Radio silence in Khandwa

At the 10 am meeting of AIR programmers,a senior colleague barged in to say that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been shot by her bodyguards. We were asked to tone down the programmes but,at the same time,instructed not to say a single word about the incident.

In the afternoon,BBC’s Mark Tully and Satish Jacob broke the news of the assassination on BBC World Service — and on BBC Hindi. The AIR was mum. Until six in the evening,AIR officials maintained that a clearance from the top was awaited before the death of the Prime Minister could be announced. Those were the days of state broadcasting. So what? The BBC was there.

BBC was the only credible broadcaster in those days. I rejoined the BBC Hindi Service in 1987 and went on to work for it for about 24 years,initially,as a producer and,later,as the head of the service.

The first Hindi broadcast of the BBC went on air on May 11,1940,as part of the Hindustani Service,with Zulfikar Bokhari (who later became the first director-general of Radio Pakistan) as the first programme head. After Independence,the service was also “partitioned” and the Hindi Service was launched here in 1949.

The state of Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975 was a turning point in the service’s popularity. My senior colleagues at the time,Onkar Nath Srivastava,Himanshu Bhaduri,Kailash Budhwar and Ratnakar Bhartiya became household names in far-flung areas of India. Millions of people,including top Opposition leaders such as Chandra Shekhar Singh,Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani,listened to the BBC Hindi news programme,Aajkal,in their prison cells to get a balanced picture of the latest developments in the country.

In the early Eighties,BBC Hindi had an estimated audience of 35 million. Even in 1990,when BBC Hindi celebrated its golden jubilee with a series of live debates and concerts in India,I was overwhelmed by the crowds who flocked to different venues. They were the listeners who had known the Hindi service since the days of Balraj Sahni,Aley Hasan,Saeed Jaffrey,Harish Khanna and Purushottam Lal Pahwa.

The geopolitical map of the world was beginning to change by the early Nineties. The invasion of Kuwait,the fall of the Berlin Wall,the disintegration of the Soviet Union and many more events led to a demand for better and sophisticated coverage.

And this was the time,when the Hindi service appointed a large number of correspondents and contributors who could file their voice reports in Hindi. We also established a small team of journalists in the BBC Delhi office that over the years expanded into a full production team. Until then,Hindi current affairs programmes largely depended on English despatches filed by BBC correspondents. With its own network of Hindi-speaking reporters,BBC Hindi entered a new phase of journalism.

I remember the night of May 21,1991,vividly,when former PM Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber in Sriperumbudur near Chennai,while he was campaigning for general elections. I was the night editor when all hell broke loose.

To explore the crucial question of who would take over the leadership of the Congress Party after his death,we spoke to a number of political commentators in India,who indicated that PV Narasimha Rao could be the next party leader. So a hunt began for Rao,who was in Nagpur that night,but,according to his secretary,unwell and unable to speak. Fortunately,minutes before our programme was supposed to go on air,we got him on the phone with a breaking story,saying,“It is up to the Congress Working Committee (if they want to have me as their leader). I will be soon leaving for Delhi.” Millions of listeners got a taste of the rapidly changing developments with the help of India’s top analysts and leaders. The programme was adjudged the best programme for news and current affairs at the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union awards.

Soon after the start of the millennium,audience surveys indicated that the BBC Hindi audience had gone down to about 12 million as a result of the increasing number of satellite television channels in India.

In order to gain better understanding of ground realities and to rejuvenate our programming,we organised a series of road shows between 2004 and 2006 in small towns and villages of the Hindi heartland.

I met hundreds of young people who said,“BBC Hindi is our window to the world.” They hoped that their local problems,from lack of drinking water to poor educational facilities,would be solved

quickly if debated on a BBC Hindi platform. At one of the venues,a listener who had travelled miles from his home to meet the Hindi team,brought along a plastic jar of muddy drinking water,and demanded that the BBC take it up with the authorities. One of the Hindi producers reached a small village in Bihar,where most helpless villagers had been living on trees for days because of floods. They thought that the BBC had come to rescue them.

The road shows and interaction with the listeners helped us in making the Hindi programmes more relevant to the audiences — at a time when most of mainstream Indian media was shifting its focus to cities. We were not disappointed. Our audience increased substantially.

As the electronic media in India expands,FM,internet and mobile phones are being looked upon by the BBC management as more sustainable content delivery platforms as compared to its short-wave radio. The website,bbchindi.com,also attracts a larger number of hits. BBC Hindi Service has tried to have some of its entertainment programmes broadcast on private FM channels in India — so far,without success. And there is the other major handicap: news on FM is still not permitted in India.

But the decision to close down its more than 70-year-old radio from April is a knee-jerk one. For millions of listeners —most of them from the remote areas of Bihar,Jharkhand,Uttar Pradesh,Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan — BBC Hindi Service has been a lifeline in terms of gaining information and knowledge. That’s what Harinarayan Mishra,the superintendent of police in Khandwa,Madhya Pradesh,who grew up in the Siwan district of Bihar and who is an avid listener of the BBC Hindi service,said in a text message he sent me. “The BBC has helped shape my personality as well as career. The information,language and analysis that I received through Hindi radio made me what I am today. There are many more who need this help even today.”

The BBC Hindi service,over the decades,has acquired an archive that boasts of exclusive interviews and programmes with the who’s who of South Asia. What will happen to them,I wonder. I remember the days when iconic figures such as Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz,Hindi writer Sachchidanand Vatsyayan Agyeya,actors Raj Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan,sitar maestro Ravi Shankar,playback singer Lata Mangeshkar and ghazal singer Mehdi Hassan spent hours with the Hindi team at Bush House in London. Some of them stayed back to have a drink at the BBC Club — the hub of poetry and politics.

The end of the BBC Hindi Radio has come so abruptly that it’s difficult to imagine that millions of people will no longer hear that signature line: Ye BBC London ki Hindi sewa hai.