The Network Effect

Reliance and right-wing politics gain a foothold

in Raghav Bahl's media empire
By RAHUL BHATIA | 1 December 2013
|ONE|

AS DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE FOOD SECURITY BILL played on displays

around the room, Rajdeep Sardesai took a seat at the centre of a simmering
news pit in Mumbai, looking like he could use a break. Just ten days earlier,
on 16 August, CNN-IBN and IBN7, the channels he oversees as editor-inchief of the IBN Network, had witnessed the sudden layoffs of approximately
300 producers, cameramen, and reporters. Sardesais base of operations, at
the channels headquarters in Noida, had been the worst affected by the
forced departures; there, reporters and anchors on air had completed their
broadcast and stepped off to find they no longer had a job. The layoffs were
part of a large restructuring exercise recommended by Mercer and Ernst &
Young for TV18, which was part of the gargantuan Network18 group. The
groups employees were told that management wanted to integrate the
processes of its expansive media empire, which included CNBC-TV18, the
IBN channels, Forbes India magazine, the website Firstpost, and a host of
other channels and outlets across television, print and the internet.
The night before the layoffs, I met a senior CNN-IBN employee at a dimly lit
coffee shop in Bandra, Mumbai. This person was washed out by the
retrenchments to come. Between phone calls, over cups of coffee not quite
large enough, the employee laid out the stark operational plan for the next
24 hours. HR plans to finish by tomorrow evening. They want to finish it in a
day.
The employee was reconciled to the job cuts, but wished they had been
handled in a better way; Network18s HR personnel had met in conference
rooms to discuss these cuts in full view of the staff outside. Tomorrow the
HR person is going to tell them that the company is restructuring, and theres
going to be an integration of newsrooms, the senior employee told me. To
minimise the chances of backlash, the layoffs would all be communicated at
one go. Over the course of our conversation, the persons phone rang twice.
Both callers wanted the same thing: information that would help them
understand what was about to happen the next day. The group had been
uncommunicative with most of its workforce (and would continue to be so for
months afterward). The senior employee told me that a list of employees to
be fired had been shown to editors; it was an indicative draft, but the heads
of various departments began to quietly inform the people listed on it on
their own. There seemed to be no recognisable pattern to the names. The
company had marked for dismissal inexperienced rookies and old hands
alike. Well-regarded reporters who had been with the group for some years
were going, as was at least one person from the camera department on a

salary below Rs 10,000. Reporters from IBN7 stopped coming to work

because they were interviewing for other jobs, the senior employee said.
Sardesai had last visited the Mumbai bureau in July, by which time the
rumours were flying so thick they were impossible to ignore. Rajdeep said
that we had to be prepared for a restructuring, a former producer recalled.
But he also told them that good workers had no reason to worry. Elsewhere
in the building, Ritu Kapur, the History TV18 programming head, who is
married to Raghav Bahl, the founder and managing director of Network18,
told the entertainment team that their concerns about impending layoffs
were unwarranted. Ritu said, No, no! What are you saying? a person
present recalled.
The deceptions grated on reporters, who felt they were owed the truth. Over
the last eight years, Sardesai had fostered an atmosphere of openness; his
employees had always been comfortable expressing strong opinions that
differed from his. But in contrast with the company lineand her own
Kapur informed Rajeev Masand and Vanita Singh, two IBN editors, that over
two-thirds of their reporters were going to be made redundant. They were
asked to say what each person brings to the table, the senior employee
said. Masand spent hours on heated calls to protect his team from being
culled, the producer told me. Smitha Nair, the sharp, quick-talking Mumbai
bureau chief, was walking around red-eyed, in tears, according to the
producer. Among themselves, reporters began to call the coming day, 16
August, Black Friday.
A clamour grew within and outside the studios that Friday; staff leaked
details of the resignations online, in real time. Across Network18,
approximately 350 people were asked to resign in one day. Several
programmes on CNBC were scrapped with immediate effect. In Mumbai,
CNN-IBNs bureau of five news reporters, already stretched thin, was
reduced to three. At the end of the day, Sardesai wrote on his Twitter feed
otherwise a mix of programme previews and observations from his morning
walksHurt and pain can be lonely. You must grieve in solitude. Gnight.
The layoffs at Network18 came at a time of enormous stress for Indian
media. The exigencies of the market have caused advertisers to withdraw.
Earlier this year, regulators proposed that each hour of television should
contain only 12 minutes of advertising. There are prohibitive carriage fees
made by television broadcasters to cable networks. Network18, for instance,
paid Rs 584 crore for distribution and marketing in 201213. The weakening
rupee has made dollar payments more expensive; for a group like
Network18, with 15 foreign subsidiaries and a number of licensing
agreements, fluctuating exchange rates can prove worrisome. In July, the
Outlook Group decided to close three magazines, and laid off over 100 staff.
Years of large losses at NDTVs general, business, and lifestyle channels
reversed only this yearhave resulted in a steady stream of retrenchments
over the past four years.

Network18s unique approach to brand-building made it especially

vulnerable. The group presently has a market value of approximately $1.1
billion (as of 24 November this year), making it Indias third-biggest publicly
listed media conglomerate. Tens of millions watch the groups 27 national
and regional television channels in at least 11 languages. A joint movie
studio venture makes tentpolesfilms whose success hold up several other
venturesas well as more realistic fare. It owns a large online retail
company, event and sports management concerns, specialty magazines,
news websites and a newswire, and produces, exhibits, and distributes its
own content. It hasto state it mildlyconsiderable reach. But its biggest
news properties were built on tie-ups with global giants: CNN, CNBC,
Viacom, A+E Networks, Forbes, and Entrepreneur, among others. It had built
its stellar reputation on aggressive and expensive strategies, such as the
lavish campaigns that had helped launch the television channel Colors in
2008. It was the most glamorous possible proposition for anyone who had
the spare change to buy into a media company of its size and statureand
this was in spite of the fact that its stability was precarious.
In January 2012, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), Indias second-largest
publicly listed company, had announced it would invest a substantial sum in
Network18. At the time, they looked like saviours: over two days, Network18
stock jumped 27 percent. The movement indicated a kind of euphoria, given
that Network18s share price had, at the time, fallen almost 95 percent from
its 2007 highs. It had incurred over Rs 800 crore in accumulated losses in
20112012while the company said its losses were Rs 191 crore ($30.45
million), had it not used a convenient accounting standard, its losses would
have been Rs 835 crore ($133.12 million). But Reliances investment was
also disconcerting. A company with strong links to government and
extraordinary interests in petrochemicals, refining, and telecommunications,
had helped ease mounting debt at an influential news organisation that
owned two business channels, a business website, and published the
business magazine Forbes India. I dont think the group saw how it was
going to be perceived, a senior editor at Firstpost told me this October.
Thanks to Reliances investment, a rapidly expanding group deeply in debt
and prone to frequent cost-cutting measures now had the one thing that had
been in perennially short supply: security. For some employees down the
chain, the investment seemed like a boon. We felt a little good about a
reliable company buying a stake, a reporter who was later laid off told me.
We thought it would become more stable. When I met Tushar Pania, a
spokesperson for Reliance, at the companys office in south Mumbai this
September, he claimed that they had very little role in the retrenchments.
Its not our intent to run the business, he said. We dont know the media
business. If we wanted to run Network18, we would have run it.
Taking his place in the Mumbai newsroom that day in August, Sardesai bared
his feelings to the people who remained. I want to apologise, he told them.
We feel bad about it. Its heartbreaking. Almost immediately, someone

