Twisting The Meerut Gangrape

It is fascinating how our media folks who don’t want to report a serious incident (involving allegations against Muslims) want to report on it the moment they get a chance to cloud the whole issue. In other cases where a Hindu is involved they want to scream at the top of their lungs. Take the case of Mumbai DIG Sunil Palaskar. Some aspiring model alleged rape or molestation against him and the whole media went to town. Arnab Goswami, in particular, screamed at the top of his lungs about how the Sena defended him and how the man should be hanged. It turns out the model was making allegations in the hope of getting into a reality show (see report). Since that happened, the entire media went dead silent. No one spoke about demanding a serious punishment for this woman who made fake allegations. This selective outrage over incidents is what makes our media communal hypocrites. During the Saharanpur riots the same media again went dead quiet when the aggressors were clearly Muslims but when they get the chance, even without any evidence, they are quick to point to right wing conspiracies.

The same is true for the Meerut gangrape case. The entire media went dead silent and hardly reported much about it. The police were also slow on action. Nobody in the media screamed about anything. On the contrary, they were busy playing victims. Here’s the iRudali reacting to people asking why no outrage over Meerut:

Since she had no answers to why no coverage of Meerut, Barkha claims rape threats to her and other women. Who made these threats? And other women got such threats too? And they all ran to iRudali to whine? This BS is concocted to troll those who target her for selective reporting. It is nothing short of clear, mindless mischief. Cheap victimhood! The Meerut case is reportedly an abduction of a Hindu Madrasa teacher, confined in various places, gangraped and forcibly converted to Islam. That’s the story which the media is not seeking the truth about. They don’t want to. But the moment they find an opening to cloud the case and trash the woman’s story they all jump at it. The rape itself won’t be shocking headlines but the “twist” will. Here we go:

So guy called Kaleem is reportedly her “husband”. Based on what evidence? Based on a form that Kaleem and the woman supposedly signed on the form at the hospital which operated her for ectopic pregnancy. Okay! We will get to that part a bit later. So once this husband is touted by the media the great Bhupendra Chaube (BC) of CNN-IBN decides to go to Meerut and do a show. It’s not for nothing that BC is popularly known as “Scoopendra” on SM. You see, he is the scoop master. And what does he do there? He assembles 2 Hindus, 2 Muslims and a cop and does a street debate in front of a Christian college (Sophia). Talk about BC creating communal harmony. Of course, for the camera he made sure both the Hindus and the Muslims shook hands and hugged each other at the end of the show (why did he leave the cop out? Cops don’t need love and affection?). Predictably, the foolish debate was on the alarming right wing menace and stuff on Twitter (anchored by Shreya Dhondiyal from the studio) instigating communal riots. This is as much intelligence and brains that our media morons demonstrate. BC did not have one single para on the sequence of events in Saharanpur and Meerut (he was discussing both). None! Here are the headlines and scrolls CNN-IBN was running through the show:

Look at the top headline. “Small instances”! So Saharanpur and Meerut gangrape were “small instances” according to BC. Really? Looks like the moron learned from his former boss that anything less than 1000 deaths are not serious. And then it says “Victim MAY have been in a relationship… got pregnant by him”. How do these morons know? Did the hospital or they do any DNA test? The fact that media uses “MAY” is the art of peddling an unconfirmed fact to create the “perception” for you to believe that is the truth. It is not! You need some scientific evidence to claim it was Kaleem who got her pregnant. The other choice is both the woman and Kaleem confirm it. Did they? I haven’t seen the woman confirm it was indeed Kaleem’s baby. These are assumptions on which the media is reporting. So BC gets trashed for his bogus reporting and show. What does he do? The pathetic man does what his idol Barkha does. Play victim!

