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.