Independence Not The Same As Freedom

US State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland: “As you know, we support the right of peaceful, non-violent protest around the world. That said, India is a democracy, and we count on India to exercise appropriate democratic restraint in the way it deals with peaceful protest.” This was a comment about Anna Hazare’s protest against corruption with fasts starting August 16. Imagine, if that statement had come when we were still fighting for independence. Every political party would have welcomed it and quoted it over and over again. If that were about Egypt or Libya the Barkha Dutts, the Rajdeep Sardesais, the Sagarika Ghoses, the Arnab Goswamis, the Rahul Kanwals would be calling it a statement from God herself. Now that we are an independent republic every party condemns it citing our constitution and what not. And the same politicians will cite our constitution. The very constitution they frequently trample. The very freedoms they deny to ordinary citizens.

Our cricket teams still have many tags of Kings and Crowns. Punjab Kings, Royal Challengers, Rajasthan Royals or Chennai Super Kings! How do you explain that? If you really go by the last CNN-IBN poll that suggests people would still vote for UPA if elections were held today, you’ve got to believe this is an idiot nation. I'm sorry to say this, but only a nation of idiots can really vote for the UPA again in current circumstances. As I write this, Rajdeep Sardesai is busy with Ramchandra Guha wondering why the South is never properly credited with our independence movement. Huh? North, South, East, Centre, West – when will Rajdeep stop trying to divide the nation? And this is his Independence day special! This I-day, some news anchors sacrificed their usual attire for sarees and kurtas. That's right, for one day in your life you can be Indian, they seem to suggest.

The truth is always a loser when the context is removed. Nuland made that statement given recent events in our nation. Killing agitating farmers, lathi-charge at peaceful, sleeping protesters at Ramlila grounds, setting conditions for protests by Anna Hazare & Co., banning movies and books, like the one called ‘Aarakshan’ by Prakash Jha. Stupid banning of a book on Gandhi by the Gujarat government, banning a book on Shivaji by Maharashtra, banning Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Imposing strange conditions and telling you how you can protest. Independence is not the same as freedom. Independence is not the same as liberty. Independence is not the same as ‘we were born free’! Looks like only wild animals are really born free.

Land grabs, farmer suicides, black money, Swiss accounts, Italian heads of ruling parties, an untruthful news media, a divided nation. One is almost tempted to quote the Billy Joel song “We didn’t start the fire”. The true hero, the common man is yet to taste freedom. Taste this dosage from a gutter mouth called Manish Tiwari, spokesperson of the Congress party: “.....consists of "armchair fascists, overground Maoists, closet anarchists...lurking behind forces of right reaction and funded by invisible donors whose links may go back a long way abroad". In short, he has described Indians for you. Such contempt for ordinary men and women in a democracy can only be held by fascists themselves. If this continues you may sooner or later have that midnight knock on your door. And instead of severe condemnation our media rejoices and delights in the controversy of this filth.

Sample these translated lines from the PM's I-day speech and see if they reflect any learning at all:

"Key to winning battle against corruption is for the nation to unite

There can’t be any slip-up in vigil in the fight against terrorism

13/7 blasts have proven we need to tackle terrorism"

There hardly seems to be any wisdom gained in all the seven years of his rule. Do yourself a favour. This I-Day don’t listen to speeches by morons. Instead listen to the concept of freedom from Steven Spielberg’s movie ‘Amistad’. That’s a true story about smuggled slaves from Sierra Leone defended by a former US President, John Quincy Adams. 

The text of that great speech can be googled and found anywhere on the net. We really don’t need a constitution to tell us about our freedoms. We don’t need a constitution to confirm land should be given to the tiller. We don't need a constitution to tell us how or what to think. The mother of all democracies, England, doesn’t have a constitution. In the petition by Prakash Jha the Supreme Court must seriously strike down any ban on freedom of thought or expression, once and for all. We now have the most corrupt and the most dangerous government ever ruling this nation. When ordinary people are called ‘fascists’ you know your freedoms are dead

Freedom is bigger than the concept of independence. This I-day, for change,  please listen to a different speech.

