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Sagarika Ghose tries ‘humour’ on Tamil politics, comes up with idli-dosa, gets panned

OpIndia Staff
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Sagarika Ghose tries ‘humour’ on Tamil politics, comes up with idli-dosa, gets panned

Former TV journalist and serial tweeter of inane stuff, Sagarika Ghose scored yet another self-goal today after creating a lazy stereotypical article under the garb of  “humour”.

The article was titled, ‘Tamil teri maa? Even those who don’t understand Tamil, can see that the OPS-Sasikala battle is spicier than sambhar ?.’ (that smiley in the end is actually part of the title)

First one might wonder what she meant by “Teri Maa” and the fact that sambhar isn’t really very spicy, the content makes it worse with lazy writing and the same old  phrases like Madrasi, Sambhar, Dosa, Rajinikanth, Chennai Express, scattered around.

Understandably people weren’t really happy about the stupid stereotyping of South India and reacted:


Teri Maa is actually a uncouth distortion of the word Theriyuma which means ‘Do you speak Tamil’.

Read the below excerpt at your own risk:


We frankly don’t know:



Even though the article came with a disclaimer, rather ironically, that it was intended to bring a smile to one’s face, it didn’t quite work out that way. Perhaps the only ones smiling after reading the article were the “Internet Hindus” (a term Ms. Ghose claims to have coined) who knew that Sagarika would now be panned for her writing.

To put the article in a nationwide context, imagine someone living in a western country writing an article about India where she paints the whole country as a land of snake charmers, makes fun of Indian’s accent, languages, quotes Slumdog Millionaire among others. Ms. Ghose just did that on a regional scale.

The main problem is not that she has no sense of humour (one may not have), the main problem is that she thinks she has.

Victory vs growth – the dilemma BJP has to solve in the run up to 2019

Abhishek Banerjee
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Victory vs growth – the dilemma BJP has to solve in the run up to 2019

Here is the BJP’s current strength : 281 Lok Sabha MPs and 10 sitting Chief Ministers. Additionally, the party is an active contender for power in at least 3 large states I can think of (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Karnataka) and a bunch of smaller states (Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, etc). In the last two and half years alone, it has established first time Chief Ministers in 3 states (Haryana, Maharashtra and Assam).

What is terrifying to other political parties in India is that despite it appearing to have reached its full potential thanks to the “Modi wave” of 2014 general elections, the BJP is still growing in strength. In states where it was present as junior partner, it has now started to become the main challenger. It happened in Bihar, and it appears to be happening in Odisha:


What? How? Local elections are supposed to be a cakewalk for the ruling party, especially with Navin babu being the face of Odisha. But the BJD has barely limped past the BJP in the Zila Parishad Polls. It is ridiculous to talk about a “Modi wave” in Odisha local polls. This is a success achieved on the ground by an RSS/BJP cadre that is ever hungry for success.

On a side note, the elite media said that the poor were worst affected by demonetization. I guess the following result means that there is little poverty in Kalahandi district of Odisha:



Coming back to my main point, while such explosive growth may bring jubilation to a right-wing impatient to see a collapse of the Congress ecosystem (a decades old entrenched ecosystem that will take time and grit to destroy), it is not without “near term risks” in the 2019 General Elections.

Such amazing success actually comes with heavy downsides. For instance, Navin Patnaik would have been one of the first partners the BJP could have counted on if it fell short of 272 seats in 2019. That possibility becomes tougher now.

In fact, a result like this one opens the door for an alliance between BJD and the Congress. At the same time, the door for any pre-poll or post-poll arrangement between BJD and BJP is closing. For one, such an alliance would be unfair to the BJP’s own workers, who have toiled hard to build up some anti-incumbency against the near invincible Navin babu. The BJP leadership in Delhi doesn’t even have the moral right to nullify those hard won gains by aligning with the BJD.

