In an interview to Newslaundry five years ago, the Executive Editor of CNN-News18 Bhupendra Chaubey had named Dainik Bhaskar as the newspaper he likes to wake up to every morning. Interestingly, his favourite daily’s sense of news value seems to be very different from that of the news channel Chaubey leads.

Last Monday, his colleague Zakka Jacob conducted a prime-time discussion on playback singer Sonu Nigam’s controversial azaan tweet and ended up advising filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri to change his house if the mosque loudspeakers are disturbing. The next day the news about the controversial tweet and the resultant storm was nowhere to be found in Dainik Bhaskar, commentary was obviously too much to expect.

The ‘newsy’ tweet got only a marginally better treatment on pages of the daily’s market rival and country’s most read paper, Dainik Jagran. From being totally ignored, the tweet managed to be dog-eared for a brief report on the thirteenth page of the daily. Hindustan also had no space for it until the third day when the tweet had snowballed into other forms of theatrics. This was unlike its English flagship publication The Hindustan Times, which thought the news-breaking tweet merited even a piece.

Similarly, opinion pages of Navbharat Times didn’t share the alacrity with which its parent brand The Times of India addressed the news – with an edit and an opinion piece. In fact, none of the leading Hindi dailies, and even dailies with niche readership like Jansatta, had any opinion to share on the issue. Some even refused to register the presence of such a social-media generated row.

Does it suggest that the print section of Hindi media universe is still immune to the agenda-setting by the social media, something to which the English dailies have been quite malleable? The Sonu Twitter saga may not form an overarching pattern, but it suggests how Hindi press has a different way of going about social media news narratives.

If this was a distinct point of departure seen in Hindi dailies this week from the editorial calls made by the English press, what was even more interesting, if not surprising, was the point of their convergence.

Given their advocacy for the promotion of Hindi in the last three decades of last century — especially 1970s and 1980s — you would expect the Hindi dailies to welcome the recent news of the President’s ‘in principle’ consent to recommendations made by a 2011 parliamentary panel. It wasn’t so.

The central government’s planned measures to implement the panel’s recommendations include asking ministers to deliver their speeches in Hindi, making Hindi a compulsory subject in all CBSE schools and Kendriya Vidyalayas until Class X and having a Hindi teaching scheme in all higher educational institutes. Surprisingly, Hindi dailies either have cold-shouldered such proposed steps or are on the same page with their English counterparts in looking critically at these measures.

A case in point is how Jansatta has echoed the editorial position taken by its parent English publication The Indian Express on how such “official projects for promoting Hindi may reopen old wounds”. In an edit  (Nij Bhasha, here connotation is of Main Language, not private language, April 20), while attacking governments since independence for not doing enough to promote the constitutional status of Hindi as state language, the paper takes exception to imposing it in a multilingual country of India’s size.

In its editorial comment, Jansatta observes “No language is less important than Hindi in India where different languages are spoken in different regions. But, it’s also true that there is no language of national communication which can bind different regions and states. There have been controversies in the past on the question of Hindi. In light of such experience, it’s important that before taking steps to promote Hindi, care should be taken that such steps don’t adversely impact other languages.’’

Such congruence can also be seen in how Sanjeev Singh’s (Hindi ko badhawa dena hai to pehle ye kare Modi sarkaar, If it really intends to promote Hindi, Modi government needs to do this, April 20) in Navbharat Times. His suggestions broadly are in sync with the sister publication The Times of India’s critical edit against the mechanical imposition of Hindi as well as the advisory excesses of parliamentary panels. Singh argues that, instead of official imposition, what would be a real game changer for promotion of Hindi is the gradual process of linking it to the aspirations, job prospects and prospects of material growth in the real life.

Apart from these two opinion pieces, Hindi dailies have refrained from commenting on a development that you expect them to be interested in. It can be seen as a sign of how even Hindi Press now favours zeal for learning and promoting Hindi coming from people themselves and not imposed by governments. One may recall that how early this month Dainik Jagran carried Anant Vijay’s piece (Hindi ki badhti swikaryata, Growing Acceptance of Hindi, April 8) which saw a positive in how Mizoram Rajya Sabha MP Ronald Sapa Tlau had pleasantly surprised everyone by asking for recruitment of Hindi teachers in Mizoram. The piece argued that such swell of support for learning Hindi, coming from remote non-Hindi speaking states like Mizoram, reflects the way forward for the outreach of Hindi.

No wonder Dainik Jagran showed no enthusiasm for governmental blueprint for promoting Hindi. Its print edition didn’t even report on the development. That might be quite unthinkable in the past when rhetorics around governmental apathy towards Hindi filled reams of its pages.

The reports about government’s proposed moves on Hindi promotion were also not too conspicuous in Hindustan, which tucked it in inside pages as a brief report, while Dainik Bhaskar relegated it to a news brief among tidbits. Clearly Hindi press was in no mood to roll out the red carpet for welcoming a piece of news of which it was expected to be the natural habitat.

The past few days have been remarkable more for seeing what Hindi press was indifferent to, rather than what was engaging its pages. In some way it retained its autonomy of news value by not kowtowing English media’s line of surrender to social media theatrics. In another way, however, Hindi dailies also were willing to accompany English press in exploring the new narratives of lingual landscape in the country, powered by people’s aspirations and choices and not by official imposition.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26