CNN-IBN & NDTV - The Lying Macaulay Cousins

There used to be that old graphic joke that was widely circulated on the net. It was about the bosses asking you to rate your own performance and seeking your own salary raise. All you had to do was click a button and fill up a form. Only problem was that when you tried to click the button it moved away and your cursor or mouse kept chasing the button all over the screen till you realised you’ve been pranked. Most of us have been pranked with it sometime or the other. This prank became popular in the political domain to ridicule election candidates. For the last 2 centuries there’s a website that lists all of Rahul Gandhi’s achievements and those of his ancestors; www.rahulgandhiachievements.com. It’s a ‘comprehensive guide’ to all of RahulG’s achievements in life as the site’s tagline says. Not happy with this, the Congress eNREGA team members (a team now headed by Shashi Tharoor) came up with a counter-site called NarendraModiPlans.Com. This was about NaMo’s plans if he were to become PM. This is how it looked with the ‘Get Details’ button as the prank.

The site has since been pulled but it was just a humorous site to ridicule NaMo and there wasn’t anything wrong in it. After all, politics without ridicule and humour is no fun at all. Such gentle humour, even if offensive to some, must always be welcomed. Even politicians take pride if gentle fun is poked at them. Only the most worthless and useless politicians would have no humour directed at them. The only thing that is murky about this site is that it seems some media cronies were hand-in-glove with the ones who created the site. Our very own Scoopendra Chaubeji of CNN-IBN was among the first to tweet about the site and publicise it. He must have discovered the site through his “sources” through which he routinely scoops a lot of breaking stories. We can now reasonably suspect that CNN-IBN is part of the Congress’ eNREGA social media team. So once the NaMo fans traced the site’s builders, the ones who put up the site pulled it and now it’s gone. What a pity!

Not just that. The site’s creator started playing victim and claimed being threatened and so on. That is the real nonsense part. Some people may be annoyed with such humour (that’s the intention) but nobody would go as far as threatening someone for a silly site. You see, even Ruchica Tomar of Headlines Today was disappointed. She then tweeted that the RahulGandhiAchievements site was also not working. This site has been blank for the last 200 years or so and we are all waiting for it to fill up someday in 2150 when RahulG is likely to mature and have some achievements to his credit. But what raises suspicion of media folks being involved in the NaMo plans site is the sympathy and outrage of the original media-bimbo and she tweeted thus:

The absolute category-5 moron that she is, Sagarika Ghose half the time doesn’t think before she writes or says anything. Observe carefully. She equates attacks on UPA with attacks on Modi. This is how she keeps giving us proof over and over again that God too can be lazy and forgot to bestow her with some brains. The UPA is an entity and a political alliance which is the ruling party and Modi is an individual. How does attacking an entity like UPA get to be equated with attacking an individual? But that is their carefully crafted crime. When it comes to UPA or Congress they will attack the party or alliance. They will not attack Sonia Gandhi who is responsible for the entire mess that the country is in. But when it comes to Modi, individual attacks on him, tarring him, mindlessly discrediting everything he says is game for them. For the whole sequence of the story just read @sureshnakhua’s storified piece.

This is why it is right for NaMo supporters to lampoon this bimbo and the entire media for selectively targeting Modi as an individual but mildly targeting the party in power (UPA) when it comes to Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi. I’ve said before, the moment they mention “Gandhi” our media celebs pee in their pants and skirts. And if CNN-IBN is busy perpetrating lies can their colonial cousins be far behind? These Macaulay sisters never miss a chance. Here’s NDTV once again deleting a page from their website. “Love has this nasty habit of disappearing overnight, your lips are moving, I cannot hear… You don’t look different but you have changed, I’m looking through you, you’re not the same”. That describes NDTV’s frequently disappearing pages perfectly. Doesn’t it? **

