The Billion Lies

People working round the year usually take a break or a vacation sometime or the other. They hope to forget the heat and the problems back home and at work and spend time away from all of it. Some come back rejuvenated and raring to get back to work, some come back to the same problems they left behind. Nothing changes. Our media friends had a two-week vacation from their regular jobs and had a great time gorging on the beast called IPL. The IPL match-fixing scam worked as a trigger for a vacation from all other news items except for a couple of incidents and disasters. The BCCI is holding an emergency meeting today to deal with the case of N. Srinivasan who will be likely ousted from his position of president. The vacation may end but the billion lies of our media will return to other stories. This is just to record some bizarre coverage of the IPL scam.

At times like these the behaviour of the poor frontline reporters and cameramen turns absolutely insane. They behave like orphaned mongrels fighting over crumbs of food that someone just threw at the garbage dump in the street corner. The uncouth and uncivilised behaviour of these reporters during the arrest of Vindoo Dara Singh and Gurunath Meiyappan suggests they need training on civility first than in reporting. The image says it all. This happens every time the police arrest someone in a sensational case. The reporters hounded Vindoo right into the van in which he was taken away and jumped on Gurunath like a pack of dogs fighting for the leftovers. The siege of Gurunath was so bad that the police could take him from the vehicle to the Crime Branch office only after a serious struggle.

The players mostly remained silent throughout the vacation. The Indian team captain MS Dhoni refused to answer any questions about the IPL scam during his recent pressers. I believe he was right in remaining silent as he is not obligated to feed the media with the titbits they seek. And then Sachin Tendulkar spoke out stating he was “shocked and disappointed” at the events and that he was “hurt”. I wonder if any citizen would say anything different about the IPL scam. But for the media folks the interpretation was different. The small statements of SachinT was used to add more fuel to the campaign and Rajdeep Sardesai was the first get on TV and proclaim SachinT had “taken a stand”. What stand did Sachin take? This is how Rajdeep fools people. A mere statement about being hurt or disappointed is a statement any citizen would make but a call for some specific action would be a “stand”. Sachin called for nothing and now that he’s also an MP he throws crumbs that the salivating media gobbles as a major statement. Numero Uno’s vacation!

The more sensible and balanced statements weren’t coming from the media but from prominent citizens with a conscience. Shekhar Kapur rightly states less than 1% of our population follows cricket religiously yet the media makes you believe Srinivasan’s resignation will solve some major problems. Sucheta Dalal makes an even stronger point. How many of these same media celebs would talk about media houses and owners who are routinely entrenched in misdeeds and scams as is the BCCI. A day or two would have made some sense but the two-week long (and still continuing) campaign of the media against Srinivasan and the IPL scam looks like a conspiracy and a scam by itself. Naturally, where there’s a scam politicians can’t be far behind. None of the media celebs sought an investigation into the Radiagate scandal. Records suggest that Arun Jaitley, who is dabbling heavily in the BCCI affairs to set things right, was actually approached to protect a culprit in the Radiagate episode.

Then there are moments of comedy in every campaign the media undertakes that come as a relief and provide a good laugh. Nobody… Nobody does it better than the duo of Editor and Deputy Editor of CNN-IBN. The Editor is constantly striving for “integrity and credibility” which seems to elude him at every corner and the Deputy is constantly striving to surpass her Social Genius score. The “Numero Uno” guy hopes the BCCI and Srinivasan problems will get sorted out and his vacation can end and he can get back to his regular problems. The “Numero Unee” laments they didn’t tell us how many times Mahendra Karma was stabbed during the Chattisgarh naxal attack and media is crying over IPL. She does have a point. But the problem is “Numero Unee” and “Numero Uno” are as helpless as any other media celeb when a campaign is being dictated by political forces. They too were on vacation.

An article in The Telegraph clearly indicates that the whole campaign against Srinivasan and BCCI was driven by the Congress party and Sharad Pawar. Naturally! There are few tainted Congress members in Indian Cricket management. Rajiv Shukla represents the real power-mongering journalist who became an MP and then a BCCI bigshot. There is no reason to believe the Barkhas, Rajdeeps, Arnabs and Sagarikas are any different from Shukla. They are all Rajiv Shuklas still haunting the media. For over 15 days the Congress successfully managed to throw bigger crumbs to the media with the Bharat Nirman ads and kept them focused on the IPL scam. In the last 15 days I bet you wouldn’t have seen too many politicians or political spokies on your TV screen. They had a vacation too.

In every malicious, hate-filled campaign that the media carries out there is always someone who trumps everyone else with his sheer nonsense. And this time too, it was Arnab Goswami all the way. The man has truly become the symbol of the terrible disease that has inflicted our news media. First he spreads the canard of a billion people being cheated. This is an outright lie that he knowingly peddles for sensationalism. Only morons who constantly sit in a studio utter such crap. Shekhar Kapur rightly points out how many people really care about Cricket. Even if Kapur has just made a guesstimate I can tell you that in most places in India people still don’t know the IPL or BCCI.  

