Oprah-style television finds a fertile breeding ground

Talkshow television, Oprah-Winfrey style, has arrived in India with a vengeance. A sick, eight-months' pregnant woman was cajoled in front of the cameras and forced to endure a seven-hour ordeal of public humiliation as the studio audience combed every facet of the terrible dilemma she is facing with ill-restrained glee.

Before Tuesday night, Gudiya's story was sad enough. Through no fault of her own, she faces an impossible choice between the husband she thought was dead and the new husband whose child she is carrying. Her first husband went missing on Army duty five years ago and was presumed dead.

After waiting for him in vain, Gudiya remarried. But it transpires the missing husband, Mohammed Arif, was a prisoner-of-war in Pakistan who has been released and wants her back. But he doesn't want her second husband's unborn child.

For the private Zee network, it was a dilemma made for television. Gudiya and both husbands were roped in to sit in front of a mock village council made up of studio audience members who questioned them and then voted on what she should do.

And all this in a country where only five years ago there were just three state-run television stations that produced a worthy mix of news, drama and Indian classical music.

Indian society is changing extraordinarily fast. With the vast potential revenues to be made from television advertising in a country of more than one billion people have come networks only too eager to pander to viewers' prurience. Gudiya's case has been seized on by a competitive market.

Because it is all so new, many Indians are naive about the potential appearing on television in front of a mass audience has to damage their lives. By the end of the show, Gudiya was in despair. "I don't even know whether I will live or die," she said.

Women's groups were incensed at her treatment before the cameras got to her. She wants to stay with second husband Taufiq. But Muslim clerics said this marriage was null and told her to go back to Arif.

Gudiya had no choice. Arif did not want Taufiq's child and said she would have to give it up at birth.

Forced to move to her old home with Arif in another village, Gudiya fell ill from the stress. "There is no love now," she said. "This isn't a game. Living with some one today, with another tomorrow."

On the Zee television show Taufiq told her he would accept her decision. But in traditional Indian village society, she has little say in the matter.

One of the few good things to come out of the gruesome television spectacle was that Arif said on air Gudiya could keep her baby, but when it was "grown up" Taufiq would have to take it.

Responding to criticism, a Zee spokesman said: "Arif and Gudiya are not being held against their will. We gave the news all the hype. We could not foresee the conclusion."

And the studio "village council's" verdict? It agreed that Gudiya should go back to her first husband. For what it's worth.

- INDEPENDENT