Officially launched in July 2006, Lok Sabha TV (LSTV) was the brainchild of Somnath Chatterjee, the Lok Sabha speaker at that point of time, who envisaged it as an instrument to acquaint citizens with the functioning of the parliament. The channel, which broadcasts the proceedings of the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the parliament, is owned and operated by the Lok Sabha, making it, at least in theory, immune to any interference from the government. However, as a recent email exchange between some of the senior officials at LSTV reveals, Seema Gupta, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and editor-in-chief of LSTV, claims to be functioning at the behest of Arun Jaitley, the information and broadcasting minister of India and Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, Minister of State (MOS) for the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB). In this particular instance, Gupta’s mail sought to justify a decision that appeared to have been taken at LSTV without consulting any senior members of the organisation, by attributing it to directives that were allegedly issued by Jaitley. What remains unclear is why Gupta appeared to think that instructions from Jaitley, if any, would legitimise her decision, given that LSTV is meant to function as an autonomous organisation and is clearly out of his ministry’s purview.

On 26 February 2015, Suresh Prabhu, the union railway minister, presented his maiden Rail budget in the parliament. Soon after, Prabhu’s first interview to the media was conducted by Doordarshan— one of India’s largest public broadcasting organisations that was founded by the central government —and televised through YouTube, while questions for the interview were invited from the public through Twitter. This move, reportedly a result of the Modi-led dispensation’s emphasis on leveraging social media as an instrument “to reach out to people”, was heralded as a departure from established protocol. However, it appears that the interview had originally been conducted by LSTV, and its transfer to Doordarshan without the knowledge of senior functionaries at the organization, prompted a spate of emails addressed to Gupta.

These mails were exchanged on 26 and 27 February 2015, between Dhiraj Singh, the executive director (Programmes) at LSTV, Sumit Singh, executive director (Marketing and Promotions) and Gupta. The subject of the first mail that was sent by Dhiraj Singh read, “Why was clean feed given to DD?” In his email, Dhiraj noted that, “it was disappointing to see all our hard work and planning come to nothing and DD take all the credit of our live interview of Railway Minister Shri Suresh Prabhu soon after presenting the Railway Budget.” He further added that, “Not only did DD not show our LSTV logo they also ran the entire interview with a DD exclusive watermark” such that LSTV received no credit for “a show which was planned and produced” by them.

Making his disappointment apparent, Dhiraj continued, “As you are not in a habit of sharing key information with your senior officers I would like to know what kind of pressure you were under which you had to give a clean feed to DD.” He observed that this was an unprecedented step for LSTV—as was confirmed to me by a senior consultant at the channel—and ended with, “We (LSTV) have never done this with anyone, including the US State channels who wanted a clean feed of the Obama speech in Parliament in 2010.”

In her acerbic reply to Dhiraj, Gupta claimed that the order “to give direct feed to DD” came from “Finance Minister and I & B Minister along with MOS Rawardhan Rathor (Rajyavardhan Rathore)”. She went on to tell Dhiraj, “Do not question authority of Shri Arun Jaitley,” before ending with the threat that she would be forwarding the email to both Jaitley and Rathore.