RailGate: Bhaskar Does An NDTV

There is something sinister going on. It’s not as if information is not available but almost no media outlet wants to make any noise about it. Forget noise, they seem scared to even whisper about it. All the Shomas, Ranas, Sreenivasans, Rajdeeps, Arnabs, Barkhas, Nidhis seem to have crawled into a hole over new revelations in the RailGate bribery case. Of course, I don’t even expect Sreenivasan Jain or anyone from NDTV to talk about RailGate but others too seem to have clamped up. That’s how scary the ‘Gandhi’ name is. I have stated before that the moment ‘Gandhi’ is mentioned, our media celebs piss in their pants and skirts. That’s how scared they are. It stands to reason that there must be so much crime in the media that they wouldn’t want the CBI on their backs. Would they? Smart choice!

The RailGate bribery has taken a sinister turn after Pawan Kumar Bansal was given a clean-chit by the CBI. Imagine, someone who should be an accused is being touted as a ‘witness’ in the case. Still, when a senior BJP member, Satyapal Jain, has been putting out transcripts of the phone conversations nobody seems to even want to look at it. The one newspaper that did report it suddenly did an NDTV. We now know that in critical cases people keep screenshots of NDTV’s webpages since their love disappears overnight but the Daily Bhaskar did something similar in the RailGate episode. This was a report on the case that included the names of Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi in the phone transcripts. In other cases the spinmeisters at NDTV and Tehelka would have considered it enough to indict people as they do in the encounter killing cases. So here’s the deleted page from Daily Bhaskar from report they carried on July 28 as it appeared on 9.03am on July 29:

The original report has been deleted. There was no explanation why or if there was a retraction due to some error. Nothing! DB must have received some ‘friendly’ calls I suppose. Considering DB also has print versions in Hindi and other languages I wonder if they carried the report in print. Anyway, from the web-cache I have pieced together images from the original report as it appeared in sequence of the report:

The DB report was based on investigation and tweets of Satyapal Jain (@SatyapalJain) and I reproduce the tweet in which names of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi appear. That particular part has been highlighted and shown in the box in red:

You can read the full report of DB saved as a snapshot here as well. I recommend also read the series of tweets of @SatyapalJain on RailGate from July 28 to 29. He has systematically put up transcripts from the CBI records and the records show calls were also made to Ahmed Patel (Sonia’s political advisor) and cross-references indicate Bansal was pretty much in the know of what’s going on.

Someone once asked me if the media in India has freedom. All I can say is freedom is a choice, as is slavery. In the last decade our media has gone from crawlers and bootlickers to being absolute slaves. Those who should be putting the fear of the devil in a govt are cowering and crawling as slaves. This is what corruption does to an individual or to an organisation or an entire industry. The media remains the first line of defence for the corrupt.

  

Never Rat On Your Friends & Always Keep Your Mouth Shut

In a strange turn of events, Kapil Sibal the Congress Minister, called the media “corrupt”. This was in Bhopal and must have come as a shock to our media friends. So far whenever the Congress was confronted with its massive scams they always pointed fingers at the BJP or the past NDA govt. Now they are so tired and frustrated they are pointing fingers at the media itself. This is like a love-story gone terribly wrong. But we’ll get to it a bit later.

Take a look at the pic on the left. This is not a scene from some mafia movie. These are Congress goons walking the streets of Kolar (Karnataka) on election-day on May 5, 2013 with swords and rods. This would intimidate any voter but our Election Commission recorded that polling was “peaceful” perhaps because the goons didn’t need to use the weapons. While some local channels in Karnataka carried a report on this, not a single national media house reported it. What should interest people is that there is a cop walking alongside these goons. The pressure of keeping off the hail of scams and misdeeds of the Congress is indeed telling on their media friends. The party and the govt hadn’t gotten past the Coalgate CBI affidavit scam and a new one broke out in the form of Pawan Bansal’s nephew. It is how our media deals with these scams that should be a bigger cause of outrage.  

The media friends of the Congress, like NDTV, CNN-IBN and Headlines Today, and I’m sure quite a few other channels, describe the conduct of Ashwini Kumar in dictating the CBI affidavit to Supreme Court as “interference” with the investigation. Interference? That’s a mild word to describe the crime. It is actually “obstruction of justice”. And then the party itself describes the changes dictated by Kumar in the affidavit to be “negligible”. What will our media friends do? See this tweet from Pallavi Ghosh of CNN-IBN. Ever seen a bigger blooper? Why would anyone question a reporter criticising the govt, unless it’s her friends from the Congress party? But that is hardly what her channel does as we shall see. And then she complains that she is lampooned for defending the govt. Really? Since when is it the job of a reporter or a channel to defend the govt? This is what convinces me that those who call themselves journalists probably didn’t complete the right course.