NDTV posted a spurious report about the Hyderabad rally of NaMo where there is an entrance fee of Rs.5 to listen to his speech. Of course, if not for anything else, at least NaMo’s speeches are a treat for anyone. I’m sure even their group-editor Barkha Dutt secretly watches and listens to his speeches and wishes she had such popularity instead of the tag of Radia-girl. Okay, here’s what they posted:

Isn’t that a typical NDTV headline? Now this fraud-loving channel also acts a mouth-feeder to the Congress party and it’s spokies. Naturally, Manish Tewari started barking early on about how Modi is lower priced than cinema tickets and how this act of his shows blah blah. Everyone quickly joined in to condemn Modi and BJP for reducing politics to mere commerce. Although, I sincerely wonder if anyone would pay to even see Manish Tewari dancing as a bar-girl. There is simply no worth in anything he utters, just as most reports of NDTV must be treated with suspicion. Nowhere in this NDTV report does it mention that the Rs.5 was a token collection for the Uttarakhand Relief Fund. It’s a first in Indian politics that people are willing to pay to listen to a politician. Usually, the Congress is known to pay people and feed them food to attend their rallies. No wonder it shocks them and the likes of Manish Tewari.

However, in their enthusiasm to condemn Modi with lies both NDTV and the Congress forgot something. It was Mahatma Gandhi who started the practice of raising funds by charging a small fee for his autograph. Well, he used to charge Rs.5 too. If you do a minor math you will also realise that Rs.5 in the Mahatma’s would probably be as good as Rs.500 in the current times. His grandson, Arun Gandhi, writes that he used to help in collecting these funds. So like the impatient fools that they are, both NDTV and Congress, particularly Manish Tewari, indirectly ended up lampooning the Mahatma too. When the facts came out all these charlatans scrambled back into the holes they crawled out from and NDTV once again deleted a report.

The Macaulay sisters, NDTV and CNN-IBN, will continue to peddle their lies and their mischief till Elections 2014. They desperately want Modi and the BJP to lose because, as Modi himself puts it, their “Roji-Roti” comes from abusing him. That these colonial cousins will faithfully do for their bosses. After ending up with egg on their faces, the Congress, NDTV and CNN-IBN have now to deal with a new site called UPAPlans.Com. Enjoy!

** Lyrics from the song “I’m looking through you” by The Beatles.

 

NDTV's Uttarakhand Deceptions

Everyone values information but not everyone values perception. Creating perceptions is the game in the media. Let me rehash an old story from the West to NDTV’s context. Now everyone knows NDTV is like the former USSR’s Pravda news agency except that NDTV is a willful mouthpiece and slave with an agenda. When Narendra Modi inaugurated the Sabarmati River front in Ahmedabad he took a boat ride. Strong winds blew off his cap which fell some 50 feet away from the boat on the water. An unperturbed Modi just got off the boat, walked on water, retrieved his cap and walked back to the boat. Yeah, I guess you know what the headline on NDTV was: “Sources: Narendra Modi can’t swim”. There used to be another story during the US-Russia cold war. There was a race in Moscow. The Russian came second but the American came in one before the end. That is how NDTV would report it except that NDTV won’t tell you that there were only 2 people in the race. So you will have to figure out who actually came first.

Politicians will say what they want and they cannot be restricted. But if news channels are merely going to repeat what they said like a box of parrots then they failing in their jobs. The job of a news channel also involves “fact-checking”. This is where all the Indian news channels fail miserably. Sometime back I had written about an interview of Digvijay Singh, a darling at NDTV, by Sunetra Choudhury. Diggy claimed in some context that the Congress had never attacked the family members of the BJP or other Opposition parties. This is a LIE and NDTV let it pass; which is why I had strongly recommended “NDTV needs a lie-detector”. Looks like they still haven’t got one!

