Why Don’t Channels Clear The Air By Telecasting Kanhaiya’s Speech
Saeed Naqvi
Arnab Goswami of Times Now Television, runs his show rather like an animal trainer in an old fashioned circus or an Al Capone like gangster, terrorizing his minions, which is what the panelists palely peering out of those windows begin to look like, by the time Arnab is through with them.
It is in this galaxy that
Sambit Patra, BJP Spokesperson, has been shining these past few days with
incomparable light. Arnab runs a clip showing Kanhaiya Kumar and his friends,
raising their hand and throwing their heads back. There are no words, only
cacophony. Sambit Patra provides the missing slogans. “Afzal hum sharminda
hain; tere qatil zinda hain.” (Afzal Guru, we are embarrassed that your
murderers roam free).
Flushed with success from
Times Now where, with Arnab Goswami, he had helped viewership ratings sky
rocket on the JNU issue, Patra turned up at the India Today Television, to test
his luck. He will rue the day he accepted anchor Rahul Kanwal’s invitation.
Shouting slogans in support of
Afzal Guru is a powerful allegation against the JNU demonstrators. This has
become particularly so for the millions who watch Arnab’s show. This vast
viewership is liable to swallow the allegation unhesitatingly simply because it
does not have the background. This audience does not know that the anniversary
of Afzal Guru’s death has been observed all the three years since his hanging –
religiously in Kashmir and in liberal enclaves like Jawaharlal Nehru
University.
True, Afzal Guru’s crime was
heinous. He was supposed to have master minded the December 13, 2001 attack on
Indian Parliament, barely three months after the 9/11 attack in New York.
The Supreme Court judgement
handing him the death sentence did not satisfy everybody. The Honourable Court
admitted that the evidence was circumstantial, but went onto argue that the
“collective conscience of society will be satisfied only if the death penalty
is awarded to Afzal Guru.” Critics found it unfortunate that a court of law
decided to pander to its assumed notion of “collective conscience” rather than
abide by points of law.
The hanging too was most
mysterious. Without informing his family, Afzal was secretly hanged and buried
in Tihar jail. Since then there is a demand in Kashmir for his remains to be
returned to the family. Is it an unfair demand?
In Kashmir, Afzal Guru is not
a closed chapter because of the circumstances attending the disposal of the
case. But buoyed by political power, this time the Sangh Parivar decided to push
for charges of sedition against Afzal Guru’s sympathizers. This is part of a
larger game spelt out in an article in The Pioneer published in June 2014 soon
after Modi came to power. The author K.G. Suresh is a versatile journalist and
a member of the Sangh Parivar think tank. He said: “Augean stables of that
hallowed institution called JNU must be cleaned. They have over the years,
become dens of secessionism, Maoism and terrorism.” Was it not Subramanian
Swamy whose name was being mentioned as the possible Vice Chancellor? He showed
his hand the other day when in the context of the current agitation he asked
for the university to be shut down for four months. But for the time being sedition
charges on the leftist union leader would suffice.
For this line of action to
succeed, choreography of the whole Afzal Guru show in JNU would have to be
couched in clear cut anti India rhetoric. In this, the Sangh Parivar goofed up
in its co ordination with the JNU authorities and the police. First, the Vice
Chancellor permitted the show. But when the youth wing of the Parivar, ABVP
protested, permission was withdrawn.
The university
administration’s indecisiveness became yet another nugget in what to me has
been the finest piece of oratory since the days of Prakash Veer Shastri and
Atal Behari Vajpayee. In his February 9 speech, Kanhaiya Kumar “left the
audience spellbound” according to eye witnesses. It was imaginative of the
Indian Express to have published an English translation of the speech under the
title “Is this Sedition?”
By now Arnab and Sambit Patra
– and sundry other duets – were on the move providing lethal voiceovers to
clips showing Kanhaiya and his friends shouting inaudible slogans which were
alleged to be anti Indian.
“We shall avenge Afzal Guru’s
killers; we shall breakup the country; Pakistan Zindabad and worse.” We have
Sambit Patra and Ravi Shankar Prasad’s testimony that this was the anti
national fare dished out at the JNU do.
Secure in the conviction that
he had won the propaganda war for the Sangh Parivar-ABVP, Sambit Patra sought
to push his luck a little further with a different channel – India Today
Television.
Rahul Kanwal’s advantage is
that he is a reporter as well as an anchor. First, with great craft, he lulled
Patra into a sense of false security. How cleverly had Patra been channel
hopping armed with the video clip of Kanhaiya’s anti national sloganeering
which has been dominating “some channels” Rahul said.
He then led Patra to an in
house computer whizkid who, quite expertly, separated the Kanhaiya clip of 9 February,
with crisp and clear sound quality from the doctored clip of 11 February where
the sound has been deliberately muffled to warrant outside commentary – Patra’s
in this case. Rahul’s sifting of the grain from the chaff left Patra tongue
tied on live TV. He made cow eyes at Rahul. He looked like Surma Bhopali caught
lying within Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra’s earshot in Sholay.
Meanwhile, Kanhaiya in his
speech has challenged the ABVP to debate him on nationalism. This is the crux
of the matter. Here is a TRP spinner for the channels to pick up. Or atleast
the speech can be telecast so that the nation can distil the truth from the
concoction the ABVP and the Police have poured into the JNU cauldron.
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