responded angrily. A month ago we asked you about it. Why did you lie to
us? Are you saying that you didnt know a month ago? Sardesai reasoned
with her, saying, Panic would have spread. She disagreed: No, instead
people would have quit and looked for jobs. Editors, reporters, and
producers told me they were disturbed by the manner in which the sackings
were conducted. In CNN-IBNs camera department, people were fired by the
heads based on their friendship, a producer said to me. The camera heads
told camera guys they were being fired based on reporter feedback. But
forget reporters, they did not take any feedback even from the bureau chief.
Sardesai seemed to know of the mismanagement in this department,
according to the producer, and was upset by it. Looking to his left, where the
camera division staff were clustered, he pointed out, If it was done unfairly,
and there are slackers here, they will be pulled up for it.
Even as Sardesai strove to mend fences, an observer said, he looked
defeated. The decision to fire people had not been his to make, and yet,
because the channel responded to his leadership, the episode had
undermined him. Still, he did what he could, a senior editor told me. Some
people got six months salary. The company eventually made severance
payments amounting to Rs 10.27 crore.
Nearly every person I spoke with was sympathetic to Sardesai. At some
level he hasnt taken it well, one employee present that day said to me
later. Sardesai wrote them apologetic text messages that a couple of
employees I met said they ignored.
In the newsroom, perhaps under strain, or perhaps in a moment of
weakness, he disarmed the bureau with a confession of his helplessness. He
told them that he would leave if he was to face this again. Sardesai
explained to everyone in the newsroom that he had resisted pressure from
management to reduce the channels payroll four years ago, when rising
costs had induced similar layoffs elsewhere in the group. This time we
couldnt resist, Sardesai said to the newsroom. The business model had
become too cumbersome. He was asked why the channel had continued to
hire for four years if they had been under pressure. I agree, the producer
recalled him conceding. We thought things would stabilise. It was poor
management.
Theres some kind of obfuscation, the senior employee told me. I dont
know why someone didnt just say, were not doing well. The perception is
that the company is doing well. Its acquiring properties left, right and
centre, so why are you firing what you know is a lean team? This is going to
affect news gathering. A compromise on quantity is a compromise on
quality.
The changes taking place across the groups publications had other, less
visible consequences. Over three meetings at a coffee shop in central
Mumbai in January this year, R Jagannathan, the editor-in-chief for web and

print at Network18, and Indrajit Gupta, then editor-in-chief of Forbes India,

discussed a possible integration between Forbes India and Firstpost, the
networks opinion site. Jagannathan believed that the 40-strong Forbes India
team, which produced a fortnightly magazine, a quarterly, and also handled
ForbesIndia.com, should produce less local content and instead help build the
Firstpost brand. Gupta thought this would change the character of Forbes
India, whose circulation, company press releases claimed, had reached
75,000 copies. In less than five years, the magazine had attained Rs 25 crore
in revenues on the back of in-depth Indian business reporting. At the end of
each meeting, the two editors parted uneasily; multiple members of the
Forbes India staff told me that it became clear that unpleasant changes were
on the way.
The next month, Jagannathan began to attend Forbes Indias edit meetings.
During one such meeting at the end of February, he dismissed several ideas
from the staff, and told the Forbes India team that they were screwing up,
according to a person present there. Glancing at a sheet of paper he had
arrived with, he yelled at the room, Youre doing it wrong. Forbes is about
the wealthy. Its about right-wing politics. You guys are writing about
development and poverty. If you guys dont get it, Im going to make sure
that you do. His hands shook as he read the prepared note. The person
present there told me, He was under so much pressure. It was clear he had
arrived with a brief from someone. I suspect it was from Raghav.
Jagannathan did not respond to messages for comment.
|TWO |
ON 3 JANUARY 2012, TV18, the television arm of Network18, announced
that its board, led by Bahl, had approved a sum of up to Rs 2,100 crore to
acquire the stake held by Reliance in Eenadu Television Network (ETV). ETV
had regional muscle; the network was started in 1995 by Ramoji Rao, the
influential Hyderabad tycoon whose media empire had expanded to include
12 popular entertainment and news channels in over seven states. If ETVs
regional reach was combined with the national reach of TV18, they would
together command over 25 national and regional channels across news and
general entertainment.
In a press release announcing the deal, Network18 was unrelenting in its
optimism that the group had finally turned around. It insisted that authority
would reside solely in the hands of Bahl and his management team. In
addition, the board said that TV18 and Network18, which had a combined net
worth of Rs 1,643crore, would together raise Rs 5,400 crore from the
market, and use the gains to pay off all debt. If they werent able to raise
enough, Bahl would buy up the shares that remained through his own private
companies that controlled both Network18 and TV18, which are publicly
listed firms. To do this, Bahl would receive funding from a body called
Independent Media Trust. This trust had been set up for Reliances benefit.

Bahl brimmed with positivity in an earnings call with analysts later that day,
telling everyone that he maintained full undiluted control over the
Network18 group. The message was reasserted in stories that the groups
channels ran. CNN-IBN stated emphatically that, Management and editorial
control will continue to be held by TV18 promoters. On the call, when
analysts pressed him for details, Bahl turned them down. At the end, he
dispatched them with a bright but vague message. The deal was a landmark
transaction that gave the company a chance to begin afresh, and build on
the limitless opportunities before it.
According to Reliances press statements, the partnership with Network18
would ensure a ready supply of content to the company when their ambitious
plans for 4G network services finally took off. Bahl said Reliance saw it purely
as an investment. He chose not to disclose that the investment had left his
control over the business in a far more perilous state than at any time in its
18-year history. In exchange for its funding, Network18s promoter
companies would issue convertible debenturesput simply, financial
instruments backed by company assets that could be exchanged for regular
sharesto Reliance. Effectively, this would make the group Reliances to
control. This was explained lucidly in a Competition Commission of India
order that approved the deal in May 2012, which pointed out that the
acquisition of debentures had the ultimate intended effect of RIL acquiring
control over Network18 group.
Over the next month, Bahl met the groups editors in individual meetings to
discuss the groups benefactor. Indrajit Gupta told me Bahl asked for his
opinion on handling stories about Reliance and media in Forbes India. My
feedback was very simple. We should continue to do stories on Reliance and
media. He asked, Do we really need to?
Reliances name provokes a certain kind of reaction among the media in
India. The reaction, more often than not, is to proceed with caution. This
prudence applies to stories about the company and its interests, as well as to
its controlling family, the Ambanis, regarding whom every word that makes it
into print is treated with unparalleled care. In early November, when a writer
at the Economic Times mistakenly captioned a photograph of Mukesh
Ambanis wife, Nita, with the name of his brothers wife, Tina, the papers
editors, in the words of a reporter present, went crazy.
In the early 1990s, long before Mukesh and Anil Ambani split their fathers
legacy and went their separate ways in 2003, Dhirubhai Ambanis Reliance
had put out the Business and Political Observer, and its weekend companion,
the Sunday Observer. The companys relations with the press in the
preceding years had not always been tranquil; in the 1980s, the Indian
Express had doggedly pursued stories of the companys irregularities and its
mutually beneficial relationship with Indira Gandhis government. The
Observer was intended to put across their own point of view, according to a
former senior editor who worked there. They would do slanted editorials, or

slanted storiespart of it would be fact, and part of it would be puffed up.

