Press, money and polls: Meet the media owners who bought electoral bonds

Just three years after its launch, a Hindi news channel topped the TRP leadership for more than half of 2022, defeating most legacy brands. And now, it is leading another top 10 chart, though for different reasons.TV9 Bharatvarsh’s parent group Associated Broadcast has Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Ltd, an infrastructure giant, as its majority stakeholder. Megha is also the second biggest buyer of electoral bonds. The TV9 network itself is no stranger to controversy. While it has projected its round-the-clock coverage of regional wars as the reason behind its high TRPs, its counterparts have alleged irregularities in the ratings.But it’s not the only media property that has links to companies that have purchased electoral bonds. From radio stations and TV networks to web portals and a magazine, various media outlets are linked to firms that have together purchased bonds to the tune of Rs 1,086.5 crore..Open magazine, Editorji, Fortune India, and Rs 3 crore in bondsRPSG Ventures, which purchased electoral bonds of Rs 3 crore in July last year, is led by the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, which, among other things, owns a handful of media properties.The foremost of them being Open, the English weekly magazine by the Open Media network that was launched in 2009 and saw its first controversy in 2013 when its political editor Hartosh Singh Bal was fired. The magazine’s editor Manu Joseph revealed in an interview the same year that Sanjiv Goenka had told him that he was “making a lot of political enemies” because of Bal’s writings and utterances on TV news channels. In 2019, the magazine featured Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 10 of its 29 covers in just six months. The magazine also notoriously offers a regular column to MJ Akbar, former union minister and journalist who has been accused of sexual harassment by over 20 women. The RP-Sanjiv Goenka group also acquired a majority stake in video news app Editorji in July 2020, which was set up by former NDTV CEO Vikram Chandra. The group also acquired an exclusive license to publish Fortune India, a global magazine that publishes annual rankings of leaders. The group also owns music label Saregama. Men's magazine Esquire and entertainment publication Hollywood Reporter are expected to be launched by RPSG Lifestyle Media later this year. Reliance links to media acquisitions and their donationsMN Media Ventures purchased electoral bonds worth Rs 5 crore in November 2022 and NexG Devices worth Rs 35 crore, in May 2019 and November 2022, respectively. These firms are owned by Media Matrix Worldwide, a company that Ojasi Trading – a unit of Reliance subsidiary Teesta Retail – has at least a five percent stake in.On the board of NexG Devices, meanwhile, is Surendra Lunia, Mukesh Ambani’s former business associate who sold a 29.18 percent stake in NDTV held by Reliance firms to the Adani Group, which subsequently resulted in the takeover of the news organisation. Newslaundry had reported in detail about how Lunia is the financial in-between for Ambani’s growing footprint in the Indian media. At least three other companies where Lunia serves as director purchased electoral bonds – Infotel Business Solutions, Infotel Enterprises, Mankind Pharma. The total amounts to donations worth Rs 79 crore, including NexG. The NDTV takeover is not the only media acquisition with a Reliance link as political donor.Laxmidas Vallabhdas Merchant, Reliance’s group controller who purchased Rs 25 crore of electoral bonds in November 2023, is a director in at least six companies linked to Reliance’s takeover of the Network18 conglomerate, as uncovered by The Reporters Collective. Two radio stations, assembly polls, and Rs 7 croreTwo radio stations run by media conglomerate Sun TV purchased Rs 7 crore of electoral bonds. Kal Radio Limited and South Asia FM Limited purchased Rs 3.5 crore and Rs 3.5 crore, respectively, on April 3, 2021.Chennai-based Sun TV, owned by media mogul Kalanithi Maran, runs 48 FM radio stations, including Red FM, Suryan FM, and Magic FM 106.4. It also runs five magazines, two newspapers, film distribution companies, OTT platforms, DTH service providers, television channels, and an IPL team. The April 2021 purchase of bonds by both channels took place three days before the assembly elections were held in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Puducherry. Maran is the son of former DMK leader Murasoli Maran and the grand-nephew of former Tamil Nadu CM M Karunanidhi. Media empire of the second largest buyerThe second largest donor to political parties via electoral bonds - Rs. 966 crore - has a strong media trail. In 2018, Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Limited bought 80 percent stake of Associated Broadcasting Company Private Limited, paving the way to control the six channels of TV9. While TV9 Bharatvarsh is its national channel, TV9 operates five regional channels too, including TV9 Telugu, TV9 Kannada, TV9 Marathi, TV9 Gujarati, and TV9 Bangla, besides News9 Plus, touted as a news OTT platform. A Goa newspaper owner, and bonds before electionsGoa-based Dempo Industries, which has diversified interests in industries like calcined petroleum coke, shipbuilding, and food processing, donated Rs 1.5 crore to political parties via electoral bonds, via Dempo Industries, Vasudeva Dempo Family Trust, Dempo Ind Navhind Papers and Pub, and Shrinivas Vasudev Dempo. The company also owns a leading newspaper in Goa, the Navhind Times, as well as Navprabha, a Marathi daily newspaper. The group purchased bonds worth Rs 10 lakh on April 15, 2019, one week before the Lok Sabha elections in Goa. It also bought bonds worth Rs 1.4 crore on January 10, 2022, one month before the assembly polls in Goa.The company also faced action by the Enforcement Directorate in May 2022 in connection with a probe against a former employee of the company whom the agency accused of purportedly creating assets worth Rs. 30 crore while he was employed abroad with the Dempo Group.It should be noted that most mainstream news channels have skipped the murky details on the EC’s electoral bond data dump. Apart from a handful of discussions on channels like India Today and NDTV, more airtime is devoted to statements from political parties, not analyzing the data. Take TV9 Bharatvarsh, where Samajwadi Party spokesperson Sunil Sajan said “no big journalist” was speaking about electoral bonds or whether central agency action had influenced their purchase. “Aayega toh Modi hi, par kaise aayega Modi?” he asked. (“It will be Modi who wins, but how will he win?”) In response, anchor Gaurav Agrawal turned the discussion around to ask panelists how Modi might win the upcoming polls. On Times Now Navbharat, Sushant Sinha “debunked” claims from the Congress that Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Ltd purchased electoral bonds worth Rs 140 crore just a month before winning a tender worth Rs 14,400 crore for the Thane-Borivali twin tunnel project. He said the bonds were “merely one percent” of the tender and suggested the Congress was asking questions since they were familiar with scams worth “thousands of crores”.Meanwhile, Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said that electoral bonds had been introduced to “wipe out black money” and the amount that opposition parties received was “disproportionate” to the number of seats they had in the Lok Sabha. Does this quite add up though? Read this piece for moreThis report is part of a collaborative project involving three news organisations – Newslaundry, Scroll, The News Minute – and independent journalists.Project Electoral Bond includes Aban Usmani, Anand Mangnale, Anisha Sheth, Anjana Meenakshi, Ayush Tiwari, Azeefa Fathima, Basant Kumar, Dhanya Rajendran, Divya Aslesha, Jayashree Arunachalam, Joyal, M Rajshekhar, Maria Teresa Raju, Nandini Chandrashekar, Neel Madhav, Nikita Saxena, Parth MN, Pooja Prasanna, Prajwal Bhat, Prateek Goyal, Pratyush Deep, Ragamalika Karthikeyan, Raman Kirpal, Ravi Nair, Sachi Hegde, Shabbir Ahmed, Shivnarayan Rajpurohit, Siddharth Mishra, Supriya Sharma, Tabassum Barnagarwala and Vaishnavi Rathore.