Right-Wing Fantasy Journalists

Tavleen Singh is a prominent journalist and sometimes also appears on TV discussion panels. Here are excerpts (in blue) from an article “The enemies within” in the Afternoon Despatch & Courier (July 28, 2011). The excerpts are produced in a rearranged order and not in the same way as they appear in her article: 

A TELEVISION show may seem like an odd place to make a profound political discovery but this is what happened to me last week. I agreed to appear on Nidhi Razdan’s show, left, right and centre……. So on Monday of last week she decided that the two most compelling subjects were the corruption charges that currently surround the chief minister of Karnataka and, more puzzlingly, the lessons India can learn from the massacre in Norway.  Her guests in the NDTV studio in Delhi included Nirmala Sitaraman, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s spokeswoman, Shoma Chaudhury, editor of Tehelka and a British journalist of bleeding hearted liberal disposition. I was in a studio in Mumbai listening to the discussion on an earphone and participating when Nidhi gave me the chance to intervene

It was when we got to the second topic of the day that I found myself horrified by the discussion that went on in the NDTV studio in Delhi. Nidhi led it by saying that Anders Behring Breivik represented right wing terrorism and that this was something we needed to deal with in India as well. By this she meant Hindutva terrorism and within minutes she had everyone, including the spokesperson of the BJP, agreeing that all terrorism was bad and that it should not be linked to any religion.

One has come to expect NDTV to be a mouthpiece for the Congress and the Left. Nidhi Razdan does not attempt to camouflage anything. That Shoma Chaudhury or the foreign journalists that NDTV usually invites follow NDTV’s line of discourse is also not surprising. The surprise is always the unusual eloquence with which journalists who claim to be right-thinking also try to camouflage the truth. Tavleen Singh here has attempted a clarification in writing which she could not get the chance to do on TV. But try and recall all the BJP spokespersons, the Swapan Dasguptas, the Kanchan Guptas and their likes and you will find them doing the same thing. On one hand they will claim to be critical of the left and the media delusions but when they do appear on TV, they become the very spokespersons they criticise. Seriously, terror has no religion? Whether it’s a BJP spokesperson, or Swapan Dasgupta or Kanchan Gupta or any other so called right-thinking journalist, you will find them all agreeing. What exactly is the reason for such doublespeak? Let’s read a bit more from Tavleen Singh:

In the cause of the jihad against India these groups have killed hundreds of innocent Indians in temples, bazaars, hotels and even hospitals. Does this compare with the two or three terrorist incidents we have seen that involved Hindu terrorists? Yet, not only do our leftist intellectuals make this comparison but so do important politicians. The Home Minister said last week that he thought the BJP was targeting him in the 2G spectrum scam only because he was investigating acts of terrorism that involved leading members of the RSS. As for Rahul Gandhi’s mentor, Digvijay Singh, he has hinted on more than one occasion that he believes that it was the RSS who organized the attack on Mumbai.

Shoma of Tehelka then went into a passionate dirge about ‘innocent’ Muslim boys rotting in Indian jails and about how only when it came to jihadi acts of violence was an act of terror linked to religion. The consensus among Nidhi’s panelists was that Hindutva terrorism was  more of a threat to India than Islamist terrorism with the British journalist pointed out that someone as clever and informed as Rahul Gandhi had informed the American ambassador, as reported by Wikileaks, that he was more worried about majority communalism in India than about any threats from across the border.

In vain did I try pointing out that the reason why jihadi terrorism was linked to Islam was because it was the terrorists who called themselves holy warriors for Islam. In vain did I try reminding my fellow panelists that the jihadi groups committing acts of violence in India were created by the ISI and that this meant that they had the might of the Pakistani army behind them. Nidhi’s panelists, led by the very verbose Shoma, were convinced that ‘saffron’ terror as it has come to be known was the biggest threat to India. While listening to them I realized, more than ever before, that India’s biggest enemies are Indian opinion makers and our leftist intellectuals.