So on the night of July 1 NDTV decided to debate something they called ‘Twitter wars’ over the Uttarakhand tragedy. Yep, the anchor was Nidhi ‘Larger picture’ Razdan. And like a true parrot Nidhi merely ran a “She said, he said” story without bothering to check on facts. Ever since the channel sacrificed their tagline “Experience truth first” they have stuck to their philosophy of narrating only part fiction. So what was the issue? Sushma Swaraj tweeted something about Congress incompetence over Uttarakhand, Manish Tiwari tweeted back that LOPs lecture on some CBI proposal but didn’t visit Uttarakhand, Sushma Swaraj tweeted back that they were advised by Home Minister Shinde, Manish Tiwari tweeted back asking why Rajnath and Modi didn’t follow that advice, then Ajay Maken tweeted, then someone else tweeted blah blah. The whole thing by itself is comic but trust stupid NDTV to make a debate out of it. After all, this is a channel which even debated “who is stricter” – Rahul Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi. Here, take a look:

There is absolutely nothing in it except that NDTV won’t state a few facts. First, it has been a practice with Congress and its crony channels to accuse others of “politicising” events or tragedies if their incompetence is criticised. The only two parties who most demonstrated scavenging on the Uttarakhand tragedy are Congress and TDP. These two parties came to a physical fight at Dehradun airport on who will ferry back the survivors. Of course, the most idiotic trip by anyone to Uttarakhand has to be that of Rahul Gandhi. Doesn’t matter!

The question now is did NDTV check what Manish Tiwari said last is correct? Is it true that Rajnath Singh and Narendra Modi did not heed Shinde’s advice? Let’s check:

1)According to reports Sushil Kumar Shinde gave out his advice of VIPs avoiding travel to Uttarkhand on Monday, June 24.

2) Rajnath Singh visited Uttarakhand for an aerial survey and some interaction at Dehradun on Thursday, June 20.

3) Narendra Modi visited Uttarakhand on Saturday,June 22.

4) In total disregard of Shinde’s advice on June 24 it was RahulG who choppered to Uttarakhand on June 25 and 26 with no real purpose to his trip. The Congress claimed it was a “common citizen” trip and not as a VVIP. We all know what RG did there. He was a total nuisance. So for ManishT & NDTV RahulG is above rules and law as has been all these years, isn’t it?

I know, it all seems very elementary now, doesn’t it? Shinde gave out an advice on June 24 while both Rajnath and Modi had made their trips prior to that date. So how would they follow Shinde’s advice? True to his usually bogus comments Manish Tiwari was blabbering nonsense. Well, one can’t stop the loveable Manish, that’s his nature. But I can say with authority that Nidhi Razdan missed the “larger picture” here, the picture of FACTS. That’s how NDTV does “shoddy journalism” and creates deception in their debates. Now, let’s try to look for some real facts beyond these silly political statements.

On the night of July 1 on his programme ‘Centrestage’ Rahul Kanwal on Headlines Today confronted the Uttarkhand Congress MLA with documents indicating there was abundant warnings on the cloubdburst, extreme rainfall and glacier melting. He went to the extent ot asking why the Uttarakhand govt shouldn’t be charged with murder. There were no convincing answers. I don’t know about murder but there is no reason why a number of PILs shouldn’t be filed in the Supreme Court for “gross negligence causing deaths and destruction” against that govt. You see, NDTV won’t discuss these issues but will discuss frivolous nonsense.

While the media indulged in the nonsense of the “Rambo act” of Narendra Modi there was someone who finally pulled their pants and skirts off. Meenakshi Lekhi commented on July 1 that “it was a thousand times better to be a Rambo than be a Dumbo or a Scambo”. She just misses a point all along. It is NDTV’s job to defend Dumbo and Scambo with any deceptions possible, even if it comes to a tragedy like Uttarakhand.

