This article provides a pathway to engage with the enabling environment of public communication in India. It scrutinises debates around press policy in the first four decades after Independence (1950–90) to reveal the trajectory of contests between dominant strands of liberal and progressive standpoints. This will help unravel the constituted contexts of the public sphere of marketed print in pre-liberalisation India. The central interest in doing so is to illustrate how and argue why the value of media diversity, unlike those of media freedom and media autonomy, failed to become a core concern in debates on press policy. The ways in which this inheritance pre-determined the perimeters of policy options during media deregulation of the 1990s may be worth exploring further.
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