Special

For the first time since Myanmar's military crackdown last year that led to almost 700,000 Rohingya fleeing into neighbouring Bangladesh, a government minister has visited a refugee camp.

Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye provoked anger when he reportedly told a group of about 40 Rohingya if they were to return to Myanmar they must accept national verification cards and state they were migrants from Bangladesh.

The refugees at the Kutupalong camp in the border city of Cox’s Bazar say they belong to Myanmar. They gave the minister a list of 13 demands they want met before they return home.

Bangladesh and Myanmar agreed to begin their repatriation in January, but there were delays because of safety concerns.

So how will the govenrment respond and how committed is it to resolving the crisis?

A ''big price to pay''. That is the warning from the US president Donald Trump to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his backers Iran and Russia.

It was made in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack in eastern Ghouta near Damascus on Saturday.

At least 85 people were killed.

UN investigators have documented at least 33 alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria since 2011. They say 27 of them were carried out by government forces.

The worst was in Eastern Ghouta in August 2013 - a sarin gas attack that killed at least 1,000 people. But with Trump sending mixed signals on US troops in Syria, what more can he do to stop such attacks?

Sadhna Prime News

Alok Bhatt, Director; Ashok Mishra, Bureau Head; Khalid, Marketing Head, Sadhna Prime News, Lucknow

As soon as the reporter tells Bhatt about his agenda, Bhatt replies: ''Our business is Hindutva, exactly.'' The bonhomie between Bhatt and his prospective client thus sets in at the outset.

After the reporter apprises him of his campaign, Bhatt informs us of his links with the BJP government and the RSS: ''Hum log toh exclusive bhi karte rahte hain aur humare apne jo resources hain usmein kuch log Sangh key ya sarakar ke wo exclusively humein dete hain cheejon ko (We are do exclusive programmes and some of our resources and people are associated with the Sangh or the government who give us such stuff exclusively).'' The reason of this closeness is that his grandfather was one of the founding leaders of the RSS and he and his family are RSS followers by birth, we come to know. We are speaking to a man who is already schooled in the mould of RSS.

HNN 24×7

A new kid on the block, HNN  24×7 is Dehradun-based TV news channel. It was founded by Amit Sharma in 2016. As Sharma warms up to the reporter’s preposition, he is explained how his news channel is supposed to work according to his agenda.  

Samachar Plus

In a very short period of time after it was launched in mid-2012, Samachar Plus has earned itself the sobriquet of the No. 1 regional news channel across Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. With a catchy tag line Khabar wahi jo humne kahi (What we tell is news), Samachar Plus is owned and run by Umesh Kumar, a property developer-turned-journalist, who came to limelight after he did a sting on the Uttarakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat in 2016, few months before the state was due for assembly elections. Umesh Kumar also runs News Network of India (NNI), a news agency.

9X Tashan

9X Tashan is one of the most popular Punjabi music channels. Part of 9X Media, founded by Indrani and Peter Mukerjea in 2007 and now acquired by Zee TV in 2017, is India’s largest music broadcaster operating six music TV channels and www.spotboye.com, a Bollywood news portal. With a weekly viewership of about 1.50 crore, 9X Tashan is undoubtedly a leader on its own right, and with this kind of reach, one can fathom the impact the music channel may have on its viewers if its content could be manipulated to promote a particular ideology. 

UNI

With about 1000 subscribers including newspapers, radio and television networks, websites, government offices and private and public sector corporations across India and the world, United News of India (UNI) is undoubtedly one of the largest news agencies. UNI has news bureaus in all state capitals and major cities in the country. Sharma got a red-carpet welcome, literally, in one such bureau of the agency at Lucknow, where he met Narender Kumar Srivastva.

Amar Ujala

Anuj Tyagi, Deputy GM (Media Solutions), Noida; Navjeet Kumar, Marketing Officer, Una, Himachal Pradesh; Mohit Sharma, Asociate Vice President (Marketing), Bharpur Singh, GM (Media Solutions) and Kanwaljit Singh, Sr. Marketing Manager (Media Solutions), Chandigarh; Sanjeev Rastogi, Dy Manager (Media Solutions), Meerut; Harpreet Kaur, Sales Manager, Mumbai; Himanshu Gautam, Business Head and Ashish Vimal Garg, Sr. Manager, amarujala.com, Delhi.

Amar Ujala began its journey from Agra a year after an Independent India was born in 1947. From a single-city newspaper to 19 editions, the Hindi daily sells about two million copies a day across seven states of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu, Haryana, Punjab, Delhi NCR and Uttar Pradesh.

According to IRS, it has more than 5 million readers. As one of its senior mangers informs us, Amar Ujala has 72 lakh followers on Facebook, 7 lakh on Twitter and 2 lakh on Instagram, which shows its reach and ability to influence its readers, particularly when its content could be tweaked as Pushp Sharma found during the course of this investigation. Sharma interviewed nine senior functionaries of the daily at Noida, Una in Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Meerut, Mumbai and Delhi. One of the first senior functionaries to receive Sharma was Deputy GM Anuj Tyagi. Sharma briefs him on his agenda and asks him how best they can run the campaing on their print and digital platforms: promotion of Hindutva in the first phase and bashing of political rivals through Pappu jingles in the second. As part of the promotion of Hindutva, the journalist asked if his newspaper can promote speeches of Mohan Bhagwat on particular occasions on their digital platform.

DNA (Daily News and Analysis)

Launched in 2005 and published simultaneously from Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Pune, Jaipur, Bangalore and Indore, DNA is second most-read English newspaper in Mumbai. A joint venture of Zee and Dainik Bhaskar groups, the newspaper has a circulation of 456,000 in Mumbai. No mean a feat, it shows its popularity among Mubaikars, especially in an age where space for news in print is shrinking by the day. DNA in a matter of a decade or so may have earned for itself a reputation as a newspaper. Pushp Sharma decided to check if the DNA marketing officials cared so much as to defend this reputation and say no to his proposition.

SAB TV

SAB TV does not need any introduction. The network has been entertaining millions of Indian TV viewers with its rib-ticking comedies like ''Dekh Bhai Dekh'' and ''Tarak Mehta Ka Ulta Chashma'' for the past three decades since it came into being in 1985. Pushp Sharma called on the senior functionaries of the network if they could help him fulfill his agenda using the genre comedy that is their forte. Surprisingly, he found them ready for the job. Here, Sharma first met Parthasarathi Kuila, who is working as Associate Vice President (Sales).