I have already stated many times over that the biggest threat to Indian democracy is from the media crooks. But Tavleen Singh has got it only half right. The opinion makers are not just leftist intellectuals but also the right wing or centre-right intellectuals and journalists. Except for routinely condemning statements made by Rahul Gandhi or Digvijay Singh I have yet to come across a single journalist who has clearly stood up and asked the government to acknowledge Islamic or Jihadi terror. The reason? Most of these journalists are now freelancers who have to depend on the likes of NDTV and CNN-IBN for survival. You cannot be foolish enough to bite the hand that feeds you. The US government does not talk about China’s human rights anymore and you can guess why. One will recall that it was a college student that had the courage to ask Barack Obama about Jihadi terror. And he managed to give a vague, twisted reply.

After I appeared on Nidhi’s show I received a small floodgate of tweets from twitterers who had seen the show asking if I knew where Tehelka got its funding from. I do not and nor do I care to speculate but what I will say is that most of Tehelka’s investigative journalism seems designed to prove that India is as failed a state as Pakistan and that Indian democracy is mostly a sham. It is a viewpoint that is beginning to get on my last nerve.

It is now being revealed that NDTV, CNN-IBN and HT got lucrative media contracts from the CWG organisers. So it’s natural that they were initially low key on the scams related to CWG when reporting it. Who was the one making the loudest noise about CWG? TimesNow, of course! And why? If the Times group had got the media contracts they had bid for it appears unlikely they would have gone after the CWG scams with the same vigour as they did in July-August last year and continued ever since. They would have been too busy then promoting a rosy picture about the games and the CWG organising committee. Are the right-thinking journalists any different?

There are a few stray journalists who care to state things as they are or as they see it. When it comes to confronting the central government with the truth about terrorism I doubt there are too many journalists, left right or centre, who want to take the risk. The main job of these journalists still is to be largely politically correct. In the recent case of TimesNow’s Arnab Goswami kicking and screaming over cops being targeted by Narendra Modi, not one journalist has managed to find the courage to stand up and write or talk about the deluge of nonsense that Arnab is attempting to spread. The only clarification to come was from Jaynarayan Vyas of the Gujarat government itself.

In principle all terrorism is bad. It does not take an Einstein to discover that. The question here is to acknowledge and respond to the biggest terror threat that confronts us. The government and the media would have you believe it is Hindu communalism. Unfortunately, there are only a few, like Subramanian Swamy, to confront it.

It is also in this context that a one-man party like Subramanian Swamy is leading an extraordinary fight against corruption and against Islamic terror. And he is not really a journalist. Those journalists who pretend to stand up for fairness and straight talk are the most misleading ones. You know the government stooges, the leftists when you see them in print or on TV but the really misleading ones are the right wing fantasy journalists. They are the ones giving credence to the chorus of ‘terrorism has no religion’. This ends up with polls like the ones CNN-IBN is currently doing to merely reiterate that falsehood.

TimesNow May Collapse Under ‘Arnab’ IMPACT

Update (August 12): This was originally posted on February 18, 2011. I thought sending a new QBox to Arnab to Impact the fall of Narendra Modi might help. Order placed. When the TimesNow kicking and screaming is over we will have elections soon.

Rarely a night passes without Arnab Goswami telling us how many questions he would ask. On the night of February 16, the day MMS finally broke his ‘silence’ and spoke to TV editors, Arnab gave us some interesting statistics. There were 16 editors and a total of 20 questions were asked. That is hardly a scenario that Arnab would have liked. I must mention though that it was extremely insensitive and discourteous of Harish Khare to have interrupted Arnab and tell him it was not an ‘interrogation of the PM’ and to show some ‘courtesy’. In this case it was Harish Khare who was being a jerk. After all wasn’t Harish Khare a part of the Times Group earlier? After wrongly snubbing Arnab he allowed Prannoy Roy to not only make a long-winded statement but wrap 2 or 3 questions into one to the PM. Well, Prannoy is from NDTV so that probably goes well with Harish Khare. But this is about Arnab Goswami.

