Need something like a censor board': RSS constitutes panel for curbs on OTT 'cultural pollution'

The Panel That Took Two Years to Become a Panel In October 2024, Mohan

Bhagwat used his Vijayadashami address in Nagpur to call OTT content a source of "moral corruption"

• a line that, at the time, read as one more addition to a long list of Sangh commentary on modern culture. It is worth remembering how often such speeches have been treated as rhetoric that fades by the next news cycle. This one did not fade. It moved, slowly and without a press announcement, into an actual body: an informal panel of former vice-chancellors and pracharaks that has already held its first meeting and is now working toward a formal proposal for the Union Ministry of Culture. The two-year gap between speech and structure is the detail worth sitting with, because it tells you this was never really about OTT content specifically - it was fed by Kutumb Prabodhan, the RSS's ongoing programme to "revive traditional family values" and "strengthen inter-generational bonds." OTT platforms are simply where that older concern has found its newest, most visible target. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has followed the RSS's cultural interventions over the decades: a concern about social change is first framed as a family or moral issue, then slowly built into an institutional recommendation aimed at the state. What is different this time is the object of concern - not a festival practice or a textbook, but a globally distributed, largely unregulated form of entertainment that Indian regulators have so far chosen to govern lightly. That regulatory gap is real and it is the parallel that both supports and complicates the panel's case. Films exhibited in Indian cinemas have been pre-certified since 1952, under a law built for a pre-television, pre-internet media environment. OTT platforms, existing in a completely different technological and cultural context, were instead placed under the IT Rules, 2021 - a "light-touch" framework of self-classification and grievance redressal, deliberately built to avoid pre-censorship. The RSS panel's demand for "something like a censor board" is, in effect, an argument to import the 1952 model into a 2026 medium - and here the historical parallel breaks down, because the CBFC was designed for a handful of theatrical releases a year, not for the volume and cross-border nature of streaming content that any pre-certification regime would now have to police. The government's own record complicates the panel's premise further. It has already disabled 50 OTT platforms over two years using existing IT Act, BNS and Indecent Representation of Women Act provisions - evidence that enforcement tools already exist, even without a dedicated censor board. What the RSS panel is really proposing, then, is not a fix for an enforcement gap but a shift in who gets to define "cultural pollution" before content ever reaches an audience - a genuinely older question in Indian cultural life, now being asked of a genuinely new medium.