Cobrapost exposé: Media houses purportedly agree to run Hindutva campaign for a fee

Cobrapost’s latest exposé, Operation 136, purportedly shows how a section of Indian media houses agreed to run a pro-Hindutva campaign in exchange for money. The website’s reporter, Pushp Sharma, posed as the head of Shreemad Bhagwat Gita Prachar Samiti and approached close to “two dozen media houses” to run a pro-Hindutva campaign in the run-up to 2019 elections. According to Cobrapost, Sharma offered anywhere between Rs 6 crore and Rs 50 crore to carry out this work. Sharma met owners, business heads and revenue officers of various media organisations. Prominent among these include Dainik Jagran, Amar Ujala, DNA, Punjab Kesari, ScoopWhoop, India TV, Rediff and UNI.

At DNA, Sharma met its south region head and special initiative manager. In the sting, Sharma can be heard talking about three phases of the campaign he’d like the newspaper to run — soft hindutva, semi political content that would include character assassination of leaders like Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati, and promoting firebrand Hindu leaders. DNA representatives purportedly agree to this proposition. At Dainik Jagran, Sharma is seen meeting with the newspaper’s area manager of Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha. Dainik Jagran’s representative agrees to run the pro-Hindutva campaign as an advertorial and to take the payment in cash. The representative says that the newspaper is comfortable being branded as Hindutva and purportedly agreed to run investigative stories on Sharma’s “cue”. At ScoopWhoop, Sharma talks of wanting to get political dividends in terms of Hindutva voters with surrogate advertising. Sharma again talks of running a ‘soft Hindutva campaign’ focussing on the Gita and one of the website’s founders is heard saying that this could be packaged as mythology content. 

You can also read our complete report on the Cobrapost exposé here.