There are many places in this vast country where people don’t watch anything let alone Cricket and they form a huge majority. And then Arnab follows it up with “Crusade for Cricket”. This guy probably believes he’s the Grand Mufti of TV and propriety but actually represents the worst in TV journalism. Calling it “cheating a billion” is the way that Arnab and TimesNow regularly cheat a billion people from real news and facts. It is a practice with Arnab to fool people with fake headlines and excessive screaming. I truly pity the reporters like Navika, Bhavtosh and others who work under him. They must feel like idiots having to work under someone who acts more like a circus joker.

The awful truth is that some cricketers and bookies may have cheated but they haven’t stolen your money. They have cheated your faith in the game but not your money. I believe the UPA which has not only cheated your faith but also cheated you of your own money is a far more serious issue than IPL betting and fixing. But the media can be silenced with a fair share of crumbs as we have come to learn. Now that this IPL campaign of a billion lies is nearing its end the media celebs will return to their regular job. They will return to “Hunting season” which is another way of protecting the Congress. And in doing so they will manufacture another billion lies right up to election season.

Multiple Organ Failure

The last major political leader from the Congress to die of natural causes was Vilasrao Deshmukh in August 2012. While Deshmukh seemed quite active in the months prior to his death it was a surprise to find he was ailing so seriously and a last minute liver transplant was also aborted because the donor died before the operation. Other than the scams that he was accused of Deshmukh was quite a popular leader in Maharashtra. Final reports on his death indicate he was suffering from liver failure which led to kidney failure which led to lungs failure and all of these led to heart failure. That sounds like total chaos, a lot like the Congress and UPA which are suffering multiple ailments. 

For 16 consecutive days now our media has been soaked in the IPL scam with just a pause for minor news items like naxal attacks or ministers resigning in Andhra. All of them just want one thing; N. Srinivasan to resign as BCCI president. TimesNow has gone a step beyond NDTV, CNN-IBN and HeadlinesToday, the channel is now calling it “Crusade for Cricket”. When George Bush used the term “crusade” after the 9/11 attacks for the war against terrorism he quickly withdrew that term and settled for ‘Operation enduring freedom’. I hope the liberals and Islamists don’t attack TimesNow for carrying out a “Crusade” for Cricket. All of them want Srinivasan to resign on moral grounds. It’s a fair demand but the political leadership from which most morals flow in public life has long dumped morals. The last time morals were seen in Indian Cricket was when GR Vishwanath recalled Bob Taylor for a wrong dismissal in the 1979-80 Golden Jubilee test. Well, Taylor went on to score a century and India lost the match. Since then it has been “law will take its course”. But the IPL scam reporting was helping bury many a Congress-UPA crime but when organs fail, they are bound to give a rude shock. The Chattisgarh naxal attack of May 25 was one massive heart attack to the Congress, BJP and the media.

Now that more details of the Maoists attack trickle in it seems quite obvious that the attack was a conspiracy hatched by a politician or a group of politicians. The Maoists seemed to know who will be there in the convoy and sought out specific politicians as targets and killed them. Their main target was Mahendra Karma, who supposedly founded the Salwa Judum, but they allowed Kawai Lakma, a close associate of Ajit Jogi, to escape. Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh all rushed to Raipur. Amazing! 14 Congress lives and 7 security personnel were killed. I’m quite sure these three Congress heads didn’t rush to Raipur for the security personnel killed.

At the Governor’s meet over the incident, where neither SoniaG nor RahulG had any right to be present, RahulG kept asking “who is responsible”? Funny, isn’t it? A man who is responsible for nothing and to no one in this country asks that question. A man whose own constituency Amethi has failed on most development index and who is an “Eid ka chand” in parliament talks about responsibility. This was the guy who was partying after 26/11. This is the same Pappu who said “Congress supported BJP during Kargil”. Responsibility? Chest-beating at best! Never mind! And Minister Jairam Ramesh screams “we will win the war against naxalism”. How he proposes to do so, nobody knows.

Contrast all the drama of the trinity from Congress to the deadly attack on CRPF and Police personnel in April 2010. 75 were ambushed and brutally killed. SoniaG, RahulG or MMS didn’t rush to Dantewada. It seems only when their party men are attacked that wakes up politicians. This must make the naxals feel that targeting politicians pays better dividends. The moronery and hypocrisy of MMS and his party wasn’t more visible than in the fact that in October 2009 he grandly stated naxalism “is the greatest internal threat to India”. Well, what has he done about it? We don’t know. Hundreds have died since then. That statement by MMS wasn’t made at some security meet it was made to reporters at a function of the National Centre for Performing Arts. Very artful indeed! The horrible fact is that the GOI has no clue, no policy on how to deal with the naxals. And they reward convicted Maoist sympathisers like Binayak Sen with positions in the Planning Commission.