China, Pakistan & The Cowards Of Our Country

Many people are or have been in some job or other where circumstances and demands of the work compel them to put their mind over their heart. But ironically, whenever an employee needs to improve the employer or the boss generally doesn’t say “use your mind”. The advice or encouragement usually is “put your heart in the work” or as they say in Hindi “thoda dil laga ke kaam karo”. In other words, the suggestion is to put some passion into the work. Sunetra Chaudhary of NDTV would be very different on TV if she were allowed to use her heart. She doesn’t get to do that so she writes in DNA. There was that case over a year ago when she wrote about sexual harassment by a UPA minister which NDTV buried. Recently she wrote another piece from her heart called “Why desi netas will never charm the English media” in DNA. It’s a simple but one of the most honest pieces I have read in print. Sunetra mentions how the nonsense of Salman Khurshid’s “Acne” comment about China’s incursion in Ladakh hardly raised any eyebrows in the English media. She further writes:

“So even when he stooped to the level of street fights by saying things like: “I’ve been made a minister so I work with a pen but I can also work with blood,” some of us stepped in to explain to the rest-of-us-language-culture-impaired folks that his words were actually a ‘figure of speech’ and by getting offended by Khurshid’s words, we were just exposing our own lack of sophistication”. You see, all the suave Anglais types can say anything and people are ignorant or lack sophistication if they don’t get it. But if the desi guys say the same things they would be called uncouth, misogynists, uncivilised etc. If Khurshid had made a comment like “a love affair worth 50 crores” that would have been considered poetic but Modi saying “50cr girlfriend” is obviously tasteless. This is how the English media conducts its discussions by licking the feet of those who can speak fluent English, throw a quote or two from English Literature and make a mockery of national issues and national security.

The survival of the Congress party is detrimental to the progress of India is what I wrote in my previous post. A day later, Salman Khurshid, Manish Tiwari and Shashi Tharoor offered more evidence for it in their pronouncements on Sarabjit Singh and other issues of national security. Collectively, these people heap insults on Indians but they do it stylishly in English so it all passes. After his moronic “Acne” remark Khurshid followed it up with stating India is like Muhammad Ali, the great boxer. He was trying to imply that like a boxer India can take a lot of punches and beating but will come out the winner in the end. Meaning Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Maldives and all their uncles and aunties can keep screwing this country but India will take the blows and come out a winner. Quite heroic, eh? What Khurshid doesn’t know about his idiotic comparison is that Ali always claimed he had a pretty face and never a scar. He floated like a butterfly and the song says “Im Ali.. Catch me if you can”. In contrast every neighbour seems to have caught India by the scruff of her neck and wringing it at will. Khurshid is a coward who is trying humour in a crisis that is debilitating to the self-esteem of Indians.

History has it that most land encroachments and theft of our territories has happened under Congress watch given they have been in power for most of our 65 years of absence of the British. Let’s catch up with history though. Here’s what Rajinder Puri wrote in November 2011 about the Congress and he was being kind in seeking a reinvention of the party:

“In 1976 in violation of a unanimous Parliamentary resolution that still stands, forbidding any truck with China until all territory illegally seized by it is recovered, in violation also of a policy decision that unless China agreed to the Colombo Proposals hammered in an international Asian conference India would not talk with China, Mrs. (Indira) Gandhi nevertheless went ahead and established full diplomatic relations with China. She betrayed the memory of her father and the national interest. Why? The only explanation appears to be that around that time America under President Carter was on the point of clinching the process of normalization with China initiated earlier by President Nixon. Like a puppet on a string Mrs. Gandhi somersaulted and went against declared policy and the national interest”.

So Indira Gandhi violated a resolution of the parliament to appease China. Don’t be surprised if China becomes a permanent guest in the encroached land and also makes incursions in Arunachal. Before you know it Mr. Khurshid, the current Mrs. Gandhi may also forget the sins of the grandmother. And Manish Tiwari would happily say NDA did nothing about Indira Gandhi’s appeasement of China. Coward! Hardly floating and stinging like Muhammad Ali, is it? This is the same manner in which Congress appeases Pakistan for vote-bank politics after each of their crime gets bigger and worse.

