I have always been interested in Politics. I remember reading Hindu editorials with my grandfather even back at the age of 10 or 11 and for people who haven’t read their editorials before, reading an editorial in Hindu is like listening to a lecture in Political Science class. It is all substance but you have to be intuitive to make your own inferences and conclusions.
After coming to the US, my interest in Politics faded. And in the four years that I have been here, there has been a big boom of “liberal” news media in India. All that liberal crap means is the news delivered by them is a hogwash of pseudo-secular, government pampering trash infused with so called western ideals. I had been totally turned off from Indian politics as Congress seemed to me to be in its second vice grip of the country with seemingly no viable alternative in the horizon.
I was content with that and I had far better ways of spending my leisure rather than wasting my time in a hopeless endeavor of trying to know how my home country is faring. But the dozens of scams unearthed horrified me. I did not understand which was worse – the sheer brazenness of the politicians who refused to resign and continued to be in power or the indifferent apathy of the public who practically didn’t seem to care. Trying to find out more about the 2G scam as most politicians involved in it were from my state, I came across this video of Subramanian Swamy. He gave a lecture to a packed audience of Non-resident Indians who seemed to devour his speech and asked him for ways to help in his anti corruption crusade. Frankly I was overwhelmed by the facts he presented in his speech. It was simply too much information and more than half of his speech seemed to be merely libel to me.
Like all Indian unmarried girls, I asked my father the next day about Subramanian Swamy. My father described Swamy as a comedian in the political circles who merely spouts off baseless rumors, none of them have ever been proven. I digged around online and indeed my father was proven right. He had been involved in plenty of lawsuits – the most famous ones being the Jayalalitha corruption suit. Also, he had made many fanciful claims like Sonia Gandhi being responsible for the assassination of Rajiv and so on. All of this seemed to me to be plot lines out of a fancy political novel.
But as fate would have it, I listened to a lecture by Swamy about Hinduism and its greatness and I was genuinely moved. I have never been a very religious person but there was something in his speech that made me feel proud of my Hindu identity despite all the flaws of Hinduism. But despite all that glorification of Hinduism, I did not for a moment feel a bitterness towards Islam or Muslims. All I could hear was caution at the fact that Muslims are like young children. Once you start appeasing them, they will start making bigger demands and that it is bound to lead to religious intolerance and so to retain the secular nature of our country, we must retain a Hindu majority. Well that seemed like sensible advice to me, as I have not heard of one Muslim majority secular nation so far.
I started becoming news hungry. NDTV, TimesNow, CNN-IBN, India Today and all the usual news channels simply bored me because in the name of analytical discussions, they showed a one-sided conversation, dominantly in favor of the Congress. The show hosts Rajdeep, Arnab, Karan and Sagarika shamed me at the fact that they were not behaving like journalists in search of truth but rather as actors trying to shine the spotlight on themselves. I dont even have to talk about Barkha as we all know how openly she wears her favouritism. I have heard that during emergency days, Doordarshan was bashed by the public for providing news in favor of the Government and pushing all the emergency horror under the rug. Well, frankly atleast Doordarshan had its staff paid by the Government and were probably loyal. Well, who knows where they are getting their money from.
So, I have decided to create posts where I merely reproduce good articles and critiques I rarely come across online and I hope to be able to read them back again someday and feel terribly good about myself. Don’t ask me why.
The following is a comment by Shyam on FirstPost:
There you go. Rajdeep and the so-called liberal media at it again – creating false equivalencies.
When Congress gets caught with a big scam, they try to find some allegation against BJP and debate ‘Are all political parties corrupt today? or ‘Are all Indians corrupt?’ not differentiating that one is in power and the other is in opposition. The charge is about looting and misuse of public money that only people in power can do! Corruption is always top-down.
When someone points out Congress is a dynasty with servants and its laughable to see RG talk about meritocracy in youth congress, they debate ‘ Isn’t Sangh parivar another dynasty? Aren’t both BJP and Congress both dynastic in different ways?’
When Robert Vadra is caught looting because of his family connections. they try to dig up some dirt on BJP to make it all ‘fair and equal’. Will they now dig up the ownership details of Young Indian as they did with Purti group? Of course not, they will go back to SRK new hair style, Amitabh Bacchan’s cough, Yuvraj singh’s mom and what not
When polls show Muslims are also trying to move on in Gujarat and are even supporting for Modi, they debate ‘Are muslims in Guj so scared of modi that they are supporting him now?’ And he has the bigotry to call him communal! You see, for him to be secular (being a ‘liberal’ and all), the people he bashes will have to be communal (and by insinuation ‘medieval’ and ‘uncouth’).
When Rahul Gandhi fails miserably in UP, the topic of debate is ‘Is the UP electorate too casteist?’. So if cong fails, its because of casteist and communal narrow minded electorate?