The Observer had a brief life, but Reliances shadow over the media grew
long in the years to come. In a 2008 New York Times piece on Mukesh
Ambani, the writer Anand Giridhardas wrote, A prominent Indian editor,
formerly of the Times of India, who requested anonymity because of
concerns about upsetting Ambani, says Reliance maintains good relationships
with newspaper owners; editors, in turn, fear investigating it too closely. I
dont think anyone else comes close to it, the editor said of Reliances sway.
I dont think anyone is able to work the system as they can.
In recent years, the company has begun to quietly acquire media outlets. As
the Competition Commission order confirmed in plain terms, it had gained
effective control of both Network18 and ETV without appearing to own the
networks. In November, the journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta revealed on
the media news and criticism website, The Hoot, that the Serious Fraud
Investigation Office, an organisation under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs,
had accused Reliance of having engineered a series of allegedly illegal
transactions to control a company that controlled the NewsX television
channel. Big business has always been well-disposed to the idea of
proactively controlling the message, but Reliances recent approachthat of
controlling the mediumis a rather more elaborate precaution than Indian
corporations have taken before. The spokesperson of a rival company, who
spoke on condition of anonymity, claimed, They now own the platforms
where public opinion is.
You have to take a nuanced view, Thakurta told me during an interview.
The vehicles of the Network18 group have reported news that has gone
against Reliance. Will they break stories against them? I doubt it. Will they
conduct investigations that work against the interests of Mukesh Ambani and
the corporate conglomerate he heads? I doubt it. But then, that is to be
expected.
IN 2005, Bahl wrote a piece for an Outlook special issue titled India Rising.
The story of Indias television news, he said, is largely the story of three
extraordinary companies, two super-skilled professional entrepreneurs, and
an apprentice. The companies are NDTV, TV Today and TV18. The two supermen are Aroon Purie and Prannoy Roy. The apprentice is yours truly.
Fifty-one year-old Raghav Bahl is a former management consultant who
entered the media industry when he became a correspondent for
Doordarshan in the 1980s, while he was still in his twenties. Soon, he was
anchoring Newstrack, the monthly television newsmagazine made by Puries
sister, Madhu Trehan. He was a really dynamic young anchor then, CB Arun
Kumar, who met Bahl on the Newstrack sets in 1989, said. He was full of
good ideas. People were more into politics and general news, but he was into
business.

In 1991, Bahl joined Business India, a publishing house, to create a business

version of Newstrack for television. The programme was called The Business
India Show. They had produced exactly one edition when, on 21 May 1991,
Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. You have to imagine how the whole country
was in turmoil. It made a lot of business people very jittery. We put the
programme on hold because we wanted to wait and see what would happen,
Arun Kumar said.
Sanjay Ray Chaudhuri, one of Network18s founders, described the ensuing
upheaval in an essay he wrote for Mint. There followed a frustrating time
when we were drawing salaries and doing no work. We were young, hungry,
ambitious, impatient and at the prime of our working lives. The Gulf War had
already shown us the future. The satellite revolution was at our doorstep. In
the meantime, Bahl, Chaudhuri, and Arun Kumar started a new production
company, Television Eighteen, in Delhi. (Chaudhuri is now executive director
in the Network18 group; Arun is the academic director of a film school in
Mumbai.)
With nothing happening, Bahl pitched for work everywhere. The mood was
depressing at the time, Arun Kumar said. He lucked out when the BBC saw
the work Television Eighteen had done. They signed Bahl up to produce and
anchor a show called India Business Report. To train the staff, the BBC sent
down a retired veteran who went out on shoots with Television Eighteens
young staff for a few months. His mandate was to bring them up to the
BBCs standards. This wasnt difficult. Bahls video editors and cameramen
were graduates of Jamia Millia Islamia, whose mass communications
programme produced skilled technicians. Their methods seeped through the
organisation, as did the experience of Television Eighteens founders.
Between 1993 and the following year, Ashok Advani, the founder of Business
India, decided to start a television channel called Business India TV (BITV).
He told Bahl that the channel would be transmitted off a Russian satellite.
Transmission fees cost $1.5 million, far below than the $5 million cost of
using the satellite that broadcast the Star Network and Zee into Indian
homes. Advani believed that the money they saved could be used to improve
production values. Bahl disagreed on two vital counts. He told Advani it was
premature to start a channel, Arun Kumar said. He also thought the Russian
satellite was a mistake. For Bahl, being seen was more important than
transmission fees, Arun Kumar told me. If your programming is being seen,
the quality isnt important. Around August 2004, he left BITV, taking a
number of his colleagues with him.
Arun Kumar decided to stay back, but Bahl tried convincing him to leave. He
said, Look, well start our channel in due course. This ones never going to
work. He was right. Cable operators decided very quickly that recalibrating
their receivers regularly to pick up a beam from a Russian satellite was too
much work. Eventually BITV switched to the Star satellite, but it was too late.
They ran out of money, and other channels had traction by then, Arun

Kumar said. It was a classic business strategy mistake. It brought Advanis

empire tumbling down. They saved money on the satellite, but they lost the
whole thing. Raghav knew it was a mistake. He knew all along.
Meanwhile, Bahl found an opportunity to exploit. Indian television had little
business journalism. This presented an allied problemthere were no
television business journalists either. He decided to contact reporters and
editors at the Economic Times and India Today, and won them over, if not
with the promise of a brand new medium, then with offers to double their
pay cheques. After the economic reforms, journalists began to get better
salaries across the board, but he was offering raises of 100 percent, S
Srinivasan, whom Bahl hired as an editor in the 1990s, and who now runs
the Tamil channel Puthiya Thalaimurai, told me.
Previously, Bahl had produced India Business Report for the BBC and a
lifestyle programme, the Amul India Show, for Star TV. The BBCs methods
seeped through the organisation, as did the experience of Television
Eighteens founders. When Bahl hired journalists to make three programmes
that would run on the channel Asia Business News (ABN)a joint venture
between Dow Jones, and the Hinduja familythe new hires were made to
learn those ways.
His modus operandi with ABN carried all the hallmarks of his ambition. He
hired more than 60 people for one programme alone. His entire objective
was to get the best editorial team, Srinivasan said. When hes on a high, I
dont think he looks at money. Between themselves, reporters jockeyed to
have their stories chosen to fill limited slots. Many of Bahls former editors
told me that his insistence on good production values set him apart from
others in the field.
He shaped their own appreciation for well-produced stories, over long hours
in editing rooms, and also by issuing frequent debriefsvoluminous
documents critiquing particular programmes and stories, and containing,
some former employees said, hidden criticisms of reporters. It was an
expensive way to work, but the money from ABN was generousthe
company paid Television Eighteen $2,000 (approximately R70,000 in 1996)
for each two-minute story.
Bahl told his senior editors that he wanted to sustain quality, even as he was
spending more and more time growing the business. Hardev Sanotra, whom
Bahl had lured from India Today, was one of those editors. He watched the
companys editorial philosophy form as it produced (and Bahl anchored) India
Business Report and the Amul India Show, as well as its daily 90 minutes of
programming for ABN. Sanotra told me, He said, Well do ethical
journalism, we must do quality journalism, and well pay well. Bahl was true
to his word. He resisted pressure to drop inconvenient stories. In one
particular instance, an interview with the industrialist BK Modi took an
unexpected turn when he said lots of things against the Hindujas, Sanotra

