RSS-linked news agency to feed content to Doordarshan and AIR. Here are key reasons?

India’s public broadcaster Prasar Bharati will now entirely rely on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-backed news agency, Hindusthan Samachar, for its daily news feed.

Who runs Hindustan Samachar

The Hindustan Samachar, which has remained the voice of Hindu right wing politics, has over the years spread its wings across the country. It has 22 news bureaus and 600 correspondents. According to Indian Express, the Group Editor is Ram Bahadur Rai, a seasoned journalist who worked with Jansatta for several years, and is now chairman of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) under the central government’s Ministry of Culture.

It’s only renewal of contract

Prasar Bharati is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting which runs the Doordarshan and the All India Radio. It signed an exclusive contract on February 14 with Hindusthan Samachar — a decision which came some two years after it cancelled its subscription with the Press Trust of India (PTI), India’s largest and oldest news agency. The two parties entered into a formal agreement in which Prasar Bharati will pay nearly Rs7.7 crore to Hindusthan Samachar for a period of two years ending in March 2025. Indian general elections are due by May 2024. According to sources, Hindusthan Samachar has been providing its wire services to Prasar Bharati free of cost since 2017 on an “evaluation basis”. The latest contract, however, is said to be not new.  It is only the renewal of an annual contract that HS has had with Prasar since February 2020. “We had a prior contract with Hindusthan Samachar, which was renewed this month,” Prasar CEO Gaurav Dwivedi told The Indian Express on Sunday.

Possible reason for the contract

It will be naïve to deny the news outlet’s close link with the current dispensation. Shrikant Joshi, the RSS leader who revived Hindustan Samachar, passed away in 2013. After his death, Sarkaryawah (general secretary) of the RSS, Suresh (Bhaiyyaji) Joshi, made efforts to strengthen the outlet.  However, massive revival plan was devised in 2016 in Ujjain at a conclave which was concluded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ravindra Kishore Sinha, who served as a Rajya Sabha MP of the BJP from Bihar from April 10, 2014 to April 9, 2020 became its chairman. Sinha served in the position until April 2022, when he was replaced by Nagpur-based Arvind Mardikar.

Brief history of Hindusthan Samachar

Hindustan Samachar was founded in 1948 by Shivram Shankar Apte alias Dadasaheb Apte, a journalist. The news outlet was registered as a cooperative society in 1956. Apte, who was born in Baroda, had a lifelong association with the RSS. He was the founding general secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in 1964. In 1975, soon after the proclamation of the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s government merged the four news agencies of the time — PTI, United News of India (UNI), Hindusthan Samachar, and Samachar Bharati — into a single news agency, Samachar, reported Indian Express. The decision was reversed by the Janata Party government that came to power after the elections of 1977.

-INDIA NEWS STREAM