The MSM was forced to reluctantly report the Chattisgarh killings only to return to the IPL scam all over again. One fails to understand why this obsession with a betting and fixing scam which is relatively petty when compared to other issues of importance. Let’s not complain too much. In between there were some other issues too. RahulG, continuing his moronic utterances, made a grand statement to his partymen “My mother is lenient but I am strict” he said. Very nice! And following this stupidity NDTV held a debate on who is the tougher boss, SoniaG or RahulG. I’m not joking, take a look yourself. For NDTV that’s a serious issue to be debated as it is a serious concern for voters.  

It also helps that the IPL scam coverage helped to completely ignore the indictment of Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit by the Lokayukta. She has been indicted for misusing 22 crores of public money for promotions and has been asked to repay 11 crores. And while the IPL coverage was on and was brutally interrupted by the Chattisgarh disaster the Congress continued to run Bharat Nirman ads. Irony! In the commercial breaks while reporting the deadly Maoist attacks TV channels were running a “minority appeasement” ad under Bharat Nirman. The ad claims 1.65 lakh crores worth of loans/scholarships to 65 lakh minority students. I wonder how they arrived at these figures. In another ad the Congress claims having started 27 new central universities in print and 11 of the same in the TV ad. Why these differences? Media usually doesn’t debate content of commercial ads as a policy. But the BN ads are not mere commercials. They are govt and political ads whose content needs verification and analysis. The amounts involved are far higher than the IPL betting scam. The BN ads on TV and in print have conflicting numbers in many ads and our media won’t verify or question it. Why should they? After all, they are the beneficiaries. There must be a warning from upstairs: ‘No negative news about Congress, else no BN ads for you, so behave’!

Amidst all this the Telengana issue has started to burn again. A senior Congress CWC member, Keshav Rao, has quit the party in support of Telengana and joined the TRS party. I guess the politicians will push Telengana to a stage where it will create more Maoists and then will sit and discuss strategy. RahulG will ask “who is responsible?” and our media will be happy to show sensational scenes of riots and self-immolation. And while the Chattisgarh attacks happened our Home Minister happily extended his stay in the US. His reason for extension was an appointment with an eye doctor on May 28. Sushil Kumar Shinde’s casual approach is quite reflective of the failure of the Congress party and its govt. So while there is tall talk by the Congress on its achievements it seems the Indian colleges, hospitals and doctors are simply not good enough for their party members. It’s always US or some foreign country. (Read An Idiot’s guide to Bharat Nirman) Remember, during the December 2012 agitation over the Delhi gangrape Shinde famously said... let me just quote him:

"It is very easy to ask the Home Minister to go to India Gate and talk. Tomorrow if any other party's demonstration goes on why should not the Home Minister go there. Tomorrow Congress and BJP will demonstrate, tomorrow Maoists will come here to demonstrate with weapons,"… Shinde said the people should understand the government's role and the government should not go anywhere. This will happen tomorrow, for any government. Why should the government go anywhere"?  There, that should tell you how Shinde views Maoists but it proves that MMS, SoniaG and RahulG wouldn’t have rushed to Raipur if the Congressmen weren’t killed. And today, May 31, when Shinde did manage to visit Chattisgarh he again made the most moronic statement: “This Maoist attack is worse than any terrorism”. The Congress didn’t feel so when the 75 jawans were killed in Dantewada.

The latest to play the victim is Aruna Roy. She has quit the private durbar of SoniaG called NAC because she is unhappy the govt is not implementing policies for the poor (that she wants?). In short Aruna Roy is telling us: Govt bad, SoniaG good! Surprising, since the Bharat Nirman ads claim they have done a lot for the poor. Congress has even given a darshan of Metro rail in Delhi to village bumpkins. What more do you want? In a chat with NDTV (who else) Roy mentioned she would now like to work from the “outside”. Really? When exactly was she working from “within”? The NAC is not a part of the govt so she was anyway an outsider in SoniaG’s coterie trying to legislate for the parliament. So like it or not even a Darbari from SoniaG’s coterie is not happy with govt’s work for the poor.

In conclusion, one has to make the sad comparison between the final days of Vilasrao Deshmukh and his party itself. It is now a party and a govt that is suffering multiple ailments of a serious nature. Many critical parts have failed beyond repair and it makes a bad picture.

SoniaG, MMS, RahulG, Ministers, Policy paralysis, foreign policy failure, economic sluggishness, corruption of media, never-ending number of scams, low morale of army and police, and it goes on and on and on. When Deshmukh died he must have at the very least left a fair bit of assets for his family. Each failure of the Congress results in worsening shock. When the UPA2 dies, the nation will be five years older and deeper in debt and our media friends will still be chasing Srinivasan. Cause of death: Multiple organ failure.