Anjali Damania - Jenny Come Lately

When Kishore Samrite, an ex-MLA of Samajwadi Party, filed a case in the Allahabad HC against Rahul Gandhi for alleged abduction of a woman named Sukanya there wasn’t a whisper on any of our TV channels. The HC dismissed the case after Sukanya was reportedly produced in court and slapped a fine of Rs.50 lakhs on Samrite. The case is now in the SC. Surprisingly CBI, which investigated the case, has stated to SC such a woman doesn’t exist.  Strange, isn’t it? The Allahabad HC dismissed the case after the woman was reportedly produced in court and now CBI claims in SC the woman doesn’t exist. Never mind. Did you hear any of this on any TV news channel? Did you hear any of it when Samrite actually filed the case in the Allahabad HC? Nothing! When the HC dismissed the case and slapped a penalty, Headlines Today only reported the dismissal and the penalty but not any details about the case. Read the post “Rahul Gandhi-Sukanya case: Amazing media silence”. Now imagine if some member from BJP or TMC or AIADMK or BJD were involved in the case instead of RG. You can then imagine the case would be on TV 24X7 for all these past 6 years without let up.

Is it any surprise that even Mamata Banerjee, in her interview to Rajdeep Sardesai, hints at “PaidNews”? Paid by Congress particularly! Okay! Then there were reports about Sonia Gandhi being one of the richest women politicians on earth by Business Insider. I’m sure you’ve seen Arnab debating the report on TimesNow. No? Or Rajdeep Sardesai’s interview with her about that? No? Yes, I think you finally remembered that discussion on the billions stop here with Barkha. No? Damn! Everyone missed these reports? Well, that’s our celebs in the media for you; shamelessly devoted to maligning anyone and everyone opposed to Congress. It wasn’t even a day since the news of the resignation of Ajit Pawar, Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, over the massive irrigation scam that our media found a whipping-boy. One would have thought there would be news about the scam, how it was operated, how the contracts were given out and who benefitted from it. Nothing!

Politicians, regardless of parties, are known to dole out favours to each other. But for the media to make extra-ordinary charges on the basis of someone’s allegations is stretching a bit too far. They must have heard Arindam Chaudhari’s clarion call: “Dare to think beyond irrigation, water, canals and dams”. And Lo and behold, they found Damania, Anjali Damania (AD). The Jenny-come-lately! And the target? Nitin Gadkari (NG), the BJP president. Anjali Damania seems to be a band member of Arvind Kejriwal who is fighting… I don’t know who or what he is fighting anymore. From a position of credibility and trust the man now enjoys as much credibility as Nixon selling used cars.

So what was this Anjali’s problem? Seems she met NG three times over this irrigation scam and according to her he had asked her to back off the allegations because Sharad Pawar was a close friend. So she’s very upset that the one man, with a RSS background, she trusted to arrest all scamsters in the irrigation scam let her down. And she has proof of her discussions with him in the form of an SMS she sent him. Damn! This is a warning for all you people out there. Make sure nobody sends you SMSes; you could be incriminated in any crime of their choice. So from September 27 it was AD all the way for our media crooks and the irrigation scam itself was over and done with. While NDTV and CNN-IBN made allegations along with AD on their channels, Times Now went further and held a full panel discussion. Some interesting titbits from TimesNow:

Anjali showed her mobile to the world as demanded by Arnab. Then she read out her SMS to NG as proof of her conversation with him. I can’t believe it was actually an SMS. She invoked patriotism, invoked RSS bhakti, invoked blah blah… She read it for nearly a minute or more. Who the hell sends SMSes that long? It read more like a legal notice than a SMS. Well, I would estimate it could be something like that. Send a message to make it part of a record that may be handy in future. She doesn’t have even 1 message in acknowledgement or of any nature from NG though.

During the discussions AD states she received threatening phone calls. On a single day she got 30 such calls she mentions. All of that must be to stop her from blowing her “whistle” I imagine. So a panellist asks her why she didn’t record any of those threats and she responds with “am I expected to record all threatening phone calls”? Oh! Now, she’s on a whistle-blowing trip and receives not one, not two, not three but 30 phone threats in a single day and she still didn’t consider it necessary to record even one of those? Umm.. routine for RTI activists I suppose. Fine! Strikingly, she doesn’t even complain to or even inform the police. Does that sound normal to you? Does that look like the behaviour of a reasonable person?  

So the rants began from NDTV, Times Now, CNN-IBN, Headlines Today and I’m sure all the other language channels too. “Gadkari silent”! “Gadkari fails to respond”! “Gadkari hiding”! As if all that clearly established his guilt. On September 27 NG sent AD a legal notice charging her with defamation and all her claims to be falsehoods and untruths. The best headline after this was, of course, from Times Now (Sep 28), the guys who have already been slapped a 100-crore defamation damage: “Irrigation scam puts BJP on the back-foot”. Haha! So from Congress and NCP being the perpetrators of the scam it is the opposition party that is guilty and is on the back-foot. But Arnab did pull out a few documents that showed AD had more than just public interest in mind while tracking the irrigation scam. Seems, she held lands that would have been damaged by some dams.

As for the legal notice by Nitin Gadkari you have to only see the two reports and how contrasting they are: TOI and NDTV. For some reason NDTV doesn’t reveal the full story while TOI has a little more than the legal notice. Let’s read some excerpts from the TOI story: (Includes comments by Eknath Khadse, leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly)

Gadkari's notice to Damania on Thursday evening asked her to retract her "false, baseless and defamatory statements". "You are making such false and baseless statements only to make sensation with the object to defame my clients. The state BJP unit was the first to unearth the irrigation scam and has undertaken public agitations...,'' said the notice. Senior BJP leader Devendra Phadnavis said…. "In the last budget session, I raised several queries based on the papers procured by the BJP and Damania through RTI. I had even mentioned that IAC members were being targeted for raking up the scam. In fact, she (Damania) wasn't even aware of the whistle-blower (chief engineer Vijay Pandhare). I told her about the letter and gave her Pandhare's number"… Further attacking Damania, Khadse said: "Damania had taken land near one of the irrigation dams. The govt decided to raise the height of the dam, following which Damania's land was getting affected. She wanted the govt to lower the height, but all her efforts yielded no results. On the contrary, the govt forfeited her land as Damania had purchased it without being eligible for it."

So, as usual, where it concerns the opposition, the onus to prove guilt is not on the “accuser” but on the “accused” to prove innocence. That’s our MSM. Throughout September 28 no channel asked any questions about AD’s lands or their status. None! Who knows she might have even met NG (assuming she has indeed met him) to save her lands and turned bitter if/when he had refused! Why isn’t that possible? I can’t help rephrasing the statement of the Amicus in that SIT report about another whistle blower, Sanjiv Bhatt’s claims: “There is no evidence that Anjali Damania did not meet Nitin Gadkari and seek to save her lands”. Now let the media twist that one. Well, move over Top Cop, Anjali Damania is here and she’s the new darling of our media. The Jenny-come-lately!