Gouri Chatterjee - JNU row: Thank you, PM Narendra Modi, for allowing the nation to polarise so quickly // Akshaya Mishra - JNU students as 'anti-nationals': Dear anchor, who the hell do you think you are?
Thank you Mr OP Sharma. Or simply OP for his friends like
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. Thank you for not letting your status
as member of the Capital's legislative assembly stand in your way of hitting,
kicking, pulling the hair of defenceless, unarmed people at the Patiala House
Court on Monday afternoon. Thank you for proclaiming this with pride: 'Goli
bhi maar deta agar banduk hoti" (would have shot them dead if I
had a gun) and stating unequivocally that "it is not wrong if
somebody shouting such (anti-India) slogans is beaten up or even done to
death."
Moderation, never his strong point (he was suspended
during the Winter Session of the Delhi Assembly in 2015 for using
derogatory language against AAP MLA Alka Lamba), is something he will not have
to pick up in the service of his party now.
Thanks to those men in black coats, trained to uphold
the law and the Constitution, for shoving and pushing and beating, mercilessly,
completely outnumbered mediapersons and students, irrespective of gender and
age, grabbing their phones and cameras. Thank you for chasing them into
courtrooms and closing the doors for concentrated attention, merely for waiting
to hear the bail petition of Kanhaiya Kumar, JNU's student union president on
charges of sedition or, at worst, for simply being "JNU-waales." You
even embarrassed that great champion of television patriotism, Arnab
Goswami.
Not to worry, they have laid down the law, might is better
than right, whatever they may have been taught in law schools.
Thank you home minister Rajnath Singh. First for sending
the flatfoots into the JNU campus and picking up Kanhaiya Kumar for merely
being present at a meeting where 'anti-national' slogans were raised but one
who, by the police's own admission, did not mouth those slogans himself.
Second, for not knowing the difference between fake and real tweets thereby
giving true blue terrorist Hafiz Saeed, a handle to accuse India
of "misleading its own people and the world."
Whatever else the home minister may be accused of,
efficiency is unlikely to be one of them.
Thank you Smriti Irani, for paying more attention to
the complaints of ABVP members than to the submissions of teachers. Thank you
for interfering into the workings of the academic institutes under the charge
of your HRD ministry, throwing university after university into turmoil
and generally living up to the appellate Manusmriti Irani, bringing a gleeful
smile to the face of her bête noire Madhu Kishwar who has been happily
tweeting, tongue firmly in cheek, that "CPM leaders very happy with HRD
Irani for her cooperative attitude towards their concerns." Ms Irani knows who are actually beholden to her: East Delhi
MP Maheish Girri, Secunderabad MP Bandaru Dattatreya Batra and others of their
ilk.
Thank you Mr Amit Shah, for raising the ante by stating this
to be wholly an issue of "nationalism and patriotism", clearly
endorsing the strong-arm tactics deployed against the "Left-leaning JNU
students," dubbing JNU a "hotbed of separatism and terrorism"
and accusing anyone questioning the actions of the authorities as "joining
hands with separatists". Clearly, the BJP president has found his poll
issue, whenever and wherever they are held.
Thank you Mr Narendra Modi, for permitting the
country to be polarised so quickly. No longer the fig leaf of the great
developer, the angry flames that engulfed the Make in India stage
appearing like a symbolic funeral pyre for those grandiose drams that the man
who wanted to be Prime Minister had successfully sold to the nation. Growth is
turning out to be a mirage and can be consigned to those flames, replacing it
with nationalism and patriotism, often said to be the last refuge of
scoundrels. Birthday wishes in person to the Pakistan Prime Minister
notwithstanding, anti-Pakistanism is now the mantra, and will be chanted ad
infinitum, on any and every flimsy ground.
Akshaya Mishra - JNU students as 'anti-nationals': Dear anchor, who the hell do you think you are?
Dear television studio super heroes, leave the students of
JNU alone. You called them anti-nationals and traitors, maligned them in other
ways, gave a respectable university a bad name and earned your TRPs through it
all. Now please allow them to breathe some fresh air. They are young people,
smart enough to settle disagreements in a civilised way. And they hate your
presence around them. They are polite and they still have some respect left for
journalists, so they won’t call you vultures waiting for a carcass to feed on.
But that’s how they feel about you at this point.
Of course, their feeling does not matter to you much. Many
of you have lost empathy. Bloated by silly egos and that intriguing sense of
power that the overlordship of the studio brings, you have stopped being
mindful of delicate human sentiments. It won’t bother you one bit that students
are still immature and they have a long way to go in their lives. It won’t
occur to you that anti-national and traitors are simply very harsh words for
them, and calling them ‘worse than terrorists and Maoists’ is just going too
far.
Before we go any further here’s question: by what right do
you call people anti-national, seditious? To make it more direct, just who the
hell are you? It is never a journalist’s job to brand people as this or that.
It is never a job of a journalist to distort the truth and present an alternate
reality to the audience. A day after the issue of anti-national slogans hit the
media, Kanhaiya Kumar was quickly termed a ‘deshdrohi’ and the overwhelming
hint in the panel discussions that followed in several channels was that the
varsity is indeed a den of such elements.
The impact of such irresponsible branding by you is visible
now. House owners around the campus have started throwing out students, a
couple of them have been beaten up and the general impression going around
among the locals is everyone in the JNU is busy in anti-national activities.
The respect for students is gone. Now, who has to take the blame for that?
Obviously, the lot among you wearing nationalism on its sleeves. The video with
Kanhaiya in it shows none of his acts was remotely seditious.
Nobody is going to pull you up; the media in the country
enjoys a unique status that allows it to get away with anything. But sirs, in
your over-enthusiasm for the branding business, you appear no different from
the people who kill someone for eating beef or kill someone over religion or
having a view different from yours. Behind those brilliant suits and the
wonderful English you speak, you are uncouth people who would maim and murder
with words. The issue is still the same, though it might be a bit clichéd by
now: intolerance.
Blinded by your own sense of power and the grand delusion
that your opinion makes the country go around, you commit acts of intolerance
that are sometimes worse than those of the thugs claiming to be
ideologically-driven. We know you are clever people. You kill the other opinion
by loading your panels with people who would say yes to you all the time and
pounce upon dissenters at the slightest hint. We know how cleverly you twist
debates to support your view point and how tactfully you avoid topics that will
hurt the powerful and the influential. Students are not powerful or
influential, and so you think you can hurt them any way you like.
Since it’s your space and you lord over it, nobody would
tell you on your face that you are intolerant or uncouth. But sirs, if you
chose to call us anti-nationals for having our own independent views, then we
have the right to call you and your view point anti-national too. Our voice
won’t be heard far, far away, because unlike you, we don’t control the
megaphone. That precisely is the reason why you should be more responsible in
your conduct. The damage potential from you is much bigger. But you seem to
have abandoned that responsibility. Sirs, to raise the earlier question, just who the hell are
you? Who gave you the right to play god?
http://www.firstpost.com/india/jnu-students-as-anti-nationals-dear-anchor-who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are-2628828.html