“Excessive and Compulsive BJP Disorder!!”

via H Balakrishnan published on March 22, 2009
This has reference to the Editor-In-Chief, Hindustan Times, Vir Sanghvi’s

” The tentwallah and the fat boy ” – (TNSE – 22 Mar 2009).
 
 

Sanghvi wrote: ” The second significant event of last week is the controversy over Varun Gandhi’s
speeches in his constituency. I need to be careful here because the
Junior Gandhi has tried to have it both ways. The CDs of his allegedly
communal speeches are doctored, he says on the one hand. On the other,
he blusters “What is wrong with standing up for my faith?” But even
Varun Gandhi seems to concede that he did say many things that Muslims
have found offensive. (I’m not sure which of these remarks he admits
to, but here they are: threatening to cut off the hand of people who
attack Hindus; saying that Muslims have scary names; claiming that his rival in the election looked like Osama bin Laden; using an abusive term for Muslims; suggesting that Muslims go off to Pakistan, etc., etc.) “.

 

 
Writing in the Hindustan Times of 04 Mar 2006, entitled ” A snapshot of middle class India“, the VERY SAME Vir Sanghvi wrote : ” Here, for what it is worth, is a snapshot of the middle class India I encountered on my travels.- – – . The general view in Delhi is that the BJP is floundering, that it is a party without an issue.Judging by my travels, this view could be seriously mistaken.There is a massive Hindu backlash building up. The public mood reminded me of the late 1980s, when such issues as Shah Bano and The Satanic Versesso upset moderate Hindus that they turned against Congress-style secularism.
The provocation, this time around, is the attitude of the Muslim
political leadership to foreign Islamic issues. No Hindu I met thought
it was right for a Danish paper to carry cartoons of the Prophet. But
why, they all asked, did Indians Muslims have to get so agitated? What
did it have to do with us? Why should a minister in the UP government
announce a bounty on the head of the Danish cartoonist? Why should Indian Muslims
demand the recall of the Danish ambassador? I have written about the
shameful cop-out by liberal Muslims over these issues before so I will
not labour the point. But the Hindu backlash is a perfect issue waiting for a BJP initiative.
This time around, the BJP need not focus on how Indian secularism makes
Hindus second-class citizens in their own country. My feeling is that
if liberal Muslims continue to react as pathetically as they have over
the last few months andif
liberal Hindus do not make it clear that genuine secularism means that
we fight all kinds of fanaticism  both Hindu and Muslim  a new
generation of BJP leaders will ride this backlash to return to power.
By ignoring the Hindu sentiment, Big Media is making a big mistake “.
 
 
Varun Gandhi was speaking in Philibit, U.P. Senior journalist Kanchan Gupta wrote:

” Anybody who has any knowledge of Pilibhit knows that Hindus in that district — in fact, all over what is referred to as Rohilkhand
— are increasingly feeling under siege. The district stretches along
India’s border with Nepal.Mirza Dilshad Beg, the Nepali politician who
fronted for Dawood Ibrahim
and was on the payroll of Pakistan’s ISI, regularly used the Pilibhit
route to funnel fake currency into India and supply arms and explosives
to terrorists. Beg may be dead, murdered by his ilk in 1998, but the
supply chain remains undisrupted. Thousands of cows are smuggled across
the border to be slaughtered; cow slaughter in Pilibhit and adjacent
districts is now a common phenomenon with the administration loath to
take any action. – – The ‘secular’ media hasn’t heard of Sonu Kashyap
who was murdered on October 21 last year. “Five unidentified Muslims”
were accused of murdering him. The administration did nothing. On
October 23, anger turned into street protests, led by a former BJP
legislator and Minister, Mr Ram Saran Verma. He was promptly arrested
and since then has been detained under the National Security Act.
Beesalpur police station in-charge Pervez Miyan brazenly defends the
continued detention of Mr Verma.”
 
