Narendra Modi regime’s ‘genes are totalitarian’, says Arun Shourie

Veteran journalist and former Bharatiya Janata Party minister Arun Shourie on Friday warned the media against becoming the Narendra Modi government’s “instruments for distracting your viewers and readers…from the main story”. He was speaking at a meeting at the Press Club of India in Delhi to protest against the Central Bureau of Investigation’s raids on NDTV promoters Radhika and Prannoy Roy on Monday. The CBI has filed an FIR against the Roys in connection with a loss relating to a loan NDTV had taken from ICICI Bank.
Among other prominent people who attended the meeting were veteran journalist and former MPs HK Dua and Kuldip Nayar, jurist Fali Nariman, and senior journalist S. Nihal Singh. Claiming 
that the Modi regime’s “genes are totalitarian”, the former minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government warned that the crackdown on independent media could widen in the next two years and offered concrete suggestions to journalists, exhorting them to stand united against any attempt to muzzle the press. Shourie told the large gathering of journalists, lawyers and activists to boycott the ministers of the government in protest and not to despair because “everything passes”. 

“And when they control the media completely, then people will see the great distance between what they are being made to swallow through the media and what is happening in their own lives,” he said.
Here’s the full text of his speech:

My dear friends, I want to begin by expressing my deep gratitude to Narendra Modi because he has brought so many friends together. And as a return the favour, I want to read him a couplet, which Kuldip Nayar will tell us who it is by:

Tum se pahle vo jo ik shakhs yahan takht-nashin tha
Us ko bhi apne khuda hone pe itna hi yaqin tha
[He who occupied this throne before you
He too believed himself to be God as much as you]

also see
A letter to Jaitley: Why do students get jailed but RSS leaders who issue vile threats walk freely?
The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS



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