Four days after the RSS had officially distanced itself from the weekly magazine Panchjanya, a senior RSS functionary heaped praises on the magazine. RSS Joint General Secretary, Manmohan Vaidya, called the magazine a herald for Dharma Yudh (virtuous battle). The comment was made at the magazine’s new office inauguration at Mayur Vihar in Delhi. Along with Vaidya, several other senior RSS officer bearers as well as senior BJP leaders including Ram Madhav were present at the event.
The entire speech along with rest of the programme was telecast live on Panchjanya’s Facebook page. On September 3, Panchjanya’s cover article accused IT giant Infosys of acting at the behest of anti-national forces. This was sparked by the glitches in the new Income Tax portal the contract for which Infosys won in 2018 and launched in June. The Panchjanya article also cast aspersions on the potential influence of China and ISI over the glitches.
RSS’ Akhil Bharatiya Prachar Pramukh, Sunil Ambekar, who is the head of the publicity wing, said that the article published by Panchjanya reflects the individual opinion of the author. On September 5, Ambekar had said, "As an Indian company, Infosys has made seminal contributions to the progress of the country. There might be certain issues with a portal run by Infosys, but the article published by Panchjanya in this context only reflects individual opinion of the author." He also added that Panchjanya is not a mouthpiece of the RSS and that “the said article or opinion expressed in it should not be linked with the RSS."
The article on Infosys had created unease amongst IT industry honchos. Speaking to TNM, former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai said "RSS is a very loose knit organisation and it has many people with operational freedom to say what they want. So many of them do not have a view of the big picture. For many years, they have been taking a hardline on many issues. These are just loose cannons who write some rubbish. So we should come down hard on them so that they do not make this mistake again”.