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Blame game and a cover-up-Saadia
-The Hoot


A huge media conglomerate was built up by a chit fund company which has now collapsed. Can the West Bengal government whose MP was part of the empire disclaim responsibility, asks SAADIA.

About 1400 journalists have lost their jobs because a chit fund company's little-known Chief Managing Director ventured to become a media mogul in West Bengal some three years back. Almost every three months, the Saradha Group that had emerged out of the blue went about acquiring and opening new media firms to emerge as a big media conglomerate. Those were times of flexing muscles and display of power and influence. Many senior journalists then suspected that media ownership was a matter of business strategy to establish the company's credentials and also a bid to emerge as the mouthpiece of the major political party and perhaps get benefits in return. The group did expand its chit fund business, picking up large sums of public money and branching out into real estate and tourism.

Sudipto Sen, the Managing Director of the Saradha Printing and Publications Pvt Ltd, now on the run from state police, epitomises the story of a political nexus going terribly wrong. The group published the English daily Bengal Post with some of the best-known journalists in town, Bengali daily Sakalbela, Urdu magazine Kalam, Bengali weekly magazine Paroma, Urdu daily Azad Hind, Hindi daily Prabhat Varta, and Guwahati-based Seven Sisters Post. It had acquired Tara Muzik, Tara Newz and South Asia TV with much fanfare just a couple of years back. It should have been a matter of real media scrutiny as to what was its source of funds and how did it forge such a valued relationship with the new government of West Bengal. Journalists working in the group had little interaction with the CMD.

Today journalist-turned-politician Kunal Ghosh and media baron-turned-MP Srinjoy Bose are trying hard to disassociate with the group but they once used media platforms of the Saradha Group to project their political philosophy. Matters debated on Channel 10 made headlines in newspapers the next day. Member of Parliament Srinjoy Bose, also owner of Pratidin Bengali daily, was by some accounts a director of Channel 10, that was a prime beneficiary of government ads in the last two years. Now Pratidin group claims that neither was Bose a director, nor had it anything to do with the failing media group. So even identifying the group CMD is a struggle for the police.

The Pratidin group claims that they had disassociated themselves with Channel 10 long back, although the disassociation apparently happened only a few months back in the wake of the downfall of Saradha. Moreover, if Pratidin did not have anything to do with Channel 10, how come their Associate Editor Kunal Ghosh became the CEO of the Saradha Group's media unit. Kunal Ghosh quit Pratidin only early this year even while continuing as the CEO of Saradha Group.

One cannot blame journalist friends who got high-paid jobs in the emerging media group. Where are good jobs for journalists and why shouldn't they accept something available? Also where was the scope for doubt when the company was backed and assisted by the ruling government? Rajya Sabha MP Kunal Ghosh was addressed as ‘Sanshad Sambadik' (Member of Parliament-cum-journalist) during all political analysis in Channel 10. He happened to be the group CEO although now he is on an explanation drive that he was merely an employee who was drawing Rs 16 lakh a month as salary. Apparently a whopping Rs 9 crore had also been spent on foreign trips of the scribe-politician who is now also explaining that the trips were backed by Pratidin group. If so, was Pratidin sponsoring foreign trips of the CEO of another media conglomerate? Does it really ring true?

Now journalists have lost their jobs and have not been given three months pending dues. Tara Muzic had on the last day of telecast gone on air with an emotional appeal for crowdsourcing funds to run the channel. While the effort needs to be appreciated as the employees want to run it as a cooperative society generating funds on their own, the question doing the rounds is why the government cannot or will not own up to creating the mess. The media houses acquired were being run on shoestring budgets by many separate groups until these bigwigs joined hands just three years before to buy them off and create this giant conglomerate. If that was not to flex muscles and make political statements or add undue credibility to the otherwise little-known business group, then what was it? What caused the present MP and working journalist (as he wants to be addressed now) Kunal Ghosh to take up two jobs at the same time with two media groups, head them and then finally to be handpicked by the new government as the Rajya Sabha MP? The Mamata Banerjee government that had until recently found Channel 10 to be the perfect platform for media announcements now claims that it was just another media house for them where their MP-journalist was a mere employee - and has not received his salary for the last three months like any other employee of the organisation.

It is hard not to conclude that media had been used to the fullest to serve the interest of the government and then disowned. The MP-journalist holding houses of profit has to go ahead and file FIRs along with other employees if he is also amongst the cheated or else he has to come out clean as to what role he played as the head of the media house when his colleagues' salaries were withheld even as the parent company kept on collecting huge amount of public money and vanished into thin air.