For a start, let me state clearly that Arnab is not as despicable as some of his peers from other channels. He just believes he has to set a record for the number of questions and then let Times Now outrageously claim that it has ‘impacted’ all the outcomes.

TimesNow Impact: Kalmadi sacked. TimesNow Impact: Darbari suspended. TimesNow Impact: Lalli (of Prasar Bharati) suspended. TimesNow Impact: Antrix chairman to go? TimesNow Impact: SMS fraud. TimesNow Impact: Sports minister acts for national swimmers. TimesNow Impact: Isro Deal cancelled. TimesNow Impact: Hosni Mubarak resigns. Oops! The last one was a tweet from somewhere. The other channels are just cheats who are repeating the ‘Impact’ claims of TimesNow. 

So if TimesNow alone can Impact so many outcomes I have started to wonder whether we really need a CAG or CVC or PAC or JPC. Such is the power of Arnab Goswami’s constant questioning. Exactly a year ago Arnab had just about asked 702,855 questions on TimesNow according to highly reliable sources from Fakingnews. Since that report, the Guinness Book of Records organisation has been keeping a watch on Arnab and have now reported that Arnab has set a world record of 1,000,000 questions. The most ever by any TV host or journalist in the world. Watch out for the ‘Breaking News’ about the Guinness Certificate on ‘Your channel’.

The 20Q Gadget specially made for Arnab by Firebox.Com

 The current information on TimesNow’s new strategy is that they are now planning to take the number one spot in ‘Breaking News’ ahead of India’s most loved and respected channel ‘IndiaTV’. And the trick is to keep asking more questions that have no answers and all silly answers can then become ‘Breaking News’. Take that Rajat Sharma! But in all fairness since TimesNow keeps telling me that it is ‘Your channel’ I have decided to help them in asking more silly questions that have no answers. I have sent a special 20Questions Machine to Arnab Goswami that might just deliver one answer on being asked those 20Questions. This is a gadget specially designed for Arnab Goswami who can’t seem to get answers despite so many questions.

I have only one fear. With the chances of the number of questions exponentially growing because of the gadget their ‘Impact’ would also be phenomenal. And I wonder if TimesNow itself will collapse under the Impact of Arnab’s questions. Wouldn’t that be nice?

CNN-IBN: Divide The Nation Polls - Terrorism

CNN-IBN carried another instalment of its series of opinion polls on August 11. This one was on terrorism. In the first two instalments IBN’s partner in this hobby, The Hindu, put out the complete data through PDF files on their site. However, in the last two polls (Economy and Terrorism) I have not been able to download the data files. Try downloading the data files at The Hindu’s site here and here. I guess CNN-IBN and The Hindu expected people to be awed and go gaga over these polls instead of being analysed in-depth. So now, you only have clips from their TV show to go by which are scanty in details on the questions, the respondents and so on. One word for their tomfoolery – BUSTED!

Anyway, before I get to this latest instalment on Terror one has to understand the minds that work behind such surveys and polls. Much of it looks like a political position already taken by  the heads of the organisations involved. Now read Rajdeep Sardesai’s anguished tweet over the right wing. I don’t know if I qualify as right-wing yet but here’s what Rajdeep tweeted:

“afzal on death row for 5 years, kasab for 3, but rajiv assassins on death row for 20 years. why no right wing anger? Gnight”

August 11, around 11.30 PM

That is probably one of the most boorish tweets to have come from Rajdeep. I also think Rajdeep was completely unaware how stupid his tweet and his thoughts are. Now, here is a media dealer who keeps shouting hoarse about a lot of things on his channel and yet it didn’t occur to him that he should be the one asking the Nalini question to the UPA. Having failed in that job miserably he thinks the right wing should be making those noises. So tell us Rajdeep have you, as a media dealer, ever asked that question to MMS, PC or Sonia Gandhi? Or have you asked that question on your channel? If not, make it a point immediately that your channel would want the same fate for Nalini as Guru. Having abrogated your responsibility don’t point fingers at some vague right-wing. You should be ashamed that you didn’t actively seek justice for both Nalini and Afzal Guru and then lament that people don’t care about others on the death row. Do you care?

