Skip to main content

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. 

Comments

  1. Said right. Now the nation itself has to decide what it ought to know. Arnab Goswami is not a journalist. He can be anything - a good actor or stage performer, a skilled crook, a power-broker, a self-proclaimed (and self-demonstrated) mouthpiece of the ruling party and its supremo but by no means a journalism. If he is a journalist, then I am Lord Shiva.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wrong people in certain important places is precisely India's current nemesis.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...