Threatened to kill you? This is turning out to be quite a story. People threaten to rape Barkha and her “other women” and they threaten to kill BC. Shouldn’t BC be filing a police complaint if he received death threats? Can he put up a copy of any FIR that he registered? And then abuse you and hate you for speaking the truth? Which part of all this doesn’t like lame victimhood? People may not like the show or may not agree with its content but this is really taking victimhood a bit too far. And what is the great truth that BC exposed to us? Oh wait! Here’s his truth:

Conspiracy? Time to expose real culprits? You were there in Meerut, you blabbered about Saharanpur. What is it that stopped you from investigating thoroughly and exposing the real culprits? And we thought the man just said he wasn’t scared and that he will stand for the truth. Where is the truth? Who are the culprits? What is the conspiracy? All vague, nonsensical statements coming out of a man who is unfit to call himself a journo. All that BC wanted to revel in was to throw a spanner in the works, create suspicion, point to the usual suspects (right wing on the ground and on SM) for all the troubles in UP. He forgot to end the show with “Mission Accomplished”. As simple as that. Kanchan Gupta rightly points to the mischief and asks a few questions on how the media is trying to cloud the issue and become an accomplice to an attempted cover-up:

They attempted that in the Tejpal case and they are doing it now again. So now that we have come this far, let’s go a little farther and see how the reports actually imply that the girl was a “willful wife” in the whole affair. Here are excerpts from TOI and let us ask some more questions:

"Her relationship with Kaleem surfaced with the help of a call detail report (CDR) in which it was found that the woman had spent hours talking to this man before her disappearance on July 23," said SSP Onkar Singh.

Interesting, eh? She was talking to him on the phone before she disappeared, so let’s assume she had a relationship with him as the reports imply. What happened to her mobile after that? Why is it that for over a month she couldn’t make one phone call or send one message to her parents or any of her friends? If she wasn’t abducted and held illegally, her alleged husband should have given her mobile back to her after the operation on July 23. Isn’t it? Did you ask Chaubeji?

“According to the police, the girl, accompanied by Kaleem, had approached local gynecologist Sushila Jairath after she suffered acute pain in her abdomen. After medical examination, the woman was found with ectopic pregnancy, a condition in which the embryo gets implanted in one of the fallopian tubes. She had been carrying this for 45 days. She was prescribed immediate operation. On July 23, the couple reached Meerut Medical College and signed a consent form as 'husband and wife ' after which the surgery began. The woman stayed in the hospital till July 27”.

The couple signed a consent form as “husband and wife”. Alright! That the hospital chose to operate on her considering it maybe an emergency is absolutely fine. Didn’t it ever occur to this stupid hospital that here’s a Muslim guy and presumably a Hindu woman claiming to be husband and wife and they sought no IDs? Is that so normal in that region? Aren’t hospitals supposed to check IDs or at least have some verification of what is written in a form? Never mind! This was not an accident case; this is a pregnancy-related case. That’s serious enough to ask if the hospital followed legal procedures in such a case. How is it that a man brings his supposed wife to a hospital for a pregnancy-related operation and the doctor or the nurses or the admin people don’t even wonder why none of the girl’s parents or family members are not accompanying them? Or were they? They don’t even verify the IDs of the persons considering the nature of the case?  She was there for 4 days in that hospital. Didn’t she have any visitors at all? Doesn’t that appear odd? Does that seem normal to you? Does that seem normal to the police or the hospital? Did you ask Chaubeji?

“Earlier, the woman had said she was operated upon in Muzaffarnagar though the police insisted it was in a Meerut hospital, something that Dr Pradeep Bharti, principal, Meerut Medical College, confirmed subsequently. "There was no controversy at that point of time and we did what was necessary to save a life. This woman had come to the hospital with a ruptured tubal pregnancy and we in the normal course of procedure operated upon her," he said”.

The contradiction of Muzaffarnagar or Meerut is not significant enough to render the case  a fake one, which is what our media folks and some political parties want. In a traumatic experience victims are known to be disoriented, incoherent and blabber a lot of contradictory things. What is important is that every aspect of the case be scientifically tested and with evidence. The hospital guys need to be questioned and investigated too.

The real question is who is twisting the Meerut gangrape case? It is not the victim or her family members. It is the media (people like BC and his gang) and deliberately so. UP police can hardly be trusted to carry out any sensible investigation. If there is anger in the society which leads to communal tension then that cannot be an excuse to downplay a case of abduction and gangrape. That doesn’t stand the test of any reason. It is our media that is trying the best to twist the case without as much as basic investigation. They are yet to ask some basic questions before they make motherhood statements like “twist in the case”. 

Political Marketing: Part - 1

A wise man rightly said “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department”.

