On October 3, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) celebrated its annual day; it was founded on Dussehra, or Bijoya Dashami, in 1925. But this year, it had something extra to celebrate: for the first time, the speech of the RSS head was transmitted live to India by the government-controlled television network Doordarshan. The message sent out by Doordarshan's decision, of the new power over the Indian state of the RSS, was underlined in fact by the content and tone of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's speech, which was less combative than those in previous years, and showed that the organisation was coming to terms with a role in which it would support and not confront the central government. Understandably, there is more than a little concern that a taxpayer-funded organisation is being used to air the sectarian agenda of the RSS, however close it may be to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which now has an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha. The feeble point that some RSS sympathisers have made is that what the RSS chief says is news and so it naturally should be shown live. There is, of course, a great deal of difference between showing a propaganda speech live and without context, and genuine news reporting.
The fact is that the RSS speech being aired live on Doordarshan is just another sign of institutional weakness, and of the government taking advantage of it to push an agenda - even if in this case that agenda is not its own, but that of a hierarchical organisation. It is in this context that complaints from other political parties, particularly the Congress, about Doordarshan's capitulation to the new order are without credibility. Doordarshan is indelibly associated with Congress propaganda in most Indians' minds. The party used state TV and radio as its handmaiden for decades on end. It has been in power for 10 years recently, and has not taken that opportunity to transform Doordarshan into an independent news broadcaster of the calibre of other state-funded channels worldwide, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States. If it wishes to have any credibility at all on this issue, it should now promise to not misuse All India Radio or Doordarshan if it returned to power.
The BJP would do well to remember that it was its patriarch, Lal Krishna Advani, who as information and broadcasting minister in the Janata Party government set up the B G Verghese committee whose report eventually led to the formation of a nominally independent Prasar Bharati. However, Prasar Bharati is still far too dependent on the government set-up; the chief executive is a retired Indian Administrative Service officer, for example. Under the last government, most of the board members were Congress time-servers. These have all now resigned. The new government must live up to the vision of setting up a truly independent national broadcaster and appoint genuinely independent individuals to the empty positions, not middle-level RSS or BJP functionaries. But so far it seems to have been the case that parties in government have no conception of the possibility that they may one day be in opposition, so an independent broadcaster would be in their interest.
