India: Comedy Central ‘banned’ for 6 days
November 26, 2014
By Chris Forrester
The India version of Viacom’s Comedy Central channel must go ‘dark’ for six days starting on November 26th. Comedy Central in India is a joint-venture between Viacom and Network-18.
The ruling comes from the country’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MIB) in response to the airing of two contentious shows, Stand Up Club and Popcorn which aired in May and July 2012. The MIB ruled that the two programmes was “not suitable for unrestricted public exhibition and children as the same depicted women as a commodity of sex and appeared to deprave, corrupt and injure the public morality and morals”.
A decision was made in May 2013 that the channel should be banned for 10 days. The channel was found to have breached guidelines limiting the use of “obscene dialogue and vulgar words”.
However, this was appealed and India’s High Court in Delhi has now ruled that the original ban was in order. With six days of the original prohibition left to run the channel must now go off the air.