New Delhi: Can you imagine what would transpire in the country if the workers of the ruling party at the centre heckled the journalists who are opposition sympathisers?
It will be pretended as if the sky has fallen, democracy is dead, Article 19 of the Constitution has no meaning and there is a so-called ‘electoral dictatorship’ in the making under the Narendra Modi government.
But the media watchdogs and their biased associations, the election commission and the judiciary remained mute spectators when the workers of Congress bullied Aaj Tak anchor Anjana Om Kashyap on Sunday as she reached Rishikesh in Uttarakhand on the launch of her show "Aaj Tak ka Helicopter Shot - Rajtilak".
The Congress sympathisers were seen gloating on social media by sharing the video clip of their workers disguised as common people heckling Kashyap.
Can anything better be expected from the grand old party, which brought disgrace to the country by forcing an ‘emergency’ in 1975?
Can anything better be expected from the party whose scion Rahul Gandhi was caught instigating his supporters to unleash a physical assault on India News reporter Shiv Prasad Yadav in Rae Barely in February?
Can anything better be expected from the opposition-ruled states where journalists are subject to all sorts of intimidation from the governments?
Kashyap, arguably the most popular Hindi news anchor, was kept out of the boycott list of 14 television anchors released by the Congress-led INDIA alliance last year as she was too big to touch.
Moreover, she was the subject of heckling by Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar’s Patna when Nitish Kumar was forming the government after breaking up with BJP.
Such bullying fits in line with the opposition’s narrative against the media which gives them airtime to defend themselves against allegations of corruption or to attack the incumbent government.
“Somewhere, the opposition sees the media’s allegiance to the government in transactional terms as they use words such as Godi media or sold-out media. For opposition leaders, the media must speak their language of fear-mongering in the name of dictatorship whenever there is any action against any opposition leader. They want the media to go back to the 80s and early 90s and talk about caste politics. It is the DNA flowing deep in their veins from 1975. They will be worse if they come to power," said a political analyst.
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