The same pattern is repeating all across the country with the BJP’s growth threatening the vote base of every other party. Bihar was just a trailer, where arch rivals came together to form  a Mahagathbandhan against the BJP. Simultaneously, even though Nitish Kumar has softened his stance towards the BJP, there is simply not enough space for a renewed alliance with the JD(U). Why? Because the BJP already has 22 sitting MPs of its own in the 40 seats of Bihar, not to mention 6 MPs of the LJP (and another 3 MPs of Upendra Kushwaha). Where is the space to offer Nitish Kumar? And again, such an alliance would be unfair to BJP workers who have grown the party in Bihar all the way to a winning position. It is not for Modi and Shah to step in now, declare an alliance and block their way in the last mile.

There’s Maharashtra, where the Shiv Sena is only a heartbeat away from joining hands with the Congress. Because of the egoistic and irrational nature of the Shiv Sena top leadership, the Sena may have shunned an alliance this time with the MNS, chances are that defeat in the BMC polls will make them wiser before 2019. Why? Because the BJP is now the dominant party in Mumbai; it has laid claim to Chhatrapati Shivaji and is making a successful bid for the Sena’s Marathi voters. The BJP’s growth is leaving no option for its opponents but to gang up.

Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and soon Mumbai may be glimpses of what “post-Congress politics” would look like in the short term. Here’s the simple arithmetic : most elections are won by a margin of about 5% votes. At many places, the Congress has been reduced to a rump party, which still polls 5-10% votes. Ironically, this makes the Congress a very attractive alliance partner for regional parties.

Generally speaking, if the Congress begins to rent out its 5-10% votes in each state to a regional player, the alliance will prevail over the BJP. That is why Rahul Gandhi is much welcome as a junior intern to Akhilesh Yadav : Rahul’s party will never rise again in Uttar Pradesh and Akhilesh Yadav could definitely use the 5-10% legacy vote attached to the Congress. If the BJP wins a majority in Uttar Pradesh, things could arguably get even worse, since even a BSP+SP+Cong+RLD combine in 2019 cannot be ruled out.

Not to mention Karnataka, where the Congress could ally now with Deve Gowda’s JD-S so as to save itself from a certain defeat. And we still don’t know all the “impossible” things that could happen as the BJP keeps growing in West Bengal and Kerala.

My final remark is that while the whole opposition “ganging up”  might give the BJP supporters a sense of unfairness, it actually isn’t unfair. Modi and Shah have stated their aim to turn the BJP into a dominant political system like that of the Congress in the 50s and 60s : right from Panchayat to Parliament. It’s a daring play and they have thrown the gauntlet right before all other parties in the country. It would in fact be unfair to expect the opposition to just roll over and die.

A “world conquest” like attitude runs the risk of making way too many enemies way too soon. It remains to be seen if Modi and Shah have the strategic depth and patience to carefully coax the raucous world of Indian politics into a unipolar ecosystem headed by the BJP.

This is why AAP leader Somnath Bharti deleted his tweet praising PM Modi

Hemant Bijapurkar
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This is why AAP leader Somnath Bharti deleted his tweet praising PM Modi

AAP leader Somnath Bharti who has a wide range of controversies to his name from allegations of domestic violence to being a spammer selling porn domains toilet found himself in the limelight again, when he sent out a tweet praising Prime Minister Modi for making it easier for the people to buy homes:

The ‘controversial’ tweet, now deleted.

Soon, almost predictably, he proceeded to delete the tweet. While some alleged that AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal himself had called up Bharti and asked him to delete the tweet, Bharti claimed that his account was actually hacked when the tweet was pushed from his account:



People found it tough to believe that a hacker would just share a news article instead of tweeting something more scandalous. Say, something like ‘Modiji allows us to work, but we watch and make porn clips’ or ‘Kejriwal is coward and psychopath’.

Speculations that Kejriwal himself might have called up was inspired by an earlier event, when back in 2015, the then Arunachal CM Nabam Tuki was forced to delete his tweet praising the Centre, allegedly at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, after Congress suddenly decided to oppose the peace initiated by the Modi government:

A tweet praising Modi government that was deleted under political pressure from Congress high command

Even if there was no call from Kejriwal, perhaps it made sense for Somnath Bharti to delete his tweet, because, as seen time and again, it can be very dangerous for non-BJP leaders to praise Narendra Modi.

Last year in November a leader at a BSP rally proceeded to praise PM Modi over demonetisation, only to see himself get into a scuffle where his mike was snatched. Others though have received harsher punishments; in 2009, a CPM MP was expelled for praising Modi, in 2013 Lalu’s estranged brother in law Sadhu Yadav was expelled from the Congress for praising Modi, in 2014 RJD had suspended a legislator for praising Modi, a JDU MLA was expelled and 2 MPs were suspended for the same, and the list goes on.

So almost invariably, praising Modi means public humiliation or a suspension/expulsion from your party. With Somnath Bharti belonging to a party whole supremo is a self-proclaimed arch nemesis of Modi, one can only imagine what fate awaited Somanth Bharti had he not deleted the tweet.

What Sasikala could have learnt from Sonia Gandhi

Kishore V. Ramsubramonian
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What Sasikala could have learnt from Sonia Gandhi

Rajiv Gandhi’s untimely death in May 1991 during the middle of an election campaign pushed the whole country and the Congress party into a leadership vacuum all of a sudden. After having won a thumping absolute majority in 1984 that gave him unprecedented number of MPs in Lok Sabha and an unassailable majority in both houses of the Parliament after the assassination of his mother Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi squandered the opportunity to take the country forward in many respects, instead landed into many controversies like Shah Bano case, IPKF in Sri Lanka (that led to his eventual death) and Bofors scam that costed him the election in 1989.

Successive minority governments by Janata Dal, first led by V P Singh and supported by an unlikely combination of both Communists and BJP and then by Chandrashekhar, supported by Congress both failed after short duration, and the country itself was in a state of both economic and political bankruptcy in 1991 when the election campaign was going on and Rajiv Gandhi was tipped to win again and perhaps chastened by the last defeat, expected to deliver much better this time around, but couldn’t live to see the elections through when he got killed in a suicide bomb attack by LTTE terrorists.

The Congress leaders got into a huddle and as expected tried to push his grieving widow, Sonia Gandhi, into the arena to lead their campaign as that would have got them a sure shot victory based on sympathy wave just as how Rajiv Gandhi himself won in 1984. Instead, Sonia declined the offer and eventually Congress turned up as the single largest party, but short of a simple majority. An unlikely candidate who had almost taken a political sanyas that time became the Prime Minister and led a minority government successfully for five years that saw revolutionary changes in the economic policies and opening up of our economy for the first time since Independence, a major shift from the Nehruvian socialist legacy that Congress party was following until then.

Narasimha Rao, who was expected to kowtow to the dynasty (read Gandhi family) didn’t stop at that, instead sprung a surprise and became an authority by himself and in the subsequent Tirupati AICC session, perhaps for the first time, there was an absolute leader of the Party and the Prime Minister from Congress Party who was not from the Nehru dynasty. This of course put many of the Gandhi family loyalists and apparently Sonia Gandhi herself into a spot of bother and the coterie tried their best to undermine Rao’s authority in many ways, and finally when Rao lost the elections in 1996, the infighting and revolt reached a feverish pitch.

The subsequent two years when again Congress was out of power but was supporting one short-lived minority Janata Government or the other, like in 1989 to 91, the power struggles within the Party were getting worse, as one big leader after the other like Mooppanar, Sharad Pawar and Mamata Banerjee left the party, and the Party was led by Sitaram Kesari who was finally locked up in a toilet, in a bitter and ugly brawl, during the Presidential elections that saw Jitendra Prasada, Rajesh Pilot and all trying to stake their claim. Yet Sonia Gandhi remained aloof and did not partake into any of these.

The party was about to split into different factions by 1997-‘98, when several of its leaders finally reconciled to the fact that the only unifying factor and saviour for the party would be the Gandhi family and Sonia herself, and finally urged her to take the leadership of the Party. Subsequently, she made the first major political move which is now famous as the “tea-party” move with Jayalalitha during 1998 aided by Subramanian Swamy, that pulled down Vajpayee’s NDA Government in 1998, but could not stop them from coming back in 1999. In between she fought a couple of elections and became MP, and finally in 2004, led UPA to its electoral victory and could have become the Prime Minister herself, but stopped short of it (either due to technical reasons or willingly) and chose Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister. As UPA Chairperson and Congress Party President, she was successful in continuing this arrangement for two terms and got a more resounding victory in 2009, which is not a small achievement, considering the fact that for the first time in about thirty to forty years Congress Party was winning elections back to back and forming Government in the Centre under her leadership.

During the period from 1991 to 2004, what is to be noticed is that, despite many occasions when she could have easily thrust herself into the leadership position, she did not do so. Instead she waited until the Congress Party tried other leaders and failed to unify and strengthen itself and the infighting led them to come back to her to lead the party which she eventually took up. Even then she proved herself by winning elections, sitting on the Opposition benches for about six years before she could get a victory for her party. And eventually worked out an arrangement to have Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister, even when she couldn’t (or didn’t – we never know) become the Prime Minister herself.

The situation was not so different for Sasikala now, when Jayalalitha’s untimely death pushed AIADMK and Tamilnadu into a leadership vacuum. Like Sonia Gandhi, she could have waited and worked out the arrangement with O Panneerselvam as the Chief Minister, who was doing a pretty decent job post Jaya’s death and could have taken advantage of holding the party together rather than pushing it into this crisis now of a split and uncertainty because of her urgency to become the Chief Minister herself.

As the General Secretary of the Party (that she got herself elevated into relatively easily and quickly without any resistance) already she was commanding the highest power within AIADMK. She could have waited and used this opportunity to first get the cadre support by uniting them and then people support by winning any by-election before asserting herself for the CM’s chair at an appropriate time later. If she was bothered about the imminent judgement by the Supreme Court, and any possible conviction, she should know that despite being in prison many times before Jayalalitha herself could come back to power easily.

Or for that matter it had not stopped Lalu Prasad from being active in politics and getting back to power again, as public memory is relatively short and people don’t consider being convicted and in prison is a great disqualification for a leader. But for whatever reasons, best known to her, she showed an urgency to occupy both the chairs, thereby pushing the very party that she was claiming to save now into an unnecessary crisis and possible split.

Now that the verdict is out and she is convicted, this urgency she showed, all the more stands exposed, and had she waited patiently, she could have even converted this verdict in her favour of getting some sympathy.

A story from 2011 is being circulated as a rumour today. Have you fallen for it?

Hemant Bijapurkar
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A story from 2011 is being circulated as a rumour today. Have you fallen for it?

Just after demonetization there were countless rumors flying around with the to create unnecessary panic among the already confused masses Which we tried to debunk them as far as possible[1][2][3]. The demonetization saga is almost behind us but rumor mongering isn’t.

A picture addressed to the Aam Aadmi about a so called misery tax written by Dr Devi Shetty of Narayana hospitals seems to be doing rounds where he writes about the devastating effects of levying a 5% Service tax.

Here he talks about a proposal which would cause people to pay Rs 5 to 10 thousand more for undergoing a heart surgery and how the government’s statement of it being applicable to only AC hospitals was a fallacy as no OT or Blood Bank could legally function without air conditioning. Calling it a misery tax he explains how the poorest of the poor would be affected by it and asks people to assemble on 12th March.

This image was even shared by some journalists like Krishna Prasad, who served as editor in chief at the Outlook magazine for almost 4 years:


Last evening the Finance Ministry itself rebutted the rumours by stating that there was no such provisions in the 2017-18 budget.


Before you jump the gun there was indeed such a service tax imposed by the UPA-2 government in 2011 by the then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee who then soon withdrew it after adverse public reactions. Dr Devi Sheety who is the Chairman of Narayana Hrudayalaya was quoted back then opposing the move.

This letter which is now being spread as a rumour appears to be a mashup of Dr Devi Shetty’s quote media reports of 2011 or it was indeed written by Dr Shetty himself in 2011 as posted on this site. If indeed real, the only big mistake of the letter, even though inadvertent, was that the letter only contained the date and month (12th March) and not the year which makes it prone for further explorations by rumour mongers. And yes this article was carried on some websites in 2016.

Question now is this: Does this qualify as “post-truth” for media mavens to chest beat on social media?

Can Economic Times be trusted with UP elections coverage? Asks Social Media

OpIndia Staff
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Can Economic Times be trusted with UP elections coverage? Asks Social Media

For around a month now, social media users have been pointing out the supposed ‘cheerleading’ of Akhilesh Yadav led Uttar Pradesh government being done by the Economic Times. Even though, as the name suggests, the newspaper’s chief focus is on the financial spectrum, there is still a sizable amount of political content in every edition of the newspaper, where Akhilesh Yadav and his government have been finding a positive mention regularly.



Naturally many wondered why Economic Times had found so much love for Akhilesh, and soon people came out with a theory linking the two:


Although this is just a conspiracy theory, it indeed is a fact that Akhilesh Yadav led state government had allotted 68 acres of land in Greater Noida for setting up of the Bennett University back in December 2014. It was by no means a hush-hush affair as Times Group MD Vineet Jain in a ceremony had presented Akhilesh with university documents and also thanked him for facilitating the allotment of land in a short period of time. This university falls under the Bennett Coleman and Company Limited, which is the umbrella organisation owning the Times Group.

The public association of Akhilesh with the university and Times Group didn’t end here, as four months later in a ceremony in Lucknow, he laid the foundation stone for the university and in August 2016 also inaugurated the University at his official residence.

Thanks to this association between the Times Group and Akhilesh, people have now started to wonder if this relationship also extends to the group’s reporting, and whether this was the reason why Akhilesh has been so royally depicted in ET reports. Times Group feels obliged to help a Chief Minister who helped them?

At least some on Twitter definitely feel so.

Social Media outrages as second account of Sonam Mahajan is also suspended by Twitter

OpIndia Staff
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Social Media outrages as second account of Sonam Mahajan is also suspended by Twitter

On 10th February, we had reported how popular Right Wing voice Sonam Mahajan, found her twitter account suspended. The account was influential on the micro-blogging site and had over 62,000 followers accumulated over many years, all of which were nullified by one suspension by twitter. This suspension was preceded by a series of such incidents occurring mostly with Right Wing accounts.

Sonam Mahajan, who also has a Facebook page, had claimed that she knew such a fate was inevitable after she had been routinely asking uncomfortable questions to Kejriwal and that the suspension was at the personal behest of Kejriwal, who was assisted in this regard by Raheel Khursheed a top executive at Twitter India.

She had also claimed that the suspension closely followed her tweet about Dangal actress Zaria Wasim’s mother who had posted a “Keep calm and defeat India” poster with a Pakistani flag on Facebook. Sonam Mahajan had gathered support from a vast range of social media users, including some celebrities like Raveena Tandon, Madhur Bhandarkar and also head of ZEE News, Dr Subhash Chandra.

To counter this unilateral ban by Twitter, Sonam Mahajan had then started a new handle named “@iSonamMahajan” on Twitter. Within 24 hours of starting this account, an ordinary Indian like Sonam had managed to recoup over 10,000 of her followers.

But it appears that even this new account has been suspended by Twitter:


Once again social media users were aghast at this blatant censorship by Twitter of voices it does not want to hear:


One user seemed to have warned Sonam of such an eventuality:


Within minutes of the suspension, an account named “The Bhakt Slayer” came up to claim responsibility for this attack:


If it has become so easy for targeted suspensions of users following a particular ideology on flimsy and non-existent grounds, can Twitter truly claim to be in support of Free Speech?

It’s not what Congress leaders are tweeting – It’s what they are reading

Hemant Bijapurkar
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It’s not what Congress leaders are tweeting – It’s what they are reading

Journalist Raghu Karnad recently wrote an article for The Wire titled ‘It’s not what Modi is tweeting, it’s what he is reading’, where he attempted to attack PM Modi over him being able to read some of the supposedly objectionable content shared by the people he follows.

He begins the article mentioning how people he followed, shared or posted some “objectionable” content which technically ended up on Modi’s timeline on so and so date, thus somehow questioning Modi’s choice of following such handles. He also spoke about how some politically incorrect people are followed by the people whom Modi follows, hence there’s a two degree separation between them and Modi.

After sharpening his blade by informing people about Modi’s huge social media presence, he claimed that Modi’s personal feed was somehow an affirmation of the fundamentalist nature of Moditva and insinuated that one or two stray tweets among the millions of tweets by the 1600 odd accounts followed by Modi, might influence Modi and that his follow-back somehow bolsters these alleged trolls.

Of course this assumes Modi is online watching and reading his Twitter feed 24×7, maybe the Karnad mixed him up with Kejriwal, who follows far more colourful handles. Also small mercies then that Mr Karnad did not draw any inference from the fact that Modi also follows an abusive troll called Arvind Kejriwal.

Anyway, taking the Mr Karnad’s stretched and warped logic further, one can make some interesting observations.

Congress is admired as a pioneer of technology in India. Every other day you would hear the phrase about how Rajiv Gandhi brought computers to India. Today the Congress party and its hobbits enjoy a sizeable following on various platforms of social media. This isn’t just one-way traffic, though. What is remarkable is how little attention we pay to what some Congress leaders see on their personal feed – especially since anybody can recreate it, by setting up a Twitter feed that follows the same users.

Even though the Congress leaders’ following lists include eminent personalities, media persons, sportsmen, some BJP leaders; yet the Congress leader’s feed is still in part a torrent of rancour and wilful distortion.

On 13th and 17th January the following tweets appeared on the timeline of well-known Congress leaders and affiliates like Ajay Maken, Priyanka Chaturvedi, Salman Soz, Shehzad Poonawala. The tweets glorified and celebrated the fact that RSS workers are getting killed at the hands of murderous communist mobs in Kerala.

A troll account followed by AjayMaken, Priyanka Chaturvedi, Salman Soz, Shehzad Poonawala

People might argue that the above tweets which are now deleted might have been tweeted in some rage or ecstasy, so for them here a few more tweets from this account:

Update: the aforementioned abusive troll, followed by Congress leaders and many journalists, tagged this reporter on Twitter and proudly claimed that he never deletes his tweets and supports murders of people who assert their Hindu identity. Earlier we had erroneously reported that the troll had deleted his tweets (as they didn’t appear in Twitter search); we thought to give benefit of doubt to even a murderous troll.


This originating account hasn’t yet being suspended for such vitriol as now a days only twitter handles of a particular ideology seem to be getting suspended. And wait there are more tweets where the Bolshevik openly calls for a harm to leaders and institutions.


Extending Mr Karnad’s logic, there is as much to learn from what these Congress people read on Twitter as there is from what they write. Mr Karnad would probably decipher that their personal feed ends up a reminder of the fundamental nature and origins of anti-Hindu bigotry.

As the mainstream media averts its attention from these details, it is the trolls, in this one sense, who reflect the facts. They are the facts, as Mr Karnad would put them.

Further, the heir apparent of Congress, Rahul Gandhi also follows the accounts of Ajay Maken and Priyanka Chaturvedi, thus he too is separated by just 2 degrees from the vile anti-Hindu vitriol of Comrade Nambiar. We are sure Mr Karnad would find this most disturbing.

Apart from this, it is interesting to note that these Congress leaders are just separated by two degrees from major misogynists: They follow a man called Tehseen Poonawala who has been exposed on live TV for being blatantly offensive and misogynistic to Smriti Irani.

The question now is this: Will Mr Karnad do a similar analysis of Rahul Gandhi, his acolytes and the Hindu hating “comrades” they encourage on social media?

76% Indians feel country is heading in the right direction: Ipsos MORI poll

Hemant Bijapurkar
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76% Indians feel country is heading in the right direction: Ipsos MORI poll

Ipsos Mori one of the leading research organization, in a global poll conducted on 7th October 2016 (before demonetisation) found out that about 76% of the people in India, the highest in a democratic country felt that their country is on the right track. What makes this poll even more interesting is that out of the 25 countries polled, majority of the people in as many as 19 countries including US, Japan, Germany and Great Britain felt that their country was heading in the ‘wrong’ direction.

India is in third position behind China and Saudi Arabia but as many reports suggest the sense of fear the Chinese feel about going against the establishment may suggest that people weren’t speaking with a free mind during the survey.

To take things a step further, we decided to compare this poll with that of polls of the same agency in earlier years to gauge whether sentiments have indeed changed over time. While the exact poll wasn’t conducted many similar polls were indeed conducted in the past few years.

Going back all the way to May 2010 before scams like 2G, CWG and Coalgate were at the forefront, almost 85% of Indians assessed their current economic situation as good which was the highest among all polled countries.

As compared to that in April 2013 when the whole scams fiasco had played out and as acknowledged by Chidambaram, UPA was paying a price for high inflation, the number of people describing the economy as good had dropped down to 66% a drop of about 19%.

As compared to the drop, in a survey carried out from May 2nd to 20th in  2014 it was found that there was a 6% upswing in a month after Modi was elected PM.

So even though the comparisons may not be like for like,, we seem to have encountered a 10% growth in positive emotions from May 2014 to October 2016, the figure which might change either for the good or worse if and when a survey will be carried out in the post demonetization era.

Hindustan Times journo insults and abuses PM Modi on Twitter, calls him ‘Jaahil’

Abhishek Banerjee
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Hindustan Times journo insults and abuses PM Modi on Twitter, calls him ‘Jaahil’

Off late, an attempt is being made to target ordinary citizens, who voice their opinion on social media. They are called “trolls”, labelled as being crass, low-class, abusive, when many of them are not even remotely abusive. It doesn’t take much for the left liberals to equate these “trolls” to jihadi terrorists as well. If by chance any such person is followed by the Prime Minister or any other BJP functionary, then quickly the argument is made that these people are trained, promoted and encouraged by the PM himself.

Here are some tweets by another private citizen:

Going by the language and tenor used, one can confidently brand this as account as that of  a “troll”, using crass and insulting language. Ideally such people can be ignored. But things take an interesting turn when we see that this account in fact belongs to a journalist. Madam Ifrah Mufti has been a journalist with The Indian Express and is currently working with the Hindustan Times:

Coming back to the above tweets, this media person refers to PM Modi as a “Jaahil”. A “Jaahil”? Really, this is the language that a Hindustan Times journo uses for India’s Prime Minister? Further, this Hindustan Times journo goes further to make a direct attack on the humble origins of Prime Minister Modi. Can you imagine a single person on the media going into the dubious pre-marriage past of Sonia Gandhi?

Wow, simply wow! A journalist for a major national media house calls Modi a “Jaahil” simply because he started life as a humble tea seller. The class hatred in this tweet is too disgusting for me to separately put in words.

In fact, this “journalist” appears to be participating actively in the political trend #JaahilPMModi by retweeting several posts on this hashtag. Much neutrality:

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For a while now, celebrity journalists, terrified of losing the narrative to social media, have been trying to run down right wingers on Twitter and Facebook by accusing them of being “abusive”. But clearly, Ms. Ifrah Mufti’s obsessive hatred of the BJP and willingness to abuse has not hindered her career within the Mainstream Media.

In fact, she has reported for the Hindustan Times on highly sensitive subjects, such as reactions to the Kanhaiya Kumar episode at JNU.

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Ms. Ifrah Mufti has also been reporting on issues that are of critical national security interest.

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This article above discusses the early life of Zakir Rashid Bhat, the man who was touted in a video by the Hizbul Mujahiddeen as a “successor” to Burhan Wani! (see here). The article by Ms. Ifrah Mufti presents several kind testimonials of Zakir Rashid Bhat as “tech-savvy”, “talkative”, “keen student”, “eager to mingle” , “fun loving”, “outgoing” and “very friendly”. Not too far away from the now infamous “Son of a headmaster” line.

Let’s summarize: Our attitudes towards active Hizbul Mujahiddeen terrorists are being moulded by writings of journalists such as Ms. Ifrah Mufti in national newspapers like the Hindustan Times.

Further, Mufti is also followed by the official account of The Hindustan Times:

Going by the logic propounded by our left liberal analysts, does this mean the Ms. Mufti is being coached and encouraged by The Hindustan Times to spew such bile from her profile? If PM Modi is often asked to unfollow such accounts, will The Hindustan Times be urged by our left liberals, to at least unfollow such a journalist, leave alone sack her from her job?

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