said. Somehow the Hindujas came to know the interview was running that
evening. He said he received calls from Bombay and London, where the
Hindujas were based, but none from Bahl. The story ran untouched.
Soon there were unforeseen troubles, not helped along by the fact that a
large chunk of the businesss funds came from overseas. Whatever money
came in had to come through the Reserve Bank of India. In 910 months the
money began to be delayed, Sanotra, now with the soon-to-be-launched
television channel New Generation (Puthiya Thalaimurais English
counterpart), recalled. Salaries and allowances were constantly deferred, and
even though people were eventually paid their due, the delays started
having an impact on morale. In 1997, Bahl shut down the programme for
which he had hired so extravagantly, because it consumed large resources.
Almost 6070 people were asked to leave, Srinivasan said. It was
surprising, because even as he was laying them off, he said it was a
temporary blip, and that he would start a channel. It was clear to him. But to
me, it looked too far away.
But Bahl saw no hurdles, only opportunities. He brought the international
channel CNBC to India in 2000, producing eight hours of programming a day
for the new channel CNBC-TV18. Govindraj Ethiraj, now the editor of
Indiaspend.com, a popular data journalism website, joined the team for the
new channel in 1999. He was like, define your own job, Ethiraj
remembered. As managing editor of CNBC-TV18, Bahl advised his hires to
think quickly. He would say that you should do your planning, but not ad
nauseum. Get it off the ground and then correct it. I asked Ethiraj what he
remembered most fondly about his time there. He didnt take very long to
respond. He makes you feel like youre in it together, he said. He was very
inspired by Narayana Murthy [co-founder of Infosys]. In that spirit, Bahls
was among the first Indian media companies to offer employee stock
options.
Bahl teamed up with a new CEO, Haresh Chawlaa veteran of Amitabh
Bachchan Corporation Ltd and Times Musicand took the company public in
a 1999 IPO that was oversubscribed by over 50 times. The company has
collected close to Rs 2511 crore, the Indian Express reported in December
1999. Chawla and Bahl began a website called Rupeecontrol.com in the wake
of the success of the financial portal Moneycontrol.com. When Moneycontrol
itself ran into trouble at the end of the dotcom boom, the pair were able to
buy it out for a song. (For a brief while Chawla considered renaming his new
acquisition Rupeecontrol, but then dropped the idea.) In 2000, Bahl told
investors that the company was about to grow even more rapidly. He said he
had plans to enter the online brokerage business, and bolster his teams of
anchors at CNBC with experts to polish the coverage to a high sheen,
because it had an immediate impact on the stock market.
Chawla, if anything, was even more keen to get a move on than Bahl.
Raghav didnt think he could take on a Prannoy Roy, a former editor there

said. He didnt think he could take on NDTV. Haresh was more ambitious.
Within five years, Chawla convinced Sardesai to leave NDTV to start a
general news channel and take ownership of it. Sardesai held 2.25 percent of
the new endeavour. Within months of its launch in December 2005, thanks to
its clever distribution strategies and, I was told, Sardesais star power, CNNIBNs ratings overtook NDTVs. Within ten years, the group had licensing
arrangements with Viacom and Forbes, Hindi and Marathi channels, a
printing press, a healthy publishing business, a home shopping network, and
a movie studio.
It burned through cash. Bahl described his approach to the business in an
essay he wrote for the media website MxMIndia.com earlier this year about
launching Colors, the networks popular general entertainment channel. Yes,
it would cost hundreds of crores, but we were clear that we would rather
burn hundreds of crores in a high voltage launch and win or flame out, as
against die a slow and painful death with a hundred small cuts, struggling
every day in the Number 4 or 5 position, draining away cash and energy,
shoulders drooping, simply waiting for the inevitable closure. We were sure
that we had to enter with the mind-set of a leader.
It is a mindset that has served Bahl well over the course of a career whose
post-liberalisation narrativea first-generation businessman building a
veritable media empire in under two decadeshas a near-fabulous quality to
it. Vivian Fernandes, who worked with Bahl for 18 years and is the co-writer
of Superpower?, Bahls book about competition between China and India,
said to me: His story is a proxy for Indias economic reform. In a CNBC
interview with Anuradha Sengupta during the networks publicity blitz for the
book, Bahl twinkled when Sengupta opened the discussion by asking him
why he had chosen not to write about his own story. Weve got a long way
to go, he said.
He knew what he wanted, Srinivasan said. He knew very early. He could
be ruthless. He didnt flinch once a decision was taken. I asked him how he
would describe the companys growth. They grow, they shrink, they grow.
This was a description I heard often. Indian entrepreneurs lack a strategic
vision, Srinivasan said, speaking in general. Have you heard of a five-year
plan? Or a ten-year plan? In media you dont know whats happening six
months later. Srinivasan, saying this in 2013, had the benefit of hindsight.
For most of the past decade, the Network18 group had ridden on markets
flush with money, and eager investors who bought the story Bahl sold. But
while the group grew, it began to morph into something that bewildered its
investors and staff.
|THREE |
IN 2007, Network18 floated the Indian Film Company (IFC) on Londons
Alternative Investment Market (AIM), a small exchange with few regulatory
hurdles. The IFC was a film fund created to finance the production and

distribution of feature films, a new area of interest for a group that had, so
far, been content to operate only on television and the internet. I invested
money on the face value of Raghav Bahl, thats it, Deepak Gupta, a large
investor in the Indian Film Company, told me. I had heard a lot of stories
about him. I had great faith in the guy.
Bahl sold his investors the proposition of a disciplined Indian film industry.
He wasnt alone in this. The middle of the previous decade saw the rise of
marketing and finance professionalssoap sellers, the politician Amar
Singh called themin Indian films. They populated marketing and
distribution departments, ran studios, and set up investment opportunities.
Bahl was among the first of these to solicit foreign investment in an
organised way, promising change in what was a sexy, if deeply feudal,
business.
Gupta says he bought into the message, and the messenger, for reasons he
couldnt fully explain. Bahl wove visions of growth and dazzling returns in a
promising industrya mine waiting to be tapped by professionals. It will
enable high quality international investors to reap the benefits of the
structural changes and growth opportunities being thrown up by the Indian
film industry, he proclaimed at the time. The IFC aimed to produce or
acquire an improbable 40 to 50 films for release each year. And generating
returns for his shareholders was among Bahls first priorities, he said. He
would bring investors an annual return of 20 percent, if you manage the
capital efficiently.
My intention was not to stay there for very long, Gupta said on a phone call
from Dubai, where he lives. Gupta was a fund manager kind of guy, he told
mean early investor who typically sold high quickly, preferably for a five or
ten percent gain. He invested 3.6 million in the IFC, he told me, and waited
for the fund to list. He told other investors that he hoped to cash in within a
couple of months. The fund opened on the morning of 18 June 2007 at 99
pence, and it traded only a percentage higher for the rest of that day. Not
unreasonably, Gupta had expected the fund to rise dramatically, in keeping
with volcanic IPOs everywhere before the crash of 2008. Instead, the fund
soon began a rapid descent: within months, the stock lost almost 20 percent
of its value.
As the stock crashed, IFCs management, led by Bahl, declared it remained
optimistic. It had turned a profit with the success of Jab We Met and
Welcome in its first ten months, and claimed, in its annual report of 2008,
that it would benefit from the effect of a number of positive dynamics
within Indias various film industries. As the promoter and managing director
of Network18, which held 18.18 percent of IFC, a stake worth Rs 80 crore,
Bahl, backed by management, told shareholders in Network18s own annual
report that year that although the value of their investment was down, IFC
was profitable and had a positive net worth. Therefore, no provision for
diminution in value is considered necessary in the accounts.

But Bahl reserved his optimism for his publicly listed companies. In private,
he stated otherwise. On the 2008 balance sheet of an unlisted Mauritius
company, BK Media Mauritius Private Limited, which held IFC stock, he said
he expected the value of the investment in IFC to fall. Considering the
current economic scenario and a conservative accounting policy, he wrote,
provision for impairment has been made against these investments as per
managements estimates
IFCs independent shareholders grew restless with the growing chasm
between the funds performance and the managements continuing assertion
that it was faring well. By 2008, they began to demand more detailed
numbers, and asked questions about how the companys chief asset, its
movie portfolio, was valued.
They refused to give us numbers, an investor named Atul Setia said to me.
As investors we saw hit film after hit film, and nine months later we would
expect the numbers to be pretty good, but they never were very good. It was
a frustration investors had, and they couldnt understand what was going on
in the company. Finally, in late 2008, Setia travelled to Mumbai with Deepak
Gupta to persuade Bahl and the board to bring about change. Their meeting
with the board was a disaster; Setia and Gupta left with the distinct feeling
that no one was interested in their proposition. Soon after, in a highly
publicised manoeuvre in January 2009, Gupta and others came together to
form the Indian Film Company Requisition Groupa pressure tactic to
acquire representation on the IFCs five-member board of directors, which
included Bahl, Shyam Benegal, and Lord Meghnad Desai. By now, IFC stock
was trading at around 25 pence, down by 75 percent from its listed price.
Reports depicted the episode as a campaign to have Bahl evicted from the
company, but Gupta denied this emphatically to me. We did not want a
hostile takeover, he said. Who among us had the experience to run this
business? Were we ready to kill our own money?
As a result of the agitation, Gupta and Setia both won positions on the board,
giving them the authority to look into the heart of the companys financials.
Gupta discovered that the funds CEO, Sandeep Bhargava, was not only
responsible for buying movies, but also for valuing themdisparate
responsibilities that together constituted a conflict of interest, Gupta
believed. He urged management to get an independent evaluator, given that
60 to 70 percent of the companys valuation was based on its stockpile of
movies.
In July 2009, out of the blue, Network18 Holdings, a Cayman Islands
subsidiary of Network18, made an offer to buy back IFCs shares.
Shareholders were offered 40 pence a share. But heres the real catch,
Gupta said. The stock was trading at 26 pence, but in its books, the
company valued its assets at 113 pence a share. They wanted to buy back at
40p.

For the two years during which the fund had lost value, Gupta had tried with
increasing desperation to sell his stake, but couldnt find a purchaser. By the
time I called him, six years after his initial investment, distance had given
him perspective. Gupta admitted he had not researched the market, and had
instead been led by a tempting growth story. He hadnt heard closely the
fund managers utterances before the IFC listed ( the perception of greater
liquidity has made [the Alternative Investment Market] an attractive
destination for a lot of companies). The funds price hadnt risen because,
until the buyback offer, there had been simply no demand for its shares on
the AIM. Its a suckers market, Gupta said about the exchange. Theres
just no liquidity there. This was true. Over one 30 trading-day span in 2009,
the funds shares changed hands on only five days. For the other 25, there
were no buyers.
Gupta, Setia, and the others decided to sell. By 7 September 2009,
Network18 Holdings had purchased nearly 60 percent of IFC. In total, the
Network18 group ended up possessing over 80 percent.
But there were more convolutions to come, and this time Network18s
shareholders would be affected. In October 2010, Gupta and Setia learnt that
a Cyprus-based company named Roptonal had offered to purchase
Network18s IFC shares for 115.56 pence each. Roptonal was a subsidiary of
Viacom18, in which TV18 held a 50 per cent stake. At the time, Chawla was
the group CEO of Network18, as well as the CEO of Viacom18which put him
in charge of both buyer and seller. In effect, Network18s Bahl and Chawla
had undervalued IFCs shares at first, and then, in doing a deal with
Viacom18, which they held sway over, acquired a seemingly high value for
themselves. IFCs former shareholders werent entirely surprised. We knew
that one of the options [Bahl had] was to buy the company back at a very
low price, Setia said.
Roptonals offer to IFCs shareholders valued the stock at 15 percent over its
original listing price circa 2007. But Network18s Rs 80.78 crore investment
in the fund had grown less than a percent in more than three years, due to a
drastically changed exchange rate. It was a reality far removed from Bahls
glittering initial promise of 20 percent annual returns to IFCs investors.
However, matters turned out somewhat differently for the Network18
subsidiary based in the Cayman Islands, Network18 Holdings. It had
purchased shares from minority shareholders at the 2009 buyback offer of 40
pence, and sold these on to Roptonal in 2010 at 115.56 pence. For the
Cayman subsidiary, that transaction represented a gain of 188 percent in one
year.
But Network18s shareholders only realised the real cost of their investment
in IFC in 2013. It turned out that when Roptonal purchased IFC from
Network18 Holdings in 2010, it was on the condition that any shortfall in
expected income from its newly acquired film library would be covered by