Whether you’re a doctor, scientist, marketing student or in any other profession, I would recommend you read “The 22 immutable laws of marketing” by Al Ries and Jack Trout. It’s a quick, short read. As always there will be some rare exceptions to the rule but these 22 laws laid down by the two advertising gurus have generally stood the test of time. These laws apply not merely to business but also to individual endeavours if one wants to adapt them. You can run through a summary here. The reason for bringing up this old book to is to educate some of our media morons, like Bhupendra Chaube and Rajdeep Sardesai, who think marketing is some kind of evil practice. The reasons for their heartburn and escalated stupidity are these images of a mega road-show by Narendra Modi on April 24 on the way to filing his nomination papers at Varanasi.

Well, such massive crowds for Modi can upset and annoy any political opponent of Modi. Naturally, Chaubeji and Congress pimp Rajdeep were deeply upset. Chaubeji started blabbering the crowds were sourced from other towns which the Congress picked up and started screaming. It doesn’t occur to them that it’s even worse if some of those in the crowds were from other towns. It only means people are travelling to see Modi while even the locals are unwilling to turn up in big numbers for RahulG or SoniaG. It also means that if the BJP can source people from outside then they can very well source people from the town itself. Such nonsense is passed off for news debate by CNN-IBN.  

After Chaubeji’s heartburn-theory of outsiders in the crowds, Rajdeep came up with a dumb question only he can come up with. He asked “Is it necessary for Modi to do this (road-show)?” The other even more stupid question was “Should Modi be doing such a road-show on voting-day?” Is it necessary for Rajdeep to peddle filth on his channel? Is that what keeps his “Choola” burning? Obviously, these standards apply only to Modi because it seems to be fine for Rajdeep when RahulG or someone else does it. His hatred for Modi makes him lose all balance and even forget events of the recent past. As my tweet points out to corrupt Rajdeep, even RahulG held a road-show for his nomination on April 12, a voting-day. Rajdeep kept abusing Modi throughout the morning of April 24 while the road-show was on. He also went on to say he would love to have Modi as his marketing head for CNN-IBN. At least that’s an admission that his channel has miserably failed under him. His panellist (some Manini) lamented Modi’s case was one of great image and persona building. Well, it doesn’t occur to them that if that is possible for Modi then it is possible for RahulG too. After all, there are reports of RahulG having spent 500 crores with a foreign agency called Dentsu for his lipstick.

What’s bugging these hate-mongers? It’s the awful truth that there is nothing more they have to throw at Modi. They are exhausted. So they hold pathetic debates on his jackets, the colour of his Kurta and who he is waving at and so on. When an organised mafia like our media, along with Congress and its clones, keep hurling abuses at a man, the public starts to wonder about their motives. At some point they conclude if so many lies are peddled about a man, there must actually be something good about him. That’s the problem Rajdeep and Congress face. Now they claim it is all “marketing” as if marketing is some evil. I guarantee, most media morons cannot define marketing in a single sentence if they were asked to.

Marketing is a good thing; especially if your product is a good one. Smita Prakash who interviewed Modi asked him this question and he answered with a fact on products. Modi said water flows in Gujarat, people get power supply in Gujarat and these aren’t “fake” products that can be sold by mere marketing. That people see it, experience it and reap the benefits of these products. Modi wears simple Indian clothes but he wears them well. We should applaud this and expect all politicians be dressed well. And what are elections about if not marketing? The fools in the media would have you believe it’s not. Elections are about marketing your past performance, your services, your ideas, your promises and, most of all, yourself. This is what every party and candidate does or is supposed to do. Modi does it well, so the media mafia screams about marketing as if it is some evil. During the late 1990s a TV commercial show called Asian Sky Shop had huge sales advertising electric “Roti-makers”. They sold crores worth of the product but in a few weeks customers started returning the product to them and their franchisees because it didn’t make Rotis the way Indians traditionally want it. Do you see much of these Roti-maker ads or sales now? You cannot sell a non-performing or bad product by mere marketing over a longer period. Modi has been at his job over 12 years, people know what they are buying.  

