By Ranjona Banerji
Across India, sections of the RSS – Bajrang Dal, VHP, ABVP and smaller sleeper cells – are on a rampage. They threaten anyone they feel like under some specious garb of “nationalism” or “sentiments” or more just sheer bigotry and hatred. And they get away with it.
If you fight for the rights of tribals and marginalised communities, you can easily be put in prison for years while a case is being concocted against you. You can die in jail as an undertrial because no case was satisfactorily made out and yet you were denied bail.
But you can attack someone and easily get bail if you are part of the RSS’s extended family.
And one reason you can get away with this over and over again is because the Indian media has stopped holding the powers-that-be to account. Father Stan Swamy died in jail for a crime not fully explained. Suresh Sudele, who attacked filmmaker Prakash Jha on a film set in Bihar, got bail the next day. Sudele is a member of the Bajrang Dal.
Comedian Munawar Farooqi spent months in jail for a joke he did not make. Now gangs of VHP and Bajrang Dal members threaten and harass all venues where he has been booked to perform and get his appearances cancelled.
You might argue, we know this because of media reports. That is true. But it is the extent of the reporting and on which media channel it happens that is significant. Is the growing illegal power of the RSS and its organisations a constant source of outrage on India’s “news” channels in all languages?
Heh.
Actress Kangana Ranaut’s Twitter account was cancelled because of her extreme hate speech against Muslims and other minorities. Before that, her sister, who acted as her spokesperson, also had her account suspended. Ranaut creates and attracts controversy from her own actions and pronouncements. After Ranaut won a Padma Shri recently, Times Now had a public event with her. During which the actress explained that India did not really receive freedom from colonial rule in 1947 but instead got an approximation of freedom by begging. India’s real freedom came in 2014.
Now you might argue that this is Ranaut’s right to freedom of speech. Or that she is ignorant, uneducated and stupid. Or she is a brilliant shill pushing the current Hindutva rightwing crackpot theory that Indian did not get Independence from British colonial rule with dominion status in 1947 and then as a sovereign republic in1950, but rather got a “99-year lease”. And 2014 of course is when Narendra Modi was anointed King Emperor of India.
Set aside Ranaut’s nonsense. She is what she is.
The irony is that the Modi government has issued an advisory to all news outlets to carry its ‘Azadi ki Amrit Mahutsav” logo, to push the government’s celebrations of 75 years of Indian Independence!
Concentrate on Times Now and its editor Navika Kumar who was on the stage with Ranaut. Kumar was at some point a journalist, or so I’ve heard, and her response to Ranaut was “this is why people call you a god”.
And the audience clapped and tittered.
So is it that Kumar’s understanding of both history and divinity is faulty? Has she been instructed by Bennett Coleman and Company to magnify RSS rubbish and hate as much as possible? Is the reason that BCCL genuinely believes that India got true freedom in 2014 when Narendra Modi became Prime Minister? Or is it because there is money to be made by amplifying lies and misinformation?
Vineet Jain, owner and MD of Bennett Coleman is active on Twitter, condemning misinformation and saying it must be starved at its source – social media platforms. But what about his own “news” outlets?
Do they have a larger responsibility?
Do not for a moment think that Times Now is the only one, amongst India’s English “news” channels.
CNN-News18 is consistent with some of its shows like The Right Stand in building up hatred against Indian Muslims via Pakistan.
India Today TV is in the same mould as CNN-News18 as it both slyly and openly pushes Islamophobia under the garb of national security.
NDTV has started becoming increasingly wishy-washy.
These channels have some good journalists in their newsrooms but counter all their work with enough Modi propaganda so as to disguise their increasingly shrinking “journalistic” work.
Indian newspapers in English are now even more inconsistent. Some do a few good, strong, “truth to power” articles and immediately push some BJP points of view to appear “fair” when in fact they must become one more mouthpiece for Nagpur.
And bar digital platforms, which are constantly under threat from the Modi government as a result, you would not get a clue that anything was wrong at all under Modi’s apparently glorious rule.
Had Kumar been a journalist, she would have countered Ranaut and her bizarre idea of Indian history.
Instead she did untold disservice to the few journalists left in her channel, in television and in India as a whole.
All hail?
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia every Tuesday and Friday. Her views here are personal