Network18 Holdings. But Roptonal also demanded, and received assurance,

that Network18 would pay up if Network18 Holdings could not. Roptonal
expected to earn Rs 322 crore over a four-year period that ends next year.
Network18 has not explained why its Cayman subsidiary cannot make the
payment, and has made a provision of Rs 237 crore to bridge the shortfall (a
figure which would have constituted 80 percent of its revenues last year).
Setia told me that Bahl was the epitome of a certain sort of entrepreneur.
Hes a very intelligent, articulate Indian promoter, Setia said about him. I
asked him what he meant by Indian promoter. They look after their own
interests, he said. The Indian market is typified by illiquid companies with
large promoter shareholdings where theres a lot of manipulation for the
financial benefit of the promoter.
Analysts realised how difficult it was becoming to decipher the groups
numbers during its 2010 restructuring, a major operation that involved
merging and demerging ten of the groups companies. When one analyst,
Nikhil Vora, asked Bahl for clarity on the earnings call following this
restructuring in May 2010, he received an elaborate evasion for an answer.
Vora, the head of research at the finance firm IDFC, asked Bahl, I am not
asking specifics but want to understand the broad objective of this entire
restructuring. Is it to get all your news assets into a single entity? What is
the broad thought process which is being deployed apart from making it
shareholder friendly? In response, Bahl talked for two full minutes about
investors who believed the company structure was too complicated. He said
he hoped to sort out the confusion after putting our best efforts and our
best thoughts into the various possibilities However, the minute we are
absolutely ready with it, we will come back to our shareholders. Decoded,
this appeared to be an acknowledgment of the fact that shareholders had
concerns, and the company would address them when it had a solution. But
at no point did Bahl actually say why the restructuring had happened.
When I contacted Network18 with questions about some of its numbers, the
company responded tersely that its transactions have been made in
accordance with the regulatory requirements. Some of these transactions,
analysts point out, are questionable. In 2010, Porinju Veliyath, the founder of
Equity Intelligence, an investment firm, sent out an angry email with the
subject line, Raghav Bahl doing Daylight Robbery on TV-18 shareholders!
Veliyaths investors owned a small stake in TV18, and he was aggrieved by
what seemed like blatant stock price manipulation in the months before the
crucial 2010 restructuring (which Vora had asked about on the earnings call).
He also calculated that after the restructuring, assets transferred from TV18
to Network18 were undervalued by over Rs 900 crore. Can this merger of
TV18 be stopped by minority shareholders? he asked in his email. He wrote
that he would begin legal proceedings against TV18 in this matter, but it isnt
clear if he followed through on the threat. Veliyath declined to be interviewed
for this piece.

From a finance perspective, its a company built to pull wool over

shareholders eyes, Deepak Shenoy, who runs the financial website Capital
Mind, told me on a phone call from Bangalore. Shenoy posts regular
dissections of company finances on Capital Mind, and has kept a running tab
on Network18s numbers, which he says indicate that its a company that
keeps hiding stuff under the carpet.
In 2011, he discovered a befuddling note in the companys annual report.
Network18s management took a Rs 255-crore loan, but the money wasnt
for the company. It was for a confusingly named trust called Network18
Group Senior Professional Welfare Trust, over which Bahl, his wife, and his
sister, Vandana Malik, exercised significant influence. The trust was provided
this money even though Network18s management knew it was unlikely that
any economic benefit will flow to the company from the trust, according to
the Network18 companys 2011 annual report. The report also showed that
the trust repaid Rs 202 crore to Network18 that year, but still owed it nearly
Rs 150 crore. Why the heck should a company give Rs 255 crore of its own
investments, as security against a loan to a promoter entity? Shenoy asked.
He observed that the trust controlled by the Bahls had used loans to
purchase shares directly from the market in September and October 2011.
Effectively, the companys money was used to help the promoters buy more
shares from someone else, Shenoy wrote. This is brazen. I dont know if its
illegal, but it sure as hell should be.
Network18s annual reports and balance sheets do not always make easy
reading for its shareholders. Indeed, for a company its size, Network18s
complex financial dealings tend to attract very little scrutiny. The group is a
serious wealth destroyer. Its not funny how much wealth has been
decimated, a former head of one of the groups several companies told me.
The strange thing is the lack of action against them from regulators. I
asked him why analysts werent more vocal about their concerns, and he
replied, If they do that, they wont be invited to CNBC again.
Not all regulators were quiet. In February 2008, M Damodaran, who was
coming to the end of his tenure as chief of the Securities and Exchange
Board of India (SEBI), was interviewed by Shekhar Gupta for his television
programme Walk the Talk. Damodaran spoke of having received a letter from
an investor soon after the Reliance Power (an Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group
business) IPO, which had taken place the previous month. The investor
claimed that CNBC-TV18s coverage of the IPO had been unusual. The
investor asked, I saw you guys saying everything was good about a
particular [IPO] till it listed below the issue price. And now I find you saying
everything is wrong and talking it down. What happened to you guys? I
think theres considerable merit in it [the letter], Damodaran said. How is it
that suddenly on listing, all the virtues that you thought resided in some
particular issue disappeared? I think the media has a very large role to play
and I am afraid that that role is not being played to the best of its ability.
(For all his dissatisfaction, Damodaran was in the audience two years later

when Bahl launched his book Superpower? at the Taj Palace in Delhi, at an
event compered by Shereen Bhan, a popular CNBC anchor.)
Over his career, Bahl has demonstrated a talent for smoothing over complex
relationships, both human and financial. He is also gifted at making simple
things complicated. His group valued the acquisition of Reliances stake in
ETV at Rs 1,925crore. Network18s public filings from 2012 later revealed
that the acquisition price was founded on an Ernst & Young report that itself
was based on findings from unaudited information, given to it by TV18 and
ETV. To seal the matter, Network18s management declared in the 2012
filings that their ETV acquisition, the biggest purchase in their history, was
based on the conclusions of the reportbut they could not guarantee if the
numbers were correct.
By 2011, the company began to slip out of Bahls grasp. After years of
optimistic projections, it had arrived at the edge of a financial abyss, and
several of Bahls former employees were convinced he had simply
overreached. Hes very aggressive, Sanotra told me, but when you expand
too quickly, markets dont support you.
As his once-buoyant enterprise began to falter, Bahl sought assistance from
Reliancereluctantly, according to a senior editor of a Network18 website.
He was in a bind about entering a pact with the devil. Pania, the Reliance
spokesperson, explained to me that the promoters were looking for finance.
They were looking to reduce debt.
Chawla, Bahls CEO, wanted no part of it. In November 2011, two months
before the Reliance deal was announced, he resigned from Network18. From
a small single-channel operation with revenues of just Rs 15 crore, we grew
to become a Rs 3,000-crore conglomerate with a presence in almost every
branch of media, Chawla told Businessworld in April 2013. Dealing with
Reliance was another matter. He told the magazine that quitting was not a
complex decision. It was one of those things you do when you wake up. I
just felt I did not want to engage with [the Ambanis]. He declined to be
interviewed for this story, and said he had been misquoted in the
Businessworld story, but then unintentionally let slip during a brief but
heated conversation weeks laterin which he once again declinedthat his
last days there were an unpleasant situation. Now its over.
Reporters are aware of how the arrangement might affect them. They are
using our credibility, a top editor at one of the groups channels told me. I
am worried about that. One day people will ask us questions.
|FOUR |
ONLY A DECADE AGO, Bahl had believed that competition would serve him
well. He reasoned that competition deepened the market, and it could only
be to his benefit. In time, as he grappled with the complexities of his

sprawling organisation and a quickly changing marketplace, his solutions to

commercial problems appeared to come in conflict with his journalistic ideals.
The effect of Bahls growing pragmatism began to be felt at CNN-IBN some
years after its launch. He was troubled by the increasing popularity of Times
Now, which began operations in 2006 and thrived on the allure of its
combative editor-in-chief, Arnab Goswami. During primetime, Sardesais
calm and reasoned demeanour proved no match for Goswamis corybantic
style. By 2008, Times Nows ratings overtook those of CNN-IBN, which
irritated Bahl. Raghav was very unhappy when Arnab started winning, a
former senior CNN-IBN editor told me. Rajdeep used to say that Raghav
would tell him, Arnab must be doing something right. The editor felt that,
as a result, there was tremendous tension between them.
To counter Goswami, the channel began to funnel resources towards its
primetime talk shows, privileging them over news and reportage. Reporters
also noticed that Sardesai began to anchor whenever big stories were
breaking, a practice usually associated with Goswami. Theyve been cutting
down on news. Its about chasing the days big story, a reporter said.
Current and former employees say that CNN-IBN began to change palpably
in 2010. The way we played news, the way we functioned. You could get a
story right, but unless Times Now played it up, we wouldnt either. That was
frustrating, a former reporter said. And if Times Now had footage, CNNIBNs editors wanted it too. When Times Now once ran a clip of Rajesh
Khanna waving to fans on loop, editors at CNN-IBN assigned their threadbare
staff to acquire the same footage. On his visits to Mumbai, Sardesai echoed
Bahls feelings to his staff: Times Now is doing something right.
Once Reliance invested in the group, editors approached stories about their
benefactor gingerly. In one instance in 2012, a possible story containing a
reference about Reliance and TV18 bidding for Indian cricket rights was
discussed by the channels core editors for two days. People were saying,
Yeah, lets play it up, a person involved in the storys production told me.
But the reference worried them, and they asked the reporter to confirm once
more that Reliance had placed a bid. This was confirmed, but the story that
ran contained only the names of other bidders. There was an editorial call to
keep Reliance out of stories, the person said. Other editors suggested this
too. The editor at Firstpost told me, We dont talk too much about Reliance.
Neither pro, nor con. Im uncomfortable with the compromises weve made.
In a 2008 interview with Businessworld, Bahl had talked about the groups
existing commercial arrangements with companies they covered. We do not
compromise editorial. If you want to compromise content, you dont need
a private treaty to do it. It need not show on your books either. We do have
a policy of private treaties, but what is wrong with a business plan that
monetises our media reach? What difference does it make if we pay for a
stake in a company in cash or kind? It is true that the companies we invest in

get access. It is also true they may try and influence us, but that is the
occupational hazard every journalist faces.
Over the years, as the balance Bahl was required to maintain between his
twin roles as businessman and journalist shifted, the chances that his
reporters would face the occupational hazard of outside influence began to
increase. As a result, journalists found themselves in uncomfortable
situations. Last year, Vivian Fernandes, who co-wrote Bahls book, was
dispatched to Gujarat to interview the chief minister, Narendra Modi. A
person involved with the production of the interview recalled that Fernandes
asked Modi a difficult question about water conservation in Gujarat. Modis
organisers had asked to see the questions before the interview, and
demanded the water conservation questions removal. When Fernandes
sprung it on him anyway, Modi broke away from the camera and glared at a
public relations executive in the room. Why is he talking like this? the
person recalled Modi saying. Are we not paying for this interview? The
production crew realised that the interview was part of a promotion for Modi.
When Bahl heard about the curtailed interview, he reportedly told Fernandes,
We should have a clear line between marketing and editorial.
The line, I discovered, was crossed cavalierly some weeks ago. In late
October, a finished story on Micromax scheduled for a Forbes India issue was
suddenly held back for the futurea decision that threw the editorial
department. In the mean time, Gurmeet Singh, the CEO of Forbes India,
called one of the co-founders of Micromax to talk while the story was on
hold. Singh was an irrepressible salesman, several current and former Forbes
India editorial staff told me. The call by the CEO to the subject of the profile
concerned them. You suspect the worst, a reporter said. It raises
questions about conflict of interest. You have to put it in context. The
context, in this case, was that earlier that month, Sai Kumar, the group CEO
of Network18, had met Forbes India employees in a town hall meeting, and
told them that the group would no longer judge ad sales in the traditional
way (that is, quarter to quarter). Instead, the company wanted strategic
partnerships with advertisers, Kumar told the room. In the long run, we
want dealmakers, an employee who was present recalled Kumar saying. The
story finally ran in mid-November, but a disillusioned employee told me, The
job has changed, because the management has taken a different focus. In
May 2013, after the acrimonious departure of Indrajit Gupta and three
editors, Jagannathan took over Forbes India. He told MxMIndia in May,
Forbes ... is not meant to be an NGO. It is not meant to be anti-capitalism.
With recent cover lines such as Leaders for all seasons, Winners in the
making, How to think uber rich, Forbes India can hardly be accused of
being critical of Indian business. The very focus of the magazine makes me
uncomfortable as a journalist, the employee said. Its all some special issue
or the other. As a result of these changes, of five reporters in the
magazines Bangalore bureau, two have quit, and two more are about to
resign.

In the last months of 2010, the former economy and policy editor at Forbes
India, Dinesh Narayanan, heard about a finance ministry file related to an
extension of term for the then SEBI chairman, Chandrasekhar Bhave.
Narayanan filed a right to information request to view the file, and was
allowed to do so in January 2011. He discovered that a September 2009
ministry request to extend Bhaves stint was filled with strong endorsements
from, among others, the finance secretary Ashok Chawla, and the finance
minister, Pranab Mukherjee. Bhave had, in only three years, markedly
improved the quality of SEBIs investigations, and cleared a backlog of cases
through consent orders (documents through which SEBI settles
administrative or civil proceedings). The most famous consent order was
against billionaire Anil Ambani and two companies of his group and their
officials on charges of diverting funds raised abroad, Narayanan wrote in a
story he filed in the first week of February 2011. Insider accounts say that
Anil Ambani met Bhave and argued his group had done nothing wrong. But
that did not help the businessman avoid the outcomes altogether. He had to
agree to pay a penalty of Rs 50 crore and go on a self-imposed exile from the
secondary market for a year.
The file showed that Mukherjee had approved of an extension for Bhave. But
one day in November 2009, two months after the file was opened, the
finance ministers adviser, Omita Paul, asked for the file. [S]he added a
comment in her own handwriting, Narayanan wrote. She asked the minister
to take note of the composition of the SEBI board and the present tenures of
the chairman and members. A day later, Mukherjee ordered that no further
action be taken on the extension of Bhave and the whole-time members of
SEBI. The smooth progress of Bhaves extension orders seemed to grind to
a puzzling halt herearound the same time, the draft of Narayanans story
suggested, that SEBI was investigating charges against Anil Ambanis group.
In addition, Narayanan wrote that Mukesh Ambani, Indias wealthiest and
arguably the most influential businessman, is facing the heat too. SEBI is
doggedly pursuing insider trading charges against the group.
The magazine staff knew they had an explosive story on their hands, a
former staff writer said. The issue was due to appear at the end of February,
around budget time, and only three days before Bhave left his post. Indrajit
Gupta, the editor, told Narayanan to get the ministrys side of the story.
Gupta says he was passing on orders from Bahl, who told Gupta that
Mukherjee had rang. Raghav said it was the first time that Pranab
Mukherjee had phoned. There was enormous pressure to pull the story,
Gupta said. Raghav and Senthil [Chengalvarayan, then the managing editor
at CNBC-TV18] were insistent that we shouldnt carry it. He got Senthil to
put a fair amount of pressure. For a week after Mukherjee called, Narayanan
made four attempts to talk and meet with ministry officials, but they didnt
respond. On the night the Forbes India staff signed off on the final draft,
closed the issue and went out for a beer, the injunction came from the
management to drop the story, and a story about Rajasthan cricket went on
the cover instead.

