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Audience Granted

BBC rethinks decision on Hindi service

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When Outlook spoke to Vijay Kumar Pandey of Kunda town in Pratapgarh district of UP in February this year, he was in mourning—for the impending death, on April 1, of the BBC Hindi’s short wave service. The town’s reliable daily fix for news and current affairs, for Pandey, it was the habit of a lifetime. As we later reported, his 200-strong Shrota Sangathan (Listeners’ Collective) was so worked up at the British Foreign Office’s withdrawal of funding (which led to the decision to axe the service) that it was planning to burn the effigy of UK premier David Cameron.

When we spoke to Pandey again earlier this week, he sounded much more cheerful. He had just heard on Aapki Baari, a BBC Hindi service programme, that all was not lost—an hour-long evening transmission of the service would continue for another year. “Hum apni khushi bayaan nahin kar sakte. Hamari baat aap logon ke madhyam se London mein authorities tak pahunchi (We can’t express our happiness. Our views reached London through the media),” he says.

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It was, indeed, an outpouring of protest and emotion by people like Pandey—one of the 9.5 million committed listeners for the service in obscure towns and villages in the Hindi belt—that led to the BBC’s rethink. The rethink comes with a caveat—“If sustainable commercial funding for this service cannot be found during the 2011-12 financial year, we regret that it will then have to close by March 2012,” said a statement issued by BBC Global News Press Office. But for listeners, it is a reprieve.

Many wrote into the BBC and aired frank views on two live phone-in shows on BBC Hindi, CDs of which later made their way to the BBC’s head office in London. There was powerful stuff in them: a listener from Assam, Ravindra Chauhan, compared the axing of the service to the death of a parent. Another from Ghazipur, UP, Mohammed Hasnain Khan, resorting to high histrionics, threatened to immolate himself!

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What also helped, clearly, was the spate of articles in leading newspapers and magazines, among them The Guardian and The Times, London, the South Asian journal Himal and Outlook. “It was a powerful campaign by the friends of BBC Hindi which resonated in London,” says Francis Elliott, South Asia Editor of The Times. “They must have been taken by surprise by such strong reactions against their move,” says Achala Sharma, the former head of BBC Hindi. The media campaign also invoked business sense. It underscored the weak logic of losing close to 9.5 million listeners—and a potent instrument, as some pointed out, of British soft power in the subcontinent—to save a mere 6,00,000 pounds per annum.

The campaign was capped by a letter, urging the BBC to reconsider its decision, signed by an assortment of big names, including Mark Tully, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, William Dalrymple, Ramachandra Guha, Kuldip Nayar, Amjad Ali Khan, Inder Malhotra, Sunita Narain, Kiran Bedi, Swami Agnivesh and Prashant Bhushan.

But not everyone is uncorking the bubbly. After all, as some point out, it’s not a return to full broadcast. “It makes a very small difference. Much more needs to be done,” says writer-broadcaster and former BBC journalist Sam Miller, who vigorously campaigned against the axing of the service. “I am partially cynical and partially hopeful about whether it will flourish in its new avatar or fizzle out,” says Sharma. The service, which has until now never competed with market forces, will have to actively seek commercial funding, and learn to swim—or sink—in a brave new world. But for listeners it remains, for now, a reassuring continuation of the past.

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