NEW DELHI: Ravish Kumar, Senior Executive Editor, NDTV at a meeting organised by the Press Club of India on Saturday talk about the latest attacks on the media.
Ravish, the award-winning NDTV India news anchor protest the attack on Basit Malik, a reporter for Caravan magazine.
Basit, a freelance journalist went to Sonia Vihar in Delhi to report on the demolition of a makeshift mosque where there is a dispute between some Muslim and Hindu residents. The mob in the neighbourhood brutally beat him after they discovered he was a Muslim.
“Its power can turn anyone into a murderer. We are not even safe in our own neighbourhoods,” said Ravish.
He said that, ‘National Project for Instilling Fear’ has reached completion.
Before getting new highways and jobs, everybody has been unfailingly given one thing – fear. For every individual, fear is now a daily livelihood and we are all experiencing fear in so many different ways, from the moment we step out of our homes with so many warnings ringing in our ears – be careful, look here, look there….
“It is necessary to tell people, ‘What you are watching is garbage!’
“You are not being readied to kill Muslims. One day you will be used to kill just about anybody.
When the rumour of a child-lifting gang spread like wildfire through Jharkhand, Uttam and Gangesh were also killed alongside Naeem and Haleem. In Greater Noida, Bhoop Singh and Jabar Singh were travelling with their cows when accosted. They were reduced to pleading, please don’t kill me, I am not a Muslim.
Convert every person in the crowd to a possible killer – this too is a project. Managing a crowd is quite easy. Nobody owns the crowd; on the contrary, the crowd owns a government everywhere. It has its own government, it has people supporting it.”
The focus also shifted to the news coverage on some television channels that incite polarization with fabricated information.
“The way news channels are going, the time is not far away when we will forget the real republic and recognise India only through the news channel, saying, this is our India. It’s just a matter of perhaps a week or 10 days before that project too is accomplished. Soon they will field their own candidates and win with an 80% vote as well.
“It is only the lapdog (Godi media) media which is safe in India today. Jump into and snuggle down in the lap [of authority] and nobody will dare say anything to you anywhere – lose yourself in the songs of devotion, strum the tanpura, like Narada did, and chant Narayan Narayan on the television screen. Behold our Speaker, who is seen as occupying the strongest seat of democracy – these are her very thoughts.
He furthered said, “We have reached a stage where at the mere sight of the Urdu script written somewhere, we will start thrashing it on the ground that it is a ‘Pakistani’ language.”