A fascist shows his fangs

Prannoy Roy recently said if the Indian media is asked to bend, they crawl.

Thanks to the crawlers, we find it difficult to access credible news. The mainstream newspapers, barring exceptions, publish government press releases most of the time. The TV channels are mostly unwatchable. Let me give you two examples.

The prime minister has set up a private trust to collect donations to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, putting aside the PM's National Relief Fund which has been in existence since 1948. The new fund has been self-aggrandisingly named PM-CARES Fund. The Wikipedia says: “No one knows when it was registered, under which act, and why it [does] not contain any members of civil society or opposition as part of the trust.” (Accessed on 13/04/2030). Also, the trust isn’t covered under the RTI Act. So, the public has no way to find out how the amounts received will be spent. What level of arrogance can make the PM set up an opaque private fund in the time of the gravest crisis since independence, when he should act openly and transparently?

Secondly, India’s Corona virus cases are relatively small and we are happy about it. Let’s take a step back and check how many people India have been tested and compare it with a few other countries. According to a report published in the Business Standard on 9 April 2020, three countries had tested the following numbers till then FOR EVERY MILLION (1,000,000) PEOPLE:

Spain:                  18,300

South Korea:              60

India:                            4

  

A lot of experts believe India’s low level of testing is reflected in the relatively fewer cases, which is also a common-sense argument. If we may go back to the figures, it would be pointless to compare India with European nations, but for a country the leadership of which sells the fake dream of becoming a “Vishwa Guru”, can we not ask why India tested 1/15th of what South Korea, another emerging economy, did?

In a true democracy, the media will tear the government apart over the two issues I have flagged. But have you seen many discussions on them in the mainstream media, barring exceptions?

Fortunately, we have some new web-based news portals which offer us true news. They are run mostly by crowd-funding. The finest examples are THE WIRE and THE SCROLL. We should also mention Pratik Sinha’s Altnews.in, which has been doing a fantastic work. (If you haven’t, please do visit the website and check how much fake news is peddled by different sides of the political divide.)

The fascist powers that rule us cannot be happy with these upstart news portals which have captured the imagination of a lot of Indians, particularly the young. And they are not sitting idle.  

Recently, the UP government has filed criminal cases against Siddharth Varadarajan, Founding Editor of the Wire. The UP government accuses the Wire of “causing panic when it reported that UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath attended a religious event on March 25 at Ayodhya on the occasion of Ram Navmi”, long after a nation-wide lockdown was in place.

The Wire argues that the UP CM’s presence was an undisputable, recorded fact. However, in the article the Wire had “wrongly attributed a statement made by Acharya Paramhans to the chief minister, which was not only retracted but a corrigendum issued as well.”

In a statement made on 11 April 2020, 215 journalists have described the above event and issued a statement saying:

“Rather than let the matter end there, a FIR was filed in Faizabad district. On April 10, a team of the UP police descended at Siddharth Varadarajan’s residence to serve him a notice for appearing on April 14, irrespective of the fact that a nationwide lockdown was in force. … The state has an extra responsibility to exercise restraint on use of its powers when citizens are restricted in exercising many of their usual democratic rights. Freedom of the press is doubly important in such a context as people cannot make news themselves, but independent media is the most important medium of expressing their concerns. We demand that such politically motivated harassment of media persons should stop immediately.”

The New York Times tagline says, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

And what can be a quicker way to ensure darkness than to silence journalists by brute force or threats?

Monday, 13 April 2020