In May 2017, the Essel Group, an Indian media conglomerate, launched Zee Hindustan as a "nationalist news channel," rebranding their former India 24×7 programming.
[5] In 2018, a former civil servant filed a criminal complaint against Zee Hindustan, after the broadcast of a manipulated video suggesting that some members of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, a political party, shouted 'pro-Pakistan' slogans following their victory in an election in Araria, Bihar.
[12][13] In April 2020, the Zee Hindustan anchors falsely claimed that a British restaurant was deliberately poisoning non-Muslim customers with food contaminated by faeces, and attempted to link the owners to Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim organisation, as a recent incident; the visuals and story that they shared related to a 2015 incident in which customers (regardless of religion) fell ill after a rare strain of E.Coli, found in the lettuce used in Khyber Pass, a British restaurant, in which the staff had also failed to maintain proper hand-washing protocols - an incident that was widely reported in the British press.
[16] In 2022, Zee Hindustan issued a formal apology and withdrew a news segment, after confirming that it consisted of a doctored video of the Indian National Congress politician, Rahul Gandhi.
The video was shared by Zee Hindustan to falsely make it appear that Gandhi was calling for forgiveness for two Muslim persons charged with beheading a Hindu man in a case of communal violence.