The troubles in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s English and Hindi publications, the Organiser and the Panchjanya, show no sign of abating.
While good days are supposedly back with sharp increase in advertising revenues for both the magazines, things seem to be going from bad to worse for some of its employees, particularly those who wrote to the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, complaining about being victimised for protests over low salaries.
The management has responded by terminating their services.
Incidentally, the first to be sacked is the person who put the first signature on the letter which the employees had sent to Bhagwat on December 2, 2015, accusing the management of creating “an atmosphere of fear” inside the RSS publications and requesting his intervention for better salaries and an end to the harassment they were facing.
‘Bhagwatji did nothing’
“Despite being the head of the Sangh Parivar, Bhagwatji did nothing,” according to Anupama Shrivastava, a senior member of the Panchjanya’s editorial team, who was the first to sign the letter carrying 20 odd signatures of the employees of the two RSS publications.
“On January 4, the HR department called me and gave me the termination letter,” she told Scroll.in. “They also asked me to accept a cheque with an amount equivalent to my three months’ salary. When I refused to accept the cheque, they sent it to my residence through courier,” she added.
The termination letter of Shrivastava does not mention any reason for termination of her services. It only refers to clause 18 of her appointment letter dated 5 March 1992 which states:
“The employment will be liable to be terminated on either side on giving three months’ notice or payment of salary in lieu thereof…etc, etc.”
In their letter to Bhagwat, the employees of Bharat Prakashan (Delhi) Limited, the body that runs the Organiser and the Panchjanya, had asserted that they didn’t mind working on low wages – sometimes even taking salaries in parts – when the financial condition of the two publications was not good.
“But the situation has changed now, and the company is showing profits,” the letter had said, adding that the new management of Bharat Prakashan was still keeping them in deprivation. “In violation of all rules, even our basic salaries have been tampered with. When someone tries to object to these violations he is victimised,” the letter had added, citing four specific examples of the victimisation of senior employees, who were forced to sign on their resignation letters.
‘Illegal termination’
When Scroll.in talked to Paramanand Mohariya, who took charge as Bharat Prakashan’s managing director on August 13 2014, three months after the formation of Narendra Modi government, he feigned ignorance about the employees writing any such letter to Bhagawat. “I have no knowledge about the existence of any such letter,” Mohariya told Scroll.in. “All the allegations in the letter you are referring to are baseless,” Mohariya had said.
But merely a week after the publication of the story, Bharat Prakashan sacked Shrivastava. “They have also sacked Dinesh Pande,” Shrivastava said. Pande, a senior member of the Organiser’s editorial team, had also signed the letter to Bhagwat. “So far altogether nine persons have been sacked. In fact, the management is planning to get rid of all those who worked during the bad days of these publications,” she added.
The sacked workers of the Organiser and the Panchjanya have complained to the labour commissioner and are planning to challenge “the illegal termination of services” in court.
The Organiser, the official publication of the RSS in English, was launched as a weekly newspaper in July 1947. In April last year, months before the new management took over Bharat Prakashan, it was re-launched in a magazine format. The Panchjanya, the Sangh’s Hindi paper, was launched a few months after its English counterpart, on January 14, 1948, with Atal Behari Vajpayee as its first editor.