Rajdeep Sardesai had vowed not to tweet on politics after being trashed on Twitter. Well, can’t keep the “Numero Uno political analyst” off politics for too long. After Sarabjit was butchered to death he came up with the lamest statement indirectly justifying his killing claiming he was calling “a spade a shovel”. He tweeted that while talking about Sarabjit we shouldn’t forget under-trials in our own prisons. I had to remark that this was the equivalent of saying that because the crime of land encroachment is widespread in India it justifies China’s encroachment and incursion in Ladakh. Such is the stupidity of Rajdeep who has a twisted sense of justice that even in a crime by the enemy he wants to find faults with India. I guess he is what Arnab Goswami referred to as “Pak apologists” on the Newshour on May 2. Sadanand Dhume explains to Rajdeep that an equivalent would have been our butchering of a Pak prisoner. I wonder if Rajdeep gets it. We actually treat our foreign prisoners like royalty. Feed them endless biryani and allow them to go home to even vote or celebrate Christmas. The coward that Rajdeep is, he won’t see this and will keep drawing wrong parallels.

Rajdeep is the Oxbridge guy. If he had said the same nonsense in Hindi or some Indian language the whole media would have butchered him verbally. While at it, how can we forget another Oxbridge type? This one is probably the biggest hypocrite floating around in India and he goes by the name of Shashi Tharoor. Like Manish Tiwari he asks why no govt had done anything about Sarabjit earlier. He even recalls, as a patriot, the incidents of Kandahar and Coffingate over the Sarabjit murder and how sick he feels. This is Congress moronery at its best. For the number of times the Congress recalls Kandahar not one Gandhi-slave from the party has ever mentioned how he would have handled it differently. The Kandahar episode was in a difficult terrain across two hostile countries and saved lives. In the case of Congress Indians are being killed or beheaded when there was abundant warning. Tharoor talks of Coffingate. This is another lie. The Coffingate scam was investigated and even George Fernandes was cleared of any wrong doing. And then stooges like Manish Tiwari and Tharoor will scream “let’s not politicise it” but that’s exactly what they do.

It has become a trick for the Congress and their channels like NDTV, CNN-IBN, Headlines Today that when the Congress failure is exposed they will scream “let’s not politicise” when in fact they will politicise everything. Mr. Golden Spoon or Mr. Pappu or Rahul Gandhi as he is also referred to, rushed to Dalbir Kaur’s house to hug her and put up a drama for the cameras. Till Sarabjit’s murder RahulG didn’t have one word to say about him or to the Pakistanis. Pappu usually doesn’t have anything to say on anything, so he is a consistent coward. But death is such a great opportunity for the Congress and the media to scavenge. The simple truth is that this Congress and its spineless PM have more Indian blood on their hands without a shot being fired than any other govt in the past has. This very Shashi Tharoor was moderating a debate on “Aman Ki Asha”, with Paki journalists, a day after the LOC beheadings in January 2013. That’s the concern and sympathy he has for soldiers killed in defending us. There isn’t one sweat that drips off the brow of Tharoor that isn’t filled with hypocrisy. I have called him the “Happy-tongue Hypocrite”.

Slammed by everyone around him, Tharoor finally explains that his remarks were because Narendra Modi blamed UPA for the killing of Sarabjit. All that Modi said was that it was an extra-judicial killing because prisoners sentenced to death are kept in isolation and not with other inmates. And why shouldn’t the UPA be blamed? What exactly is the UPA responsible for in this nation if its foot soldiers are going to blame the NDA or BJP for all its crimes? I would sort of agree. The UPA is the most irresponsible govt we ever had.  Fact remains, despite all their so-called education Tharoor and Rajdeep are in reality a Laloo in English. That’s the only difference. Their moronery is now well established and beyond compare and instead of facing up to the truth these cowards peddle BS all the time. Naturally, I am tempted to call them the cowards of our country.