In marketing, people may not observe the phenomenon but they know what a “fad” is and what a “trend” is. Men have worn their hair long, short, crew-cuts and now even fully-shaven heads but these are fads that keep coming and going. But hair-styling or hair-care is a permanent “trend”. Fashion changes! Men wore pants as drain-pipe slim, bell-bottoms and many other styles but the trouser itself has not disappeared. Unless trousers disappear and men adopt skirts as their normal and formal wear, trousers will remain a long-term “trend”. This election season, people have finally realised that the Congress “Roti-maker” does not make the Rotis they want. As simple as that! Worse, they are realising they paid an “exorbitant” price (massive loot and corruption) for the Congress Roti-maker and don’t trust their product anymore. They want to try a different product; a product that has proof of performance. Therefore, a majority are willing to buy Modi’s product. Modi’s political competitors abuse the product like Rajdeep and Chaubeji do along with their Congress partners. But people choose the product they want. They don’t see Modi as a fad. They see it as a trend and therefore the Modi-wave. Marketing cannot create sustained waves with a bogus product. One CII speech and one interview of RahulG was enough to expose him as a fleshy mass of ignorance.

The media packaged Arvind Kejriwal as a messiah sent by Jesus Christ or Allah to save the world. Rajdeep even claims credit for inspiring AK. What happened? When people bought that product they found it didn’t perform. In fact the product turned to be doing the opposite of everything it claimed it would do. They called it “Kejri-turn”. They want a refund. Who will give them a refund for their vote? Nobody! Will they invest their vote again in that failed product? They won’t, unless AK offers a “New Improved Surf Excel” type Kejriwal. Ask yourself a question. Modi has travelled since his early years, sold tea and lived as a nomad. Do you think Modi can make Rotis for himself and his room-mates if he had to? You know the answer. In the same breath, ask yourself the same question about others. Do you think RahulG or Mrs Vadra can make Rotis for themselves or for anyone else? I believe your heart will tell you the answer. So who is into marketing a fake product? What is it that the Gandhis are trying to market that the media and many cronies want you to buy?

Political marketing is as important as it is in any other domain. For most of 67 years poor Indians have been buying a fake product from the Congress in the hopes of a better life. Unless a majority of them try out a new product, they won’t know the difference. In the next part we will see the fake products the Gandhis and Congress have been selling all these years.

Bad Timing

Fox News in the US has this tagline of “Fair & Balanced”. Not everyone thinks they are but it’s a line that’s been borrowed heavily in the Indian media too. Supposing there was a matchbox with a few match-sticks inside and two guys were arguing over how many sticks are inside, what do you think our media would do? Umm… someone like Rajdeep Sardesai would have a heated debate with the two guys and conclude by saying “We’ve had a fair and balanced discussion and we leave it to viewers to decide how many sticks are in the matchbox”. No balance-head, you don’t leave it to the viewers. All you have to do is slide the box open, spill the matchsticks and count them. That will establish the truth. That’s an exercise where one is dealing with tangibles. It’s measureable. Debates are fine when they are about policy or viewpoints on law-making and such topics. Debates are not fine when a news outlet has ample opportunity to establish facts if not the absolute truth. When they don’t, someone sooner or later comes along and establishes facts. Unfortunately, they even turn up at inconvenient times.

Take the case of Digvijaya Singh who falsely claimed with Sunetra Choudhary of NDTV that the Congress never targeted family members of BJP. DS may say what he wants but it’s the job of the news channel to dig, check, verify and confirm if what a politician stated is correct. A news outlet that doesn’t have archives and doesn’t use them if they do should be digging elsewhere. You know where.  It’s called a simple fact-check and reporting the correct facts after the interview. Did NDTV do that? Of course not! Why would they? They were happy peddling DS’ lie and I had to write the post “NDTV needs a lie-detector”. There are many such posts on this site on the lies our media has wilfully peddled, especially when it came to Gujarat Muslims, Narendra Modi and the state itself. To list the posts would make a very long list.

In September 2011 I wrote “The make-up and mask of Chachi 420 wasn’t meant to last forever”. This was in the post “SC exposes media’s clean shit” over the lies of petitions against Narendra Modi when the SC returned Zakia Jafri’s case back to the lower court. That post explains many of the lies of Gujarat 2002 which continued to be sung by the media till last year. I won’t say it has stopped because we are close to another major election and the Chachis and Chachas 420 in the media will be back with them in some form or the other. So when social activist, freelance TV panellist and writer Madhu Kishwar (MK) recently came up with a huge volume on Gujarat riots, Muslims etc. titled “ModiNama” the question she gets from Indian Express is hardly surprising. Sounds like MK reported some kind of “coup” doesn’t it? You know, it is unacceptable to our media that some people suffer from a non-terminal disease. MK suffers from that disease too. It’s called “conscience”. Naturally, IE thinks or infers the “timing” is suspicious. Was this a bad time to gate-crash the party of malicious propagandists? Well, let’s take a look at some cases of “good timing”.