In case Rajdeep forgot,  it was Rajiv’s own family member, Priyanka Gandhi, who met Nalini to seek solace. In case Rajdeep forgot, the Indian right-wing didn't coin the term 'Global Jihad'. Rajdeep has found a place in many of my posts but I thought it would be a good point to remind him of what I think of Nalini. And here are excerpts from some of those posts:

The Scum Of All Spheres

What if Pakistan did hand over the remaining 49 wanted persons from that list of 50? What exactly would our government do? Afzal Guru and Nalini (Rajiv Gandhi’s assassin) are still comfortably lodged in jails.

‘Terror’s Creed..’: MorePoppycock From Rajdeep Sardesai

Killers of Rajiv Gandhi are still in jail. Ajmal Kasab continues to dance around Indian courts every week. Now that, I suppose, is resolve for you……..It is the serious ineptness of the UPA in allowing killers like Afzal Guru or the killers of Rajiv Gandhi to defy justice that spurs anger among citizens

Islamic Terror, Government &The Indian Media

So let’s understand what the 3 stooges have said. The first stooge, PM talks about resolve. Resolve is usually shown by messages or by action. There is neither any message nor any action. Afzal Guru still continues to live in some jail. Killers of Rajiv Gandhi are still in jail.

There, Rajdeep, patriotic Indians are not biased like our media to distinguish justice for terrorists. In fact, the killing of our Prime Minister is as much a war against us as the attack on our parliament. And it is polls like the ones CNN-IBN is doing that attempts to divide the nation with dubious leading questions.

That bit done, let’s get back to CNN-IBN’s dubious surveys. Behind all the silly percentages, not backed by raw data, the only conclusion that Yogendra Yadav came to was “People say terror not linked to religion”.  Frankly, that is a line any lame duck politician will give you free of charge. Why spend all the money on surveys unless it’s free funds? And really, one had to go and ask BJP and Congress workers about their perceptions on terror? That’s really cool. CNN-IBN gets guys from BJP and Congress almost every day on their show. Where’s the need for this exercise?

Historically, terrorism was born out of religion and intolerance. Now, if all the wise men and women at CNN-IBN, CSDS and The Hindu are those who have supposedly read history then they live in denial. Not so long ago there was terrorism by IRA and PIRA in Northern Ireland/UK. The objectives were political but the motive was religion. Surveys that don’t even ponder the political motives of terrorism are usually conducted by ‘useful idiots’. Islam is not just a religion but also a political doctrine. The conquest of territories, conversions, belief in supremacy over other religions are all part of the political and religious agenda. The only religious group to have any influence in the UN is the ‘Organisation of Islamic Countries’ (OIC) who collectively attempt to pass international laws on blasphemy and such religious beliefs. That our media consciously spreads untruths is now out in the open. Don’t claim it to be ‘journalism’ anymore when the only motive is money, money and more money. The best part is getting people like A. Owaisi of MIM to debate terrorism. How clever is that? Groups that are violent against writers like Taslima Nasreen. And terror has no religion?

Rajdeep’s anger at the right-wing is understandable. I think he finds them too intelligent and far too capable of expressing themselves truthfully against CNN-IBN and their close relatives at NDTV, HT and so on. His deputy editor is credited with coining the term ‘Internet Hindus’. Far from seeing it as an affront the right-wingers wear that tag proudly. Not something she would have anticipated. The politicians’ constant endeavour is to divide the nation in every possible way. They wouldn’t have succeeded but for the help of media crooks.

At the very best Yogendra Yadav’s article “People say terror has no religion” might win an essay contest in some primary school or maybe the UN. But if truth were the measure, it fails miserably. These are media-lessons on how to divide the nation.