Tavleen Singh on government ministers suddenly defending press freedom / Arfa Khanum Sherwani: I’m a Journalist, That’s Why I Don’t Stand With Arnab Goswami
NB: Citing press freedom in defence of ruthless government propagandists who destroy other peoples' lives with no hesitation is like citing the freedom of scientific research for the infamous Dr Josef Mengele. Two Indian journalists describe their discomfort with 'lynch-mob journalism'. DS
On the day they arrested Arnab Goswami last week every senior minister in Narendra Modi’s Cabinet came out openly in his support. The list of ministerial supporters is long so here is an abbreviated version. Among those who tweeted for Arnab were the ministers of Home, Finance, External Affairs, Law, and Information & Broadcasting. They spoke of what happened to this celebrity TV journalist as an assault on ‘freedom of the press’. It was the hypocrisy of this that astounded me. They know better than anyone else that Modi has done more to curb press freedom than any prime minister since Indira Gandhi. Foreign correspondents who have written critical pieces on him have found restrictions imposed on their visas. Within India editors have been summarily dismissed for having the wrong attitude. Earlier this year I personally lost a column in a big Hindi newspaper that had been around for more than two decades. Discreet inquiries revealed that there had been pressure from the top.
So, the one thing that Arnab’s arrest is not is an attack on
press freedom. What it can be called is an attack by the Maharashtra government
on a journalist who has been so openly a spokesman of the BJP and the Modi
government that it is hard to describe him as a journalist. There has not been
an issue or event in this past year in which Arnab has not sounded like a
member of the Modi government. When the protests started against the
Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) he held a series of ‘debates’ that supported
the new law and charged the protesters with being ‘anti-national’. When the
first lockdown was imposed so suddenly that millions of migrant workers were
forced to walk hundreds of kilometres to their villages, Arnab’s ‘debates’
sought to prove that journalists chronicling this exodus of hungry, desperate
people were liars.
When during this same lockdown two sadhus were killed in Palghar, Republic TV tried its best to make it sound like a hate crime by Muslims. Then came the campaign to put Rhea Chakraborty in jail so that Sushant Singh Rajput’s name could be used by the BJP to garner votes in the Bihar election. Arnab led the lynch mob. She was first charged in Arnab’s court with murder and money laundering. Other famous anchors who emulate Arnab’s style of lynch mob journalism turned their own shows into courts in which she was judged guilty till proven innocent....
Arfa Khanum Sherwani: I’m a Journalist, That’s Why I Don’t Stand With Arnab Goswami
As soon as news of the arrest of the owner/editor-in-chief of Republic TV, Arnab Goswami broke, support for him poured in from all quarters. Several Bharatiya Janata Party leaders including Union ministers Amit Shah, Smriti Irani and Prakash Javadekar and other senior party functionaries expressed their outrage and compared it to the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Several BJP activists even took to the streets and protested, using BJP flags and symbols. Many liberal journalists, writers and activists also took it upon themselves to condemn the arrest and defended Goswami’s ‘freedom of expression’. Despite their disagreements with Goswami’s journalism, they said they felt compelled to oppose his arrest.
Goswami is one of the most powerful men in Indian politics
today. I can’t remember the last time when the entire Narendra Modi cabinet
came out in public and vociferously expressed support for someone. We know that
the Indian state will use all its might and do everything under its power to
see him out of jail. To give you an idea of his political influence – it is not
just government patronage that he enjoys, but a few months ago, we saw how
private airlines rushed to ban comedian
Kunal Kamra from flying in their planes just because he ‘heckled’
Goswami on a flight, something that this man is used to doing in his studio
with just about anyone he or his political masters don’t like.
Unlike his victims including Umar Khalid, Dr Kafeel Khan,
Safoora Zargar, Anand Teltumbde, Sudha Bharadwaj and many others, he does not
need a ‘Twitter storm’ to get heard or generate public sentiments in his
favour. He wields so much power that he can ruin the lives of not just
high-profile public intellectuals or university students – who at least have
the ability to raise their voices on their campuses or on social media – but
also extremely vulnerable people who have no power, no influence or social
media presence….
https://thewire.in/media/arnab-goswami-arrest-free-speech
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