Goswami kinda Nationalism

 

83-year-old Stan Swamy who can’t even have glass of water without somebody’s help is thrown in jail for terrorist activities. A young stand-up comedian, Munawar Faruqui, is in jail for a joke that didn’t crack but might have cracked. Siddique Kappan, a journalist who went from Kerala to report a gang rape in Yogiland, is in jail for suspected terrorist links.

Laughter is a crime in Modi’s India. Helping the poor and the marginalised is a crime. Even questioning the government’s crimes can land you in jail. Nitish Kumar’s Bihar has enacted a law for gagging people’s mouths. And Nitish Kumar is the “Bhishma Pitamah of corruption” according to Tejashwi Yadav. Now, why is Mr Yadav not arrested yet for making that statement?

Well, this is Modi’s India. You can never say who will go behind the bars for what. Somebody like Arnab Goswami can say anything and do anything – even induce suicides – but won’t be caught by the law. He is above the law like a lot many other hardcore criminals in the country. Moreover, many of these criminals are ruling the country.

A famous Malayalam poet, Akkitham who died recently, wrote many years ago the famous lines: “Light is sorrow, son / Darkness is solace.” The young son who takes the morning walk with his father in spite of the latter’s warning against it is condemned to see the debris of the night’s venality lying on the wayside. Our leaders go on promising utopia in talk shows and public performances and channel discussions. Politics is entertainment without the consolations of consoling moral lessons like in other entertainments. Instead of morals we get the wayside debris and its nationalism.

Nationalist Arnab Goswami is one of Modi’s lapdogs in what has come to be known as Godi Media. The Mumbai police have released some of his WhatsApp chats which show him clearly as a deep pit of depravity. He has been asserting his nationalism with a vociferousness that disturbed sanity. Most nationalists in Modi’s India smack of insanity and Goswami is a perverted version of that insanity.

The leaked WhatsApp chats prove his nationalism to be nothing more than sham. Just a show. He can celebrate the deaths of our soldiers because those deaths bring him certain personal benefits. His nationalism is only that: personal aggrandisement. I have always believed with Dr Johnson that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. The kind of nationalism that is peddled in India these days will make even scoundrels blush with shame.

Ambrose Bierce differed with Dr Johnson and said that patriotism is the first (not the last) resort of the scoundrel. His definition of patriotism is: “Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.” Arnab Goswami’s torch has been burning for too long now. It’s time to give it some rest and a prison cell would be quite the ideal place for one who has been deciding for too long what the nation wants to know.

 

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 360: #ContemporaryNationalism

Both the images above are fish that swam into my net from the vast ocean of Internet.