BENGALURU – India’s opposition leaders have condemned national state broadcaster Prasar Bharati’s deal in February with Hindusthan Samachar, an agency with a Hindu right-wing history, to feed wire news to its television and radio channels.
The deal comes after the state broadcaster cancelled its subscription to India’s largest and oldest professional news agency, the Press Trust of India (PTI), in 2020.
Prasar Bharati had expressed “deep displeasure” then with PTI’s coverage, saying that it was “not in the national interest”.
It was referring to PTI’s interviews with the ambassadors to China and India on the military stand-off in Ladakh, which contradicted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement that there was no Chinese intrusion into Indian territory.
Prasar Bharati has been taking news feeds from Hindusthan Samachar since 2017 on “an evaluation basis” for free.
After it stopped PTI feeds in 2020, the broadcaster entered into annual contracts with the Delhi-headquartered agency at 20 million rupees (S$329,100) a year.
On Feb 14, it signed a contract with Hindusthan Samachar for 25 months for a total of 77 million rupees.
The news agency must now provide 100 news stories every day to Prasar Bharati, including 10 national stories and 40 local ones in regional languages such as Marathi, Bangla, Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu and Gujarati.
Media watchers and news editors are concerned that Prasar Bharati’s two arms, Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR), whose multiple channels in several languages are often the only source of mainstream news in the hinterlands, will now begin to feature news that is not only pro-government – an old legacy irrespective of the party in power – but also religiously polarised.
Doordarshan and AIR were the only Indian sources of audiovisual news till the early 1990s, before the proliferation of private channels and online news. Older and urban Indians might feel some nostalgia for the broadcasters but few would consider them independent media.
However, they are still the default channels in rural India and are considered the official source of information about government activities. In 2021, the 36 Doordarshan channels had a gross unique viewership of around 685 million. To compare, Britain’s state broadcaster BBC had an audience of 489 million in the same period.
Hindusthan Samachar was set up in 1948 by Mr Shivram Shankar Apte, a journalist from Baroda in Gujarat who was in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a volunteer-based organisation that believes India should be a Hindu nation instead of a secular one.
Mr Apte was also the co-founder of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a Hindu nationalist outfit whose members have been involved in several violent attacks on mosques, churches and non-Hindu Indians.
Today, the Hindusthan Samachar has 22 news bureaus and 600 correspondents across India. Its group editor, Mr Ram Bahadur Rai, is a former journalist and chairman of a centre for arts under the Ministry of Culture, and the editor-in-chief is Mr Jitendra Tiwari, who worked in the Hindu right-wing weekly Panchjanya.
PTI, operating since 1949, has more than 500 staff journalists and about 800 stringers across India, according to its website. It has been led since 2017 by journalist Vijay Joshi, formerly with the US-based international wire agency Associated Press for 27 years. Its current chairman is Mr Aveek Sarkar, also the vice-chairman of the Kolkata-based news conglomerate ABP Group that publishes The Telegraph.
Former information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari, from the Indian National Congress, asked: “How can a public broadcaster whose autonomy was sought to be ensured by an act of the Parliament take content from a news agency which has a clear and overt ideological bias, irrespective of which side the ideology leans on?”
Mr Pinarayi Vijayan, Kerala state’s chief minister and senior member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said the deal was “an attempt to ‘saffronise’ news and silence dissent”. Saffron is a colour that signifies Hinduism, and “saffronise” refers to adding a pro-Hindu bias.
Prasar Bharati chief executive Gaurav Dwivedi defended the decision, saying: “It was done to ensure people are always up to date with authentic information.”
Unlike wire agencies such as PTI and UNI that the state broadcaster had previously subscribed to, Hindusthan Samachar supplies newsfeed in 12 languages and for a significantly smaller fee, Prasar Bharati officials told reporters.
Earlier arrangements with PTI and UNI were at 90 million and 50 million rupees a year respectively for news in just two languages, English and Hindi.
India ranked 150th of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index in 2022 because of attacks and curbs on the mobility of journalists, increasing criminal cases by the government against critical reporters, and financial control of the media by corporations close to the government.
In February, the BBC’s India office in Delhi was searched by income tax officials, which The Editors Guild of India said was part of “a trend of using government agencies to intimidate and harass press organisations that are critical of government policies or the ruling establishment”.
