How Rajeev Chandrasekhar influenced the editorial policies at Suvarna News and Kannada Prabha

29 May 2018
On Independence Day in 2016, Suvarna News aired a debate between two speakers from the political left, and two adherents of Hindutva. The leftist speakers were presented against a dark backdrop showing barbed wire and raised fists. Their counterparts stood before a light one with the colours of the national flag.
On Independence Day in 2016, Suvarna News aired a debate between two speakers from the political left, and two adherents of Hindutva. The leftist speakers were presented against a dark backdrop showing barbed wire and raised fists. Their counterparts stood before a light one with the colours of the national flag.

On 25 May, the investigative news website Cobrapost released “Operation 136: Part II,” the second part of a sting operation in which the journalist Pushp Sharma, under the cover of a “seasoned pracharak,” met senior members of numerous media houses and offered to pay them large sums of money in exchange for running a Hindutva campaign on their platforms.  The news organisations featuring in the stings included the Kannada news channel Suvarna News and its sister publication, Kannada Prabha. On the day that Cobrapost released the videos of the stings, both organisations, as well as the Dainik Bhaskar Group, secured injunction orders against Cobrapost.

Both Suvarna News and Kannada Prabha are owned by Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the media baron and member of parliament in the Rajya Sabha from the Bharatiya Janata Party. Chandrasekhar is also currently the vice chairman of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in Kerala. In the cover story of the 2017 media issue, Nikita Saxena and Atul Dev reported on Chandrasekhar’s political ambitions and his vast media empire. In the following excerpt from the story, Saxena and Dev report on the editorial transformation of Suvarna News and Kannada Prabha under Chandrasekhar. According to HS Balram, a former director of Asianet News Network—which is also owned by Chandrasekhar—the media baron “was tilting towards the BJP, even if he didn’t directly say so.” As a result, Balram added, the Kannada Prabha’s “policy was, tilt towards the BJP.”

Suvarna News was launched in March 2008, some nine months before the deal with Star that left Asianet News in Chandrasekhar’s hands. The channel was placed under the umbrella of Asianet News Network, the entity that controls Jupiter Capital’s print and television media entities.

Nikita Saxena is a contributing writer at The Caravan.

Atul Dev is a former staff writer at The Caravan.

Keywords: media freedom Rajeev Chandrasekhar Kannada Prabha Asianet Suvarna News Cobrapost
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