Remember Sadbhavna Mission? Immediately after that when Modi was on the Sadbhavna tour, guess who turns up to provoke Muslims into hatred? That would be social warrior Shabnam Hashmi who supposedly works for “harmony”. Her lies and good timing are chronicled in “Hate Engineers”. Then 2012 was an election year and also the 10th year of Godhra and after. I predicted Rajdeep Sardesai will cry in “The Hang Modi weekend”. Rajdeep did cry and showed us how Muslims were going through extreme suffering in Gujarat. Good timing! Not happy? So come elections 2012 and who goes there to do a special show? The Macaulay Putri herself! She subtly hoped that the “Chaiwalla” would invite her to tea. From Ahmedabad to Surat she could see nothing in Gujarat except Muslims suffering and the boss was doing shows on his channel titled “Why Muslims are being ignored by BJP” in Gujarat. Yeah, read all about that in “Rajdeep, CNN-IBN Join Gujarat Election Campaign”. Good timing, wouldn’t you say?

If CNN-IBN was the right eye, it can’t be crying all on its own. Right? So we need the left eye to be crying too. It’s like synchronised swimming. How synchronised? Just look at the pics in the post “The Roman agent in Gujarat” and the extraordinary talent of Barkha Dutt. Of all the places in Gujarat she picks out a Muslim ghetto called Juhapura in Ahmedabad and shows how much Muslims are suffering in the entire state. And she does it in great style over “Gujarati Thalis”. I wonder what she thought about “effete” Gujarati food. She doesn’t stop there, to add spice she imports people to speak about Gujarat. This was just a few days before the December 2012 elections. Good timing again, eh? And even post the elections and results the media showed the world nothing but “Amazing Disgrace”.

So now you know all about timing. That our MSM must have a free run on their lies and fake stories and any rude awakening is a “Bad timing”. The twisted and manipulated debates with their “fixed” panellists are their exclusive preserve. The make-up is starting to melt and the mask is coming undone. So where did Madhu Kishwar come from? Those who have followed her writings may remember she has frequently expressed her disgust at the way the MSM has treated her when she was on such panels. There is a particularly sharp open letter she had also written to Arnab Goswami. Her voice was being shut out. After 11 years she finally decided to find out facts for herself. That’s the only surprise. Why 11 years? She went to the same places that Sagarika, Rajdeep, Barkha, Ansari (of India Today), Teesta Setalvad, Shabnam Hashmi and many others went. She went to find the facts and the truth. The ones named earlier went to find flesh for the skeletons of stories they had already written. So when Bhupendra Chaubey of CNN-IBN asks her if it’s her mission to “remove bias” against Modi he shows why he is alarmed. You see, if you speak against the stories of the MSM and deal with facts, you are an outcast. You are an untouchable or will become one.

Where did it start for MK? It started sometime just before her visit to Vibrant Gujarat 2013. She was probably an invitee. She had mentioned here and there that during her trip she will also find out about the riots, about Muslims in Gujarat and development stories. It appears she came became impressed with Vibrant Gujarat and during that period spoke to people, stayed out late nights in Ahmedabad to see if women were safe, she visited police stations to see if they are responsive. Before she visited the Vibrant Gujarat event she had also run into this site. She must have glanced through some posts here and there. She asks valid questions. Who writes for it? Who runs it? No, I am not in any way suggesting that any material here made a difference to her. But it is proof that she scanned a lot of sites before she reached Gujarat and followed it up with a good deal of ground work. That she did a lot of research unlike our 2-minute noodle TV celebs who have nothing but stories to suit their agenda. So there isn’t really any “timing” to her “ModiNama”.

The awful truth again is that it’s not so much that Madhu Kishwar has made any startling revelations. Nothing of that sort! She has diligently compiled most of what was already out there into a single document with sound facts backing her up. But what she did additionally was go out late, visit police stations and meet ordinary people. The MSM is going to be upset because they are likely to feel “one of their own” has defected. Actually, moving to side of Truth is a lot easier. There’s a reason why the IE reporter and Chaubeji are disturbed. Because they think the “ModiNama” is a build-up to the next general elections. It is certain that there are many more in the MSM who will wonder about the “timing” of it all. Instead, what they should be wondering about is if their own “Good times” all these years of fake stories have ended.