As soon as news broke of the arrest of Republic TV owner / editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami, support for him came from everywhere. Several leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, including Union ministers Amit Shah, Smriti Irani and Prakash Javadekar and other senior party officials, expressed their outrage and compared it to the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Several BJP activists even took the streets and protested using BJP flags and symbols.
Many journalists, writers and liberal activists also condemned 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 don’t remember the last time Narendra Modi’s entire cabinet came out in public and yelled their support for someone. We know that the Indian state will use all its strength and will do everything in its power to get him out of jail. To give you an idea of his political influence, it’s not just government sponsorship that he enjoys, but a few months ago, we saw how private airlines rushed to ban comedian Kunal Kamra from flying their planes just because he ‘booed’ Goswami on a flight, something this man is used to doing in his studio with just about anyone who doesn’t like him or his political teachers.
Unlike your victims, including Umar Khalid, Dr. Kafeel Khan, Safoora Zargar, Anand Teltumbde, Sudha Bharadwaj, and many others, you don’t need a ‘Twitter storm’ to be heard or generate public sentiments in your favor. It wields so much power that it can ruin the lives not only of high-profile public intellectuals or college students, who at least have the ability to speak out on their campuses or on social media, but also extremely vulnerable people who are powerless. , without influence or presence on social networks.
In addition to many other crimes, his channel led community coverage of the coronavirus, during which we saw that a section of the media directly blamed Muslims for spreading the virus in the country and used phrases such as “corona jihad”, “corona terrorism” and “crown bombs”. ”. The strident and hysterical reports against Tablighi Jamaat were a dog’s whistle against Muslims in general, and created so much resentment and fear in the minds of ordinary Hindus that in at least four states, including the national capital, many residential societies put up boards that Muslim fruit and vegetable vendors were not allowed to enter. A milk seller in Himachal Pradesh died by suicide after villagers insulted him about the spread of the coronavirus.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that, along with other news outlets, this man and the coverage of his news network effectively enabled economic apartheid against these people in at least some parts of India, destroying the lives and livelihoods of the people. poorer Indians.
I am confident that my refusal to join in Goswami’s defense will not adversely affect my liberal credentials or affect my obligations to my journalistic fraternity. As someone who has spent two decades in audiovisual journalism, I have conducted hundreds of television debates and I can say with some authority that what Goswami does in television debates is not journalism but an insult to the profession. I refuse to be counted on and am willing to resign, if this is what qualifies as journalism in India now.
It is axiomatic that a man who has abused his right to freedom of expression and has almost single-handedly destroyed the institution of journalism in India claims the freedom or privilege that the constitution grants to the press. Any criticism of his arrest by the police or of the “abuse of state power” must remain firmly outside the scope of freedom of expression and freedom of expression.
Even if we are to believe that the police action against him is politically motivated, Goswami should understand that it is a very important part of the game he had entered into by encouraging police action against others for tenuous reasons. The truth is that he has functioned as a political actor and not as a neutral journalist in his work. For the past six years, we have witnessed powerlessly the abuse of institutions by BJP governments in the Center and in the states to harass and imprison honest left-wing activists, students, and journalists. Working in tandem, Goswami generated public support for the government narrative, led kangaroo courts in his studio, and became a judge, jury, and executioner. Not once has he stood up in defense of a white journalist or activist from the BJP and its governments.
He has been actively involved in creating a situation in the country in which any political adversary can be prosecuted for false accusations, key institutions hardly come to his rescue, and the sacred principle of the rule of law remains only on paper. He should be the last to complain about this new ‘structure’ because he is one of the ‘nation builders’ of our immoral new India of 2020.
As George Orwell once said, “Either we all live in a decent world or no one does.”
It is clear that the victims of Goswami’s witch-hunting journalism, the hundreds of powerless citizens he and his own have targeted, cannot save themselves from smear campaigns or rely on the state and the courts to defend them, their lives and their means. subsistence. It is up to us, who believe in the constitution and in democracy, to use our voice and our social power to defend the homeless. Instead of journalists and writers wasting their time and outrage defending a regime propagandist, they should find ways to stop this hateful, anti-popular, and undemocratic propaganda that is disrupting our community harmony and destroying our hard-won social peace.
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