left them stateless in India, which the plea states “meant that the language could be lost for the next generation”.

According to the 2011 census, there are 2.8 million people in India who speak the Sindhi language. This does not include Sindhis who no longer speak the language. 

Chand had challenged an order of the Delhi High Court from May this year, which had said that it was not workable for it to give directions for a new Doordarshan channel. 

She had approached the Delhi High Court for the first time in 2015 with a writ petition. However, Prasar Bharti had then pointed to the number of potential viewers. A full time channel for “viewership for only 26 lakh people in the country is not sustainable”, it had said.

In 2023, Prasar Bharti told the Delhi High Court that time slots had been given to Sidhi telecasts on three DD channels. In February this year, the court disposed of the plea but said that it expected the respondent to make every possible effort and endeavor to open a new DD channel for Sindhis in the future.  

Chand appealed the dismissal in May, but the appeal was dismissed later that month. 

Profitability vs protection 

When Chand began her campaign in 2008, the late Ram Jethmalani, then MP in Rajya Sabha, also got involved and wrote to the I&B ministry stating that while Sindhi language was part of Schedule Eight, a Sindhi channel was not yet in place. DD has 24x7 regional channels for many of the 22 languages in Schedule Eight, such as Malayalum, Assamese, Punjabi, Urdu, and Oriya.

In response to Chand and Jethmalani, the I&B ministry’s joint secretary said in 2011 that it was not feasible to start a 24-hour Sindhi channel due to a “serious resource crunch and staff shortage”. 

Chand told Newslaundry that “many of the Doordarshan channels are loss-making, but they’re still functioning and airing. Government’s work is not a business proposal but it is a service for the people.”

In her petitions, her counsel maintained that the profitability of a regional linguistic channel can only be tested based on the response received after its establishment. It said there is no material on record such as a feasibility study or any other report to show why such a channel is not feasible.

The plea said that a perusal of the current roster of Doordarshan channels outlines a specific streaming channel for every state of the nation and its dominant languages in addition to other channels like DD Urdu and DD Uttarakhand with broadcasts in both Garhwali and Kumaoni. 

“Thus, DD denying right to broadcasting in Sindhi based solely on absence of geographical concentration is manifestly arbitrary since the said classification is bound to have no applicability to Sindhis. It is thus violative of Article 14.”

The Supreme Court’s decision may have come in, but Chand is nowhere close to accepting defeat. She told Newslaundry that she will be considering other avenues to take the fight forward. 

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