A couple of years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi surveyed the Pragati Maidan tunnel in the national capital, as it was being completed. This inspection meant that he was driven along in an open vehicle festooned with flowers as he, umm, “inspected”.
Soon after, he inaugurated the tunnel and declared it was the Centre’s “big gift” to the nation.
Today, the Public Works Department has declared that the tunnel is dangerous, unfit for us, full of cracks and seepage.
The cost of this gift that we the people of India have paid for? About Rs 1000 crore, give or take.
This is not the first disaster involving some “gift” from the Prime Minister. But it is the latest, and I’m using it as an example.
Obviously, the media cannot ignore this event, especially since the PWD has squarely blamed the construction company, Larsen & Toubro.
And thus, the canny media has sidestepped Modi’s role in gifting us a substandard, unusable, dangerous tunnel and presented this disaster as a fight between a government agency and a construction company. Which incidentally, is one of India’s most trustworthy.
https://www.ndtv.com/delhi-news/delhis-pragati-maidan-tunnel-beyond-repair-major-overhaul-needed-report-5018203
It is impossible for the mainstream media to now link the tunnel’s collapse to the BJP government, although it had no qualms about blandly reporting on Modi’s comment that the tunnel was a “gift”, and they happily added to his propaganda machine by publicizing his photoshoots riding up and down the tunnel on a fake inspection run. He gets the credit, someone else gets the blame.
As we approach a crucial general election, the mainstream media has once more surrendered the right to show truth to power and opted again to be one more arm of the BJP’s public relations wing.
This guarantees that an unmindful public, brainwashed by religion and violence and stories of future greatness, will ask as few questions of the BJP and the Central government as possible.
This strategy of the media makes it very convenient for the BJP and Modi – or have I got the order wrong? – to carry on with its divisive policies, which encourage sectarianism and promote Hindu supremacy at all costs.
A Hindutva “scholar” – an oxymoron if there ever was one – writes in The Indian Express, the beacon of “journalism of courage”, that “caste is a western construct”. Nonsense like this justifies caste discrimination in the minds of upper caste “educated” Hindu supremacists. That’s using media as a propaganda arm, at one level.
At the same time, we have this piece of new, not really mainstream, about an Adivasi tea worker dying of starvation in North Bengal because of glitches in the Aadhaar system. This is because this government keeps changes its mind about Aadhaar – a bad system anyway – and the bureaucracy does not care and does not keep up.
Life has always been cheap in India, especially the lives of the poor and the marginalized. Incompetence is now a given, with the Centre setting the standard.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/governance/unable-to-get-food-adivasi-tea-worker-in-north-bengal-estate-dies-of-starvation-94331
The Prime Minister in a garbled speech in Parliament – the mainstream media will not tell you this, but it is troublesome – claimed that the Opposition is trying to create a “North-South” divide. This is a bit rich, from a Central government which consistently tries to impose Northern customs and languages on other parts of India, is looking at a delimitation exercise which will badly affect the more prosperous South and which does not give the Southern states their due of Central grants and taxation shares.
This analysis by P Thiaga Rajan, finance minister of Tamil Nadu, explains cogently and clearly just how it is not possible for the Centre to claim that Uttar Pradesh is doing better than Tamil Nadu (only a BJP fool would believe that UP is superior anyway).
https://frontline.thehindu.com/economy/uttar-pradesh-economy-comparison-with-tamil-nadu-south-india/article67821390.ece
Now we reach Uttarakhand. The latest BJP laboratory for sectarian division and creating Hindu-Muslim tension and violence. The state just passed a suspect and unconstitutional Uniform Civil Code bill.
https://www.livemint.com/politics/news/uttarakhand-assembly-passes-ucc-bill-becomes-indias-first-state-to-implement-uniform-civil-code-11707310389777.html
And the state has carried on with its anti-Muslim crusade, this time by attacking Masjids, Madarsas and Mazars. Haldwani has seen violence and death. This is not normal in Uttarakhand and nor should it be acceptable. The link below says two dead, current figures say at least six.
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/haldwani-uttarakhand-violence-demolitions-live-updates-9152347/
The tragedy for those who follow the media and its commentators, is that they will be fed analysis of the BJP’s electoral prowess and the Opposition’s weakness. This clever juxtaposition by liberal and fence-sitting journalists crafts democracy as a largely electoral exercise, while ignoring the ground realities.
It is important, therefore, to remember a flower-festooned prime minister gifting an unusable tunnel to the nation which has literally thrown almost Rs1000 crore down the drain. And the juxtapose that image with people who die from starvation and state-sponsored violence.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal.