Rajdeep & Co: Convenient Testimonies

Imagine someone has a bounty of Rs.1.2 Billion on his head and you can imagine the thousands of bounty hunters chasing him. Or imagine a football match when a team gets pretty close and the supporting crowd roaring and cheering. Then when the player misses, there’s those “ooohs” and “aaahs”. When a Sreenivasan Jain or Rana Ayyub get crumbs from CBI with black beard and white beard the whole media starts roaring and cheering, doing high-fives, kissing each other, hugging each other in celebration. And when the CBI doesn’t score, the media-cronies go back into their hole with ooohs and aaahs. Up comes another match with some Vanzara letter. The lynch mob goes into a frenzy again roaring and cheering “letter-bomb, letter-bomb, letter-bomb… kill, kill, kill” and it turns out a damp squib. More ooohs and aaahs! Anybody? Can anybody at all help these people achieve their life-long dream? Oh lucky! Up comes Swami Aseemanand and they start jumping for joy again. The entire army of bounty-hunters from the media was out cheering.

Suddenly everyone knows Aseemanand is a man of God who will deliver these folks. Why? Because someone called Leena Gita Raghunath from The Caravan magazine sneaked into a jail and over a 2 year period interviewed him and discovered who was behind some blasts and terror attacks. I don’t give a damn what Aseemanand says. To me he now looks like a “rented-accused” to be also used as a “rented-witness” depending on what is convenient to the bounty hunters. For the record, I wrote a long time back that this NIA and other investigations look like a sham meant to last a long time to be used and thrown in a “need-based” approach (read Confessions from Aseemanand. Who’s next?). As with these accused, the useful idiots in the media are also “used and thrown” on a need-to basis. Certain powers control their owners who are trying very hard. Let’s read an excerpt from an interview for starters:

Hmm! Pusillanimous ownership of newspapers who lack journalistic integrity. What if the publisher also had an oil company like Exxon? You might wonder which owner the editor is referring to. Never mind! But when the part owners of the business also happen to be the managing editor and deputy editor with hatred in their DNA for one person you know how far their hatred can go. Not a day passes without Rajdeep Sardesai and his deputy Sagarika Ghose bitching about Narendra Modi or passing some snide remark. I wonder if they even get to sleep without cursing and bitching about him for an hour every night. That’s how Rajdeep starts his day as well. He can’t even walk his dog without bitching about Modi:

Naturally, the response from a tweeter is quite justified. Lately Sadanand Dhume seems to enjoy slapping this duo for their stupid statements as well. They don’t seem to realise SM is not TV and some will hit back with greater force at their bitchy comments. Let’s get back to Aseemanand. Rajdeep was keen that The Caravan interview will stir a pot of gold for him. Caravan earlier tried writing about other media networks and personalities but don’t seem to have found much success. There’s that long article about Arnab running into some 12786 words which I discussed in “Bitchin’ in the back row”. That was Caravan’s first attempt at getting into the top row of news-stands. Then they tried again with one on Network18 but that didn’t do much either. Finally Caravan too adopted the “formula” masala and came up with one against RSS, BJP or Modi, if you like, with the Aseemanand crap. Now the previous two attempts may not have endeared the magazine to the media-mafia but this one certainly did. Rajdeep & Co show us how best to use convenient testimonies with a new entrant to the mafia.   

There, you see! When it’s on Ram Guha, the ‘Eminent Distortian”, the Caravan becomes a “first rate” mag. Then another one where Swami Sardesanand testifies it’s a “fine piece” and that good writing is not dead. Very nice! But this Caravan’s writing is a lot like Aseemanand’s testimony; believe it when you like and hate it when you don’t. No one proves it better than Scotch-circuit specialist Suhel Seth (November 2011):

From “I love what you’re doing” to a magazine that “nobody reads” Suhel Seth is the classic witness who can be useful for any kind of convenient testimony that the media might like to peddle. All these images are from 2011. But here’s one from Rajdeep in 2012-13:

The Ooohs and Aaahs from Rajdeep can’t seem to stop for his favourite magazine. This is like Caravan playing Vanzara. Rajdeep likes, Rajdeep applauds! Of course, anything Ram Guha says is as good as Moses saying it to Rajdeep. Then Caravan goes and does something stupid. In November 2013 Rajdeep was off to Nagpur for a lecture but I wondered if he had any other agenda too:

Rajdeep didn’t tell us he was going to meet Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, and I am not confirming he did but Caravan did. In another of those long articles (a style Caravan seems to have borrowed from Suzy Roy) the magazine explained how the owners of Network 18 were forcing the dealership to bend to the Right and be a lot more favourable to Modi. Huh, what? Rajdeep and be favourable to Modi? The man he and his deputy bitch about day and night? So in one single shot all the good writing, fine, very very fine goes out the window and Rajdeep comes up with this convenient testimony:

So as long as it about others it is gold standard but when it comes to his own house, the Caravan’s article is loaded with lies and malice. Caravan should be ashamed for such trash. That’s inconvenient testimony by the struggling magazine which is trying to become a “made member” of the mafia. Just two months later the Caravan would seek forgiveness and redemption with the Aseemanand story. Rajdeep likes! Rajdeep thinks this is his pot of gold:

So Caravan can now claim full membership of the media-mafia having handed something to certain political vandals to jump in joy and cheer. When the mafia got “ball-possession” they started to cheer and roar again. But alas! It was another missed chance. The NIA decided not to pursue allegations of the “rented-witness’s” statements which aren’t even confirmed as authentic. And that is that! The bounty-hunt continues. Please do remember, there was also one Bhavesh Patel who claimed Shinde, Diggy and others had forced him to make some allegations and statements against Mohan Bhagwat and others in the Ajmer blast case. That was killed by the media without any persuasion. RK Singh, former Home Secretary, also stated Shinde helped a friend of Dawood escape law. Even that was buried since Singh is now a BJP member. Very convenient, eh?

The one thing Rajdeep and other peers of Arnab Goswami have to learn from the latter is that Arnab does whatever he has to do on TV; good, bad or ugly. He doesn’t bitch 24X7 on the SM or anywhere else about politicians and other articles that float around. Arnab is also smart enough not to respond to bitchy articles written about him like the one from Caravan. That should tell people on NDTV and CNN-IBN why their TRPs keep going south. Same is true for Narendra Modi. He doesn’t respond to the crap peddled against him by the likes of Rajdeep, Sagarika or silly magazines.

The first image in this post is from an interview (January 2014) of none other than Jonathan Shainin the former editor of Caravan. The Aseemanand episode comes after his departure. Shainin describes in enough words that owners of Indian media are political slaves and doormats. That he uses the hypothetical example of an oil company owner should also tell you something. He didn’t include editors probably because he was one himself. It is not just the Congress, CBI or NIA but people like Rajdeep Sardesai who have now become a laughing stock for their use of convenient testimonies. This goes for most of the media-mafia. Someday there will be a price to pay for this practice.