Sagarika Ghose wants to debate ‘Is Modi PM material’. Rightly Swapan asked ‘shouldn’t we have a neutral anchor instead of a Modi Hater?’. Fellow IBN propagandist Mr. Chaubey tweets, ‘are there any?’. Our Indian media has become so embedded in the govt that they forget they are actually supposed to moderate and not be a lawyer for one party. if that is their passion, they should just be a spokesman or be a participant in the debate instead of pretensions of moderating.
Modi says ‘people close to the Congress party are all making crores of rupees. Even a girl friend of an MP made 50 cr. Think how much others are making!’ and the debate is ‘ does Modi hate women?’ instead of asking her about the sweat equity and a simple question like ‘Sonia gandhi earlier removed Shashi because of the corruption allegations, has he been cleared? what the source of that money that you had?’ I can give you some ideas Rajdeep. why don’t you debate ‘Does Modi hate rich women?’ Is Modi bitter because he didn’t get to open an IPL team?’
This same Sunanda was bashed in 2010. Now she is kosher because they can use her to bash Modi. Wow!
One of my old bosses asked me in a moment of frank conversation,’tell me, what do you think ails our company, be very honest’. I told him ‘its you, you lack leadership, risk taking and communication’. My boss didn’t like it but he probably wanted to just hear ‘what other than me is the problem with this company?’.
That’s the language of the celeb media today. They don’t get it that its their bigotry, biases, and acting like govt PR, false binary debates (as we saw during FDI ‘are you for FDI or are you against progress?’) the reason for their criticism. They keep looking outside for what ails English media today.
Dr. Swamy asked a good question in the interview last night on CNN IBN ‘why is it that Kejriwal gets so much air time but not him (Swamy) when he made the same allegations about Vadra?’. So it proves again that its the person and the not the subject matter.
They reluctantly gave voice to Swamy probably because of the pressure from Social media.
Don’t get me started on their self-serving moniker ‘liberal media’. They are hardly liberal. They somehow think as they speak in English, they are somehow more progressive, modern and the ‘live and let live’ kind of liberal minded. Ironically the ‘liberal media’ lives in a tiny bubble of self-serving delusions and is the least open minded. The traditional Right in the West was associated with dogmatic traditional values and the Left evolved as an alternative. That paradigm when applied to a country like India looks ridiculous since the Right in india is actually more liberal, open minded, understanding, and pluralistic because of the uniqueness of Hindu thought where ‘experience is central, skepticism integral, text subservient, and belief voluntary’.
As Left in the West is associated with the word liberal (contrasting with the anti-science, pro-church Right), our English media would like to think they too being Left by inference ‘liberal minded’. The Indian right is more accurately described as the ‘Liberal right’ though I would probably prefer to avoid the whole left/right paradigm as it evolved in a different context. its again ironical since I hear there is some church ownership of many English media channels!
Do you see the irony here? The false equivalency trap you fell into – in order to establish your position as the ‘real liberal’ you had to bash everyone else? You find the ‘liberal right’ as funny and you call the Indian left lib as the ‘fake liberals’ (partly correct) since you think you are the ‘real liberal’.
Agree some Hindu outfits can be annoying but how can you equate V day disruption to rioters? You again seem to insinuate that Hindus start riots when you say ‘riot in the name of religion’. Show me one riot which the Hindus started. its always a response to their tolerance being pushed to an extreme when it starts look cowardly to keep quiet anymore. Your assertion will be correct if Hindus in the US or the UK, for example, start converting the non-Hindus by fraud, inducements or threat.
We often forget that India is secular BECAUSE of its Hindu majority. India is the only country which never imposed its religion on its neighbors EVEN when it was powerful, exactly for the same reason – there is no religious decree to prosletyze or commandments on how to ‘treat’ non believers.
Forget respect, if the other party doesn’t bother, defile or intrude, Hindus will mind their own business. is that so hard to see?
The left liberals (especially those with Hindu names) condone or play down muslim terror (Azad maidan, assam, lucknow) in the name of secularism (which you have highlighted, so that’s good, you are halfway there…)
Appeasing the intolerant is not secularism. Unfortunately that’s the definition of secularism for these self-styled liberals pontificating to unwashed masses like me. Again because the Left is referred to as the ‘Secular Left’ and the other side is the ‘Conservative Right’ in the West, these Indian left lib guys think they are ‘secular’ too as they are the inheritors of the Left values in India. But even if the ‘Indian left libs’ are secular by the Western Left definition (equally tolerate all religions), that’s a welcome first step.
India is unique in that the conservative right is actually much more than secular, it actually welcomes plurality, not just tolerates it, as a Western secular Left does. And the Indian left lib (ILL) has the gall to call anyone outside their pretentious circle as ‘communal, narrow minded, medieval, outdated’ so that it can call itself the ‘broad minded, secular, intellectual, modern, progressive’!