And there is our “Numero uno” political analyst Rajdeep Sardesai. This pathetic editor wonders if a minister should resign for impropriety. Impropriety? That is all that it is? Impropriety? Even an ordinary guy on the street would call a thief a thief. But hey, it involves his friends from the Congress party whom he frequently showers awards with. Everything in the story of Pawan Bansal’s nephew’s bribery case indicates it’s a massive racket and a scam. Turns out the 10Crores bribe deal for a top job in Railways is because the position handles contracts worth 2000 Crores. That’s how the bribe-investment of 10 crores was planned to be recovered. Rajdeep (The English Lalloo that he is) doesn’t get it that top appointments in Railways cannot be made unless the concerned minister was involved. That’s not all. The assets of Vijay Singla, Bansal’s nephew, have gone up from zero to 150 crores in the last five years. To Rajdeep, that is mere “impropriety”.

When someone expresses shock that Rajdeep merely terms it “impropriety” he has an even more interesting answer. He says “Impropriety/ Criminality up for debate”. Is that so? So all that the rats will do is “debate” it? By what logic do the acts of AshwaniK or Bansal warrant a debate? This is where our editors have become puppies and doormats. What is truly required of the media is clear and strong condemnation of both AK and Bansal. Instead, they stupidly believe that if they conduct a debate they have done their job. Naturally, people ask embedded reporters like PallaviG how much is being paid because they suspect “paid reporting”. I have explained before that not all issues are matters for a debate. In the cases of AK and Bansal there is undeniable evidence of not only impropriety but criminality. Reducing their nonsense to mere debates on TV shows how desperate our MSM is to protect their friends? “Thoda Congress ke taraf se defend kar dena” as was overheard on NDTV sometime back.

The trouble with the news media being friendly or getting too close with the ruling party is that familiarity is sooner or later bound to breed contempt. Till a few years ago the media only had to contend with voices from the Opposition parties of covering up crimes of the Congress. They could easily cut off such voices. Now they are finding it difficult because the Social Media keeps breathing down their necks. While I have quoted Rajdeep Sardesai, the story is not different for other media celebs and the intention here is not to single him out.

On May 6 when the stench of misdeeds of AKumar and Bansal was still hanging heavily in the air another guy decided to go ahead with an expose on PSU banks. Doesn’t it sound strange? This is Anirudh Bahal of Cobrapost, the former Tehelka guy. The man has no record of ever exposing a single scam or misdeed of the Congress. Surprising, isn’t it? Considering that Congress is a treasure island of scams. While the contents of his expose may be genuine his timing is suspect and I have to wonder about the motive. Why would a cheap sting operator release his explosive story when the media is already burdened with two of the latest scams in Coalgate and Railgate? He would ideally want all the attention to his story and for it to run all day and night in the media. It didn’t look like that and the money-laundering story of PSU banks went cold in a few hours. Friends help each other, you know. Any distraction is gladly welcome.

Now that the corruption and its defence have become so brazen with the Congress they are now pointing fingers at their own friends and calling them corrupt. The MSM had this coming. Imagine, years of sleeping with the Congress, getting phony Padma awards, facilitation in funding and in the end the party calls their media friends corrupt. It doesn’t stop there. Livemint reports that the Parliamentary Committee on IT now wants to bring in a Statutory Regulator as a watchdog for the media. I welcome it only to the extent if the watchdog is a Constitutional body like the EC or CAG. No matter how much I condemn our corrupt media I would simply not recommend the govt ever appointing its own regulators for the media. That would be like two corrupt forces joining hands. We have already seen what the PCI has turned out to be. The PCI chairman is often busy attending ‘Mushairas’ with his Congress buddies.

On the political front the Congress brought in the Food Security Bill to counter the opposition to their scams. They suggested that BJP and others are “anti-poor” because they aren’t allowing the FSB to pass. This is trickery of the worst kind and the media should have called it as such. They won’t. Friends indeed! On May 7 CNN-IBN reported that Sonia Gandhi was against AshwaniK and Bansal continuing but MMS was opposed to it. Heard anything more absurd?

There’s a golden rule in the mafia: “Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut”. MMS is a man who keeps his mouth shut always. The media is the mafia that followed the golden rule so far and never ratted on its friends in the Congress and always kept its mouth shut. Even in a very obvious case of criminality they want to “debate” the misdeeds of AshwaniK and Pawan Bansal. That is as stupid as any editorialist can ever get. Editors should have been demanding both ministers to step down instead of “debating” obvious crimes. Well, they follow the golden rule religiously. Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut. Now that their own friends are calling them “corrupt” it has come to pass that the media now stinks for everyone.