 


In the foregoing light
wasn’t Varun Gandhi only echoing the sentiments expressed by the
‘secular’ Vir Sanghvi, three years ago? If anything Hindu anger has
blossomed after 26/11and the effete efforts of the ‘VERY-VERY-SECULAR-
MUSLIMS-HAVE-THE-FIRST-RIGHT’ UPA!!



Let me now turn to the ‘Excessive and Compulsive BJP Disorder ‘ the ‘ secular ‘ Indian English media. A most wonderful blogspot ‘ Offstumped ‘ had this to write on this excessive disorder: “  When was the last time you saw the media obsess over who gets appointed to the Congress Working Committee
or whatever they call it these days. The very fact that we rarely hear
about CWC or its post-Sonia re-incarnate speaks volumes about how the
rest of the Congress Party Organization
pales into irrelevance in deference to the one woman show the Congress
has been reduced to. In fact the AICC Website bears testimony to this
fact with Sonia Gandhi splashed all over it.  Again when was the last time you saw the media obsess over how Prakash Karat grabbed the top spot in the CPI-M edging over Sitaram Yechury
or some of the grass roots leaders from Bengal or Kerala who have
really been responsible for keeping the communists in business. The
absolute silence on the intrigues of the CPI-M that go on in smoke
filled rooms is testimony to how closed the CPI-M party organization is
to outside scrutiny and how irrelevant these intra-party intrigues are
to the politics of the CPI-M. So
what you have here is a media starved of political masala to fill up
the gossip columns and manufacture sensational headlines. And to this
sensation famished media the openness and the first among equals tussle
within the BJP is ready fodder. Hence you have all of these figments of
a lone journalist’s imagination spiced up with loose talk from a
multitude of disgruntled out of work politicians of who the BJP has an
abundance of supply. You see the same Obsessive Compulsive Disorder on display on a range of issues – be it the BJP not commenting on the Saddam
Execution or the BJP’s lack of reaction to a flippant Thackeray remark on the President’s hairdo. It
is no longer about the substance of issues which if the media had
really cared would have invited debate on Sonia’s equating of Strategy
with Compulsions. Instead all we have is nit picking on just about
anything about the BJP. In fact one begins to wonder if these journos
ever really troop out of their smoke filled offices to collect any real
facts about news events anymore.”
 
 
 
As regards the ‘state of the Indian media’, here is what a former editor of the Indian Express, Shri Rahul Singh wrote in the Pakistani daily Dawn: ” Independent editors have become a rarity in India. The Times of India,
which boasts of being the largest circulating English broadsheet in the
world, has not had a proper editor for over a decade, with various
‘editors’ given meaningless designations and put in charge of different
sections of the paper: edit page, news, sports, supplements. The
owners of the Hindustan Times and The Telegraph, the biggest dailies in
north and east India respectively, are the real editors of their papers.The four Fs now rule the Indian press — films, fashion, food and frolic.The wedding of Amitabh Bachchan’s son, the shenanigans of Sanjay Dutt and the liaisons of Saif Ali get front page
treatment.The marketing departments, not editorial,
run the show, often making editorial appointments and deciding how the front page should look and what it should display.


Indian
newspapers have become brands and products, not agents of change and
enlightenment. This trivialisation of what is one of the main pillars
of democracy should disturb all thinking Indians.
 
 






 



Tailpiece:

  The media needs to get over its obsessive compulsive BJP disorder and look elsewhere to manufacture sensation.The media coverage of the Rajnath rejig is a welcome reminder to us on the public good in Big B having Aishwarya Rai for a daughter in law and Shilpa Shetty having a Jade Goody for a house mate.Imagine where a media deprived of the inanity of celebrity gossip would go next – Narendra Modi’s bachelorhood, or for that matter how ” ILL-COOKED KICHIDI” is served to journos at the BJP HQ???” !! 
 
 

“JAI HO!!” NEHRUVIAN SECULARISM!!
 
 
VANDE MATARAM
 
WARM REGARDS

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