By Ranjona Banerji
Many very senior journalists who’ve down the rounds a few times will tell you that they are great admirers of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the founder of the Bharatiya Janata Party. That he was a gentleman with a great sense of humour and so on.
None of them, strangely, find it in themselves to compare this ideal prime minister to the one we have today. Within the BJP, the comparison is always to Indira Gandhi – we are better than her, even if we emulate the worst of her – and then, the attempt is always to denigrate Jawaharlal Nehru.
But Vajpayee as Prime Minister and party founder has vanished from the discourse, even though he was Prime Minister three times, for varying amounts of time (13 days, 13 months, full term).
Rather it is liberal “dissenters” to Narendra Modi’s brilliance who bring up Vajpayee’s “raj dharma” admonition to Modi during the Gujarat 2002 riots.
(And evil anti-nationals like me who immediately remind these liberals of Vajpayee’s subsequent question: who burnt the train. Thus putting into perspective the remark of Vajpayee wearing a mask to fool liberals.)
Anyway, I digress.
My question to these very senior journalists is this: did the Vajpayee government, in your reckoning, do anything worthwhile at all, and was any of it better than Modi’s remarkable achievements?
I seem to remember that the Vajpayee government was very big on building roads. The Golden Quadrilateral, it was called? I have travelled on the leg from Ahmedabad to Baroda. It was very good. Why is that never mentioned? Why do you give PM Modi the credit for every road built in India? As PM, he was also into diplomatic initiatives in the neighbourhood. He also spoke at international fora.
During the Janata government of 1977 to 1980, Vajpayee was foreign minister. There was great admiration then of his speech in Hindi at the United Nations. People talked about it for years afterwards. But ever since Modi came to power, even these admirers seem to have forgotten it.
They carry on with the Modi Modi chorus, blame the Congress for never building a single road or making a single speech and by doing so, help the BJP to wipe out Vajpayee’s legacy.
Why Vajpayee’s legacy has to be wiped out, by the BJP, its supporters, with the help of these very senior journalists who are all admirers of Vajpayee, is an intriguing question.
Anyone have the answer?
Did Vajpayee exist and did he belong to the BJP?
Or have we had uninterrupted Congress rule since 1947, until Modi won an election in 2014?
Intriguing…
**
Those of us in the media think we know how our fellow journalists can be influenced and manipulated and some can be easily bought. But this deep investigation by Forbidden Stories brings home just how insidious and powerful the disinformation business has become.
The revelations after the collapse of Cambridge Analytica were at one level, the Pegasus stories at another. Here you have the story of the mysterious “Jorge” and the massive disinformation business that he claims to run.
https://forbiddenstories.org/story-killers/team-jorge-disinformation/
The RW universe (or eco-system as they call themselves) revel in conspiracy theories and rumours of the “deep state”.
The sad reality is that they are often themselves the “deep state”, adept at propaganda, manipulation, mind-bending and misinformation.
And from our very senior journalists to greedy little upstarts, almost no one who is willing to suspend disbelief is immune to their pull.
And yet, the essence of being a journalist is to be full of disbelief.
Ah well.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal