New Delhi: The Press Council of India (PCI) has censured The Indian Express and its Marathi sister publication Loksatta for wrongly attributing a quote regarding cow slaughter to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat last year.
A censure is the harshest order the PCI can issue. The order against The Indian Express and Loksatta were issued on 29 May, ThePrint has learnt.
Both Loksatta editor-in-chief Girish Kuber and The Indian Express columnist Karan Thapar mistakenly attributed the quote “The Vedas order the killing of the sinner who kills a cow” to Bhagwat, alleging that he had said this in the aftermath of the 2015 Mohammad Akhlaq lynching in Dadri. Both articles appeared on the same day, 21 September 2018.
Upon realising the quote was actually from the RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya, both publications put out an apology and retracted the quote. Loksatta did this the next day, 22 September, while The Indian Express did so on 2 October.
The PCI, acting on complaints by swayamsevak Akshay Pathak from Mumbai, didn’t see the retraction and apology as sufficient, saying that in both cases, “the apology in the facts of the present case have been tendered only with a view to get out of net of law and do not deserve acceptance”.
While Kuber did not respond to requests from ThePrint for a comment for this report,
Thapar said: “I’ve clearly preceded the quote with ‘reportedly’. I didn’t attribute the comment to him myself. I don’t wish to comment on this further.”
ThePrint reached The Indian Express chief editor Raj Kamal Jha for comment, but there was no response until the time of publishing this report.
What they wrote
Kuber, in his editorial published soon after the RSS’ annual three-day conference ‘Future of Bharat’, wrote: “In 2015, Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched on suspicion of consumption and storing beef. There is need to express the reaction by the RSS chief. ‘The Vedas order the killing of the sinner who kills a cow’ — this was his reaction three days after this tragic incident.”
On the same day, Thapar wrote a column titled ‘Has the RSS ground shifted’ in The Indian Express. He observed that over the course of the ‘Future of Bharat’ event, Bhagwat took positions that stood “in contrast” to his predecessor on matters related to the Constitution and minorities.
He wrote: “In fact, Bhagwat himself is not averse to making inflammatory statements. In 2015, when Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched on suspicion of consumption and storing beef, he’s reported to have said: ‘The Vedas order the killing of the sinner who kills a cow.’”
Also read: Mohan Bhagwat is like RK Laxman’s common man and RSS under him means business
PCI rejects papers’ defence
In their defence, both Loksatta and The Indian Express said the wrongly attributed quote was first published by Business Standard (Loksatta called it a “reputed business newspaper”), which they assumed to be accurate given its reputation. They added that apologies and retractions were issued almost immediately after realising the misquote.
However, the PCI’s order stated: “The plea that it has been quoted from an editorial of ‘Business Standard’ is inconsequential.” It added that Thapar “had put the reputation and prestige of the head of an organisation to great peril” with his “casual and careless approach” to writing his column.
“We will only look at where the complaint has been raised, and in this case, it was with Loksatta and The Indian Express. Just because the respondents have cited Business Standard doesn’t mean we will look into it without a formal complaint being raised first,” said PCI secretary Anupama Bhatnagar.
“A censure is the harshest kind of adjudication the Press Council gives out. Less severe are warnings, directions and admonishments.”
A copy of the notice has been sent to the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, the director of public relations, government of Maharashtra, and the deputy commissioner of police, Mumbai.
“What the newspapers do now is up to them,” Bhatnagar said.
Also read: What Rahul Gandhi and Mohan Bhagwat have in common
It’s negative reporting that instead of writing Indian Express and Karan Thapar’s name in bold in headlines, you have written “putting words in RSS chief’s mouth”…. How sweet of you to save your community in the headlines itself…. Indian Express and Karan Thapar must be in the docks in the headlines itself…. That’s why it’s Khan Market Gang…..