India's Greatest LIE

I sincerely hope CNN-IBN does not read this post. They have this habit of creating all those “Greatest” polls and awards and an award like “India’s Biggest Liar” might get a huge number of votes beyond their control. But I’m sure some may have heard of this annual “World’s biggest liar” contest. It’s held in November every year in Cumbria, England. Contestants have 5 minutes each to tell their biggest lie before the biggest liar is chosen. Only one problem though. Politicians and lawyers are barred from contesting because they are too ‘skilled’ at lying or are “professional liars”. Not very nice, is it? However, I’m petitioning the organisers of this contest to next year exclude “Editorialists” too. If politicians and lawyers can be categorised as “skilled liars” I don’t see why, with changing times, many editors and anchors too shouldn’t fall in that category. The job of these editors is to correct the record and lies that politicians may perpetrate but in India, over the years, they seem to thrill in these lies owing to their own political persuasions. I once recommended a “lie-detector” for NDTV and with good reason too.

Indian history has many lies. Some have been corrected some still happily float as gospel truth. Let’s keep that aside. Let’s take the single beneficiary of the highest number of lies against him over the last 11 years. As it happened Narendra Modi was in Delhi on Sunday, March 3, 2013 for a BJP meet and interacted with members of the party. It also happens that Modi is an extraordinary orator and possesses an armoury of one-liners and taunts that hurt his opponents. So he called PM Manmohan Singh a “night watchman” implying that he is just guarding the crease for the prince. That upset Congress members and supporters. I wonder why though. MMS has been called ‘tragic failure’, ‘Sonia’s puppet’ and even ‘Theek Hai’ which are far worse than a night watchman who still has a very important role. Tough! That wasn’t all, given so much corruption and so many scams under the Congress govt, Modi added “BJP=Mission, Congress=Commission”. That would have really upset the Congress as also their media supporters like Rajdeep and Sagarika, in particular.

Over the last decade the Gujarat 2002 riots were used to trash Modi for anything. Then the economic development in Gujarat was trashed. When all else failed politically the chant has turned to “What about malnutrition in Gujarat?”. Rajdeep doesn’t even complete a tweet about Modi or Gujarat without malnutrition. All is fair. But unable to stomach the “commission” tag the Congress went back to a very old theme of “Rajdharma”. Who else but Manish Tiwari! Tiwari, who should be concerned about who is really corrupt from “head to toe” in the most corrupt govt in the history of India, had nothing to offer but AB Vajpayee’s “Rajdharma” comment of 2002.

Over the years, the lie perpetrated by Congress and our MSM is that Vajpayee asked Modi to follow “Rajdharma” after the Gujarat riots during a presser. That is an entirely inaccurate portrayal of what happened at that presser. When Yudhisthara, who was never known to lie, said “Ashwathama is dead” he also added gently that he wasn’t sure if it was an elephant or a man. So Modi’s political opponents picking up only that first line is somewhat understandable given politicians are “professional liars” barred from lying contests. But that’s the reason I recommend that editors of MSM should be included in that category for they too are professional liars, especially when it comes to Modi. Here’s what happened at that presser:

By 2002 ABV was starting to be frail. He not only walked slowly because of his knee problem, he also spoke in slow halting sentences. Sometimes he would speak a sentence and stall for a whole minute or more. So his “Rajdharma” comment was in response to a question by a reporter on what he would advise Modi. That is fair enough. Advising any CM to follow “Rajdharma” is sound advice and every political head should be following that dharma. But this has been turned into the biggest LIE over a decade to imply that Modi was “guilty” in the 2002 riots and therefore ABV advised him so. This is also used to imply that Modi wasn’t following that dharma. What is being completely overlooked is that in his slow, halting speech ABV also said in Hindi that “I have faith this is what Narendrabhai is exactly doing”. That is, following Rajdharma. (Watch from 1.08 onwards in the video, I have enhanced the volume for clarity)

Congress members and political opponents of Modi twisting this and continue this LIE is understandable in the context of Indian politics where honesty is at premium. But that the media celebs too perpetrated this LIE and never made the slightest attempt to correct the records would make them more culpable as LIARS. Thus, the Cumbria event should bar the Indian editors too as they should be considered “professional liars”.  

In the history of Indian politics and media, this “Rajdharma” comment being twisted and misused by the media should easily win the award of India’s Greatest LIE ever.