“Media owners milked truckloads of money from political people during the Lok

Sabha elections,” says Sunil Kumar, editor of the paper Chhattisgarh. Even during the last Lok Sabha elections, leading Hindi daily Hindustan carried a four-page special on an autonomous candidate from Varanasi, with the sponsored tag in one of the pages in fine print. This clashed with the rules set by then editor Mrinal Pande who was flooded with calls when the report was published.