I was appalled when the Bharatiya Janata Party went after Tehelka because The news magazine did nothing wrong. BJP just got mad because the magazine showed some of their leaders and armymen to be crooked. What happened to Tehelka was sheer vindictiveness.
Otherwise, we might as well do PR. But under the cloak of journalism The Wire and others like them have conducted their agenda of hate against Modi and the BJP. That’s not journalism, it’s activism of the most vicious kind.
But this time, I really hope the BJP, through Malviya, goes after The Wire. They need to be shut down because their reporting is nothing but scurrilous and defamatory. The promoters need to be arrested and punished. We were always taught to be anti-establishment.
They’ve got away for nearly 8 years or so because the BJP did not react legally. It’s ok to dislike Modi, his ideology and what his party stands for. But to conduct a sustained hate campaign against them with cooked up stories goes way beyond anything that is taught either in journalism schools or newsrooms.
It’s not just The Wire that did this and still does. And it’s done because the govt hasn’t pursued it legally. They also know that only a watertight case will hold up in court because we have a judiciary that still believes in encouraging a free press. Also, punishment for the crime is an expulsion from one job and another elsewhere.
The media firmament is littered with such examples of journalists who moved to the next job and continued merging fact with large dollops of fiction. In The Wire’s case, it conducted a systematic campaign of lies. The highest courts in the land have said so in as many words that the campaign against Modi was nothing but fiction.
It’s not Varadarajan alone but others who were allowed by him to use his platform to conduct their campaign against the BJP and Modi, who need to be behind bars. Not in all my years of journalism and academics have I seen anything like what The Wire and others orchestrated against Modi.
Tehelka only created a fake company to sting real people and showed a mirror to the politicians and the armymen of the day. The Wire, its reporters and writers with the help of the left liberal ecosystem around the world created spiteful fiction day after day so convincingly that a lot of us actually believed it to be facts.
Been There Done That 