The CEO of Prasar Bharati has defended the new Doordarshan logo after a tirade of criticism on social media. The public broadcaster this week changed the logo’s colour from red to a fetching shade of saffron.

CEO Gaurav Dwivedi told The Indian Express the new logo is merely a “catchy orange”.

“A few months ago, ahead of G20, we had carried out a revamp of DD India and settled upon a set of graphics as visual language for that channel,” he told the newspaper. “...Using a bright, appealing colour is purely about the channel’s branding and visual aesthetic and it is unfortunate for anyone to be reading anything else into that.”

Social media users have pointed out Doordarshan’s logo was saffron in 1959 when it launched, and saffron is part of the Indian national flag. But saffron in the current political context ties in with the Bharatiya Janata Party. Additionally, the revamp took place three days before voting in the first phase of the Lok Sabha polls. 

Reactions on social media ranged from indignation to celebration.

The saffron logo comes weeks after the public broadcaster announced it would live telecast the aarti or prayer rituals from the Ram temple in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya everyday at 6.30 am on DD National.

Doordarshan also took the controversial decision of broadcasting The Kerala Story, the controversial movie that purports to show Kerala as a centre for recruitment for the Islamic State, where Muslim men use their wiles to send Hindu women to Syria. The producers of the movie boldly claimed that 32,000 women from Kerala had been lured in this way, before changing the figure to a much more benign “three women”.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan tweeted that the “national news broadcaster should not become a propaganda machine of the BJP-RSS combine and withdraw from screening a film that only seeks to exacerbate communal tensions ahead of the general elections”.

Also this year, a “fistfight” allegedly broke out at the DD News studio after audience members complained that the anchor sounded like a “BJP spokesperson”. Read the story here, exclusively for Newslaundry subscribers. And if you’re not a subscriber, click here to change that.

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