Later, in a review meeting with the staff, Bahl took responsibility for the
inadequate replacement cover, but did not explain why the Bhave story
wasnt carried. While he confided to Gupta that the finance minister had
called, Bahl did not disclose that Network18 and Reliancewhich had been
mentioned in the story for its troubles with SEBIwere very likely in talks
that February about a Network18 bailout. (According to company filings,
Digital Content Private Limited, the trustee for Independent Media Trust
which invested in Network18was formed on 5 April. Its constitution was
written on 24 March, barely a month after the story was withdrawn.)
AS THE 2014 ELECTIONS COME INTO VIEW, Bahls network has begun to
tilt noticeably rightwarda deliberate movement that has left his journalists
uneasy about their ability to exercise editorial discretion. In the weeks
leading up to the groups first Think India conference in April, Bahl told his
management that he wanted to start a foundation called Think Right (the
conference would spring from the foundation). Sardesai and Sagarika Ghose,
the deputy editor at CNN-IBN, objected to the name, believing that it was
certain to be misinterpreted. They believed that right would come to mean
Hindutva, you know? a person involved in the discussions said. The
foundations name, everyone agreed, should be Think India.
For the first lecture of the Think India Foundation, Bahl asked Sanjay Pugalia,
the editor-in-chief of CNBC Awaaz, to invite Narenda Modi. Sardesai was
aware of how the exercise would appear. Rajdeep said that we were a media
organisation and, even if we didnt mean it, by providing a platform across all
our channels for Modi, people would get the impression that we were leaning
towards one party, the person said. (As a result, the group attempted to
persuade Rahul Gandhi, J Jayalalithaa, and Nitish Kumar to attend later
editions of the conference, a former reporter there said.)
A small group was created to work on the conference and solicit coverage
from Network18s and TV18s properties. There was a concerted effort to
drive a large visible campaign to prop up Modi in the run up to the Think
India platform, Gupta told me. Each channel, publication, and website had
to carry promotional material of some kind. They wanted a Modi cover story
from Forbes India. He says that Jagannathan broached the subject with him,
and didnt seem to mind that the magazine had carried Modi on the cover the
previous year. Jaggi said he wanted the cover to be a macroeconomic story
on Modi, and said we should speak to [the economist] Bibek Debroy. Gupta
pushed back, and Jagannathan finally relented.
On 8 April, Modi arrived at the Taj Palace hotel in New Delhi for the first
Think India conference. A healthy audience had filled the room to listen to
Modi talk about the need for smaller government. But two-thirds of them
were the groups staff who had been rushed in to make up for guests who
had refused to turn up, according to a former reporter. The number of
guests anticipated were not there. An editor present there said, Lots of BJP
functionaries turned up, but no corporate guys turned up. Bahl, who had

angled for Modi to be the first guest, interviewed the chief minister himself.
The annual getaway for senior management took place this year in early
2013, in Macau. Its unofficial agenda was profit, an editor who went to the
retreat said. In Macau, Raghav said we need profits. No more losses. There
would be no new channels, the editor told me. From what he could make
out, as slide after slide of the groups 60-odd companies revenues were
displayed, it was clear that the group was struggling. Network18, the parent
company, had scraped through with a Rs 14-crore profit that quarter, but
only because it had cashed in an investment.
They also touched upon politics in a way the editors present there were
unlikely to forget. At a panel discussion featuring Sardesai and Jagdish
Chandra, the CEO of ETV Rajasthan, Chandra talked about how all his shows
ran on government money. I remember him saying, Our channel is
profitable in Rajasthan. I keep Vasundhara Raje happy, and I also keep
Ashok Gehlot happy. Both parties happy, the editor said. The other editors
there, including Ashutosh of IBN7, and Nikhil Wagle of the Marathi channel
IBN-Lokmat, protested vociferously. The editors mood sank further when
Bahl let the large gathering know he favoured Modi as Indias next prime
minister. Bahls political preference seemed to have dismayed the editor I
spoke to. Between the Macau conference and September, when we met, the
editor became convinced that Bahls preferences had influenced the network.
Until last year, Rajdeep was the most important person here. Now after Mr
Ambani, Mr Modi is the most important person.
I spoke to this editor again in the middle of November. Its serious. They
have started supporting Modi directly. They have started putting indirect
pressure on [editors] to not criticise Narendra Modi, the editor said. Every
time big issues have to be decided, theyre done on mail, and everyones
opinions are sought. But this Narendra Modi thing was never discussed. I
think [Think India] was created to promote him.
Network18 is not alone in its rightward swing, but as Modis value in the
attention economy continues to rise, no one in English-language broadcasting
has traded more on his appeal than CNN-IBN. For four days in October and
November, the Centre for Media Studies, an independent think tank in Delhi,
monitored the primetime political coverage of some major English news
channels. Of the five they surveyed, CNN-IBN covered Modi for over 72
minutes, a greater duration than anyone else. At the same time, it covered
Rahul Gandhi, seen as Modis rival in the upcoming elections, for
approximately 18 minutes. All five channels had spent more time covering
Modi, but no other channels coverage was as disproportionate.
Early on 9 November, a Saturday, Sardesai travelled to Nagpur to meet
Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Two senior
editors in touch with Sardesai independently confirmed that Bahl had pressed
him to meet Bhagwat and other RSS leaders. Raghav is keen on promoting

right-of-centre policies. He believes [Indians] have enterprise in our blood,

the person involved in the decision over the Think India foundations naming
said. This view raises the question of what Bahl, who has interfered with
editorial decisions, is willing to overlook. Before he interviewed Modi, he told
a Firstpost interviewer that he believed that whatever be other attributes of
his, or the commentary around him, when it comes to advocating small
government, hes perhaps the only leader of that stature [who is doing so],
whether a chief minister, a cabinet minister, or a prime minister.
In October, I asked a senior editor at CNN-IBN if the channel had been under
any overt pressure to change its political stances. Theres no pressure, the
editor assured me. Raghavs centre-right. Hes of that view, and makes no
bones about it. But for all these years, this had not prevented CNN-IBNs
views from being shaped by the outlook of its editorial teammany of whom,
including Sardesai and Ghose, are considered prime suspects in a liberal
conspiracy against the BJP, Hindu nationalism, the Gujarat model and
Narendra Modi by some of the supporters of these institutions.
Bahl himself displayed no particular animus for the UPA government in
public. In a 2010 interview about Superpower? with CNBCs Anuradha
Sengupta, Bahl, in his clipped, management-guru tones, seemed optimistic
about the pro-incumbency wave that had led voters to return the mandate
to political representatives who were even half-delivering.
But things are different now. The UPA government makes people angry, the
CNN-IBN editor I was speaking to told me. For the first 50 years, the Left
had a hegemony over public discourse. The Hindu view was seen as loony,
fringe, way out there. But what was the voice of dissent has become
dominant. Sensing my scepticism about this reply, this editor added, You
cant impose views, because you have to show people everything.
Its no secret that the newsroom is the battleground for ideas, the editor
said. What would be worrisome if there was one dominant view pushed on
us. That has not been the case.