Live issue

In a first, Doordarshan telecast live the annual Vijaya Dashami address of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in Nagpur, which it used to cover so far as routine news. To quell the controversy that immediately followed, the national broadcaster argued that Bhagwat is newsworthy. Of course he is. The sarsanghchalak is newsworthy by definition when a former pracharak is prime minister, and especially so when the PM’s election campaign was backed unabashedly by the RSS. Bhagwat was also newsworthy during that campaign, when he had told off his foot-soldiers for going “NaMo, NaMo”, and insisted that the RSS supported the BJP only in order to further its own aims.

But the issue is not Bhagwat, it’s Doordarshan. His address this year, marking the 99th anniversary of the founding of the RSS, was the usual invoking of familiar demons like Western materialism and customary platitudes about non-violence and truth. It is the public broadcaster that has set a questionable precedent by giving it special treatment, sparking suspicions about whether it was taking its cue from the ruling regime. After all, Narendra Modi tweeted a link to the text of Bhagwat’s speech from his personal handle. Was the live telecast simply an issue of editorial judgement, therefore, as Doordarshan has claimed, or was it acting under real or anticipated pressure? This is not the first time that the national broadcaster has visibly faltered in recent times. In May, it had edited out controversial statements about the Gandhi family from an interview of Modi, before the results of the general election were declared. Caught out, it had cited the exigencies of post-production processes.

But let us give Doordarshan the benefit of the doubt this time and assume that the principle of newsworthiness was actually applied in earnest. In that case, it has a big field to play. The country is teeming with a million mutineers, for instance, who would be happy to sound off, and millions more who want to hear them. On a less spectacular level, there are important government programmes and schemes asking to be problematised and questioned seriously. If newsworthiness is going to be its new mantra, DD may have bitten off more than it can chew.