Skip to main content

India Today’s own Narendra Modi


India Today to Narendra Modi: What about creation of jobs?

Narendra Modi: As for creation of jobs, it has been the topmost priority of my government. All our efforts have been geared to this task.

The above question-answer is from India Today’s latest edition, which is an out and out eulogy to Narendra Modi who is given the Newsmaker of the Year Award by the weekly.

Now let’s look at a news item from India Today’s website: A Romanian flight carrying 276 Indian passengers landed in Mumbai early on Tuesday after being grounded in France four days ago over suspected human trafficking.

It was not human trafficking. It was a whole airplane of people leaving India illegally but voluntarily to find jobs in the USA or Canada or any country better than Modi’s India. Ironically, most of these ‘illegal’ jobseekers are from Modi’s own Gujarat which he claims in the India Today interview as the state made ideal by him. “When I became chief minister of Gujarat in 2001, the size of its economy was around $26 billion (Rs 2.17 lakh crore). When I left Gujarat to become the prime minister, the size of Gujarat’s economy had become $133.5 billion (Rs 11.1 lakh crore).” Modi claims that in the India Today interview. He goes on to make a similar claim about India’s economic progress after he became the PM.

If India is indeed making all that progress which the PM claims in the India Today interview, why are millions of Indians choosing to leave the country and live abroad doing even menial jobs?  Hundreds of thousands of Indians are even giving up their Indian citizenship in order to be able to work abroad. Where is the ‘connect’ between Modi’s claims in the India Today interview and the ground reality in the country?

India Today has chosen Modi as the Newsmaker of the Year. They have dedicated the last issue of the year to Modi. Almost the entire magazine is about Modi. There is a long - very long, in fact - article that lists Modi’s achievements with ample details. The senior journalist of India Today has done a great job to project Modi as “The Reformer,” “The Builder,” “Messiah of the Poor,” “The Vishwa Guru,” “Master Strategist,” and so on. I’m not listing all of the epithets used by India Today, which has put up no less than 24 scintillating photographs of Narendra Modi in this one volume. 

The interview was conducted by India Today’s owners, Aroon Purie and his daughter Kallie Purie. The father and daughter know their business, if not their job. Senior journalist of the magazine, Raj Chengappa, was also part of the interview team. It is he who wrote a long panegyric to Modi as the lead article of the issue. When you read the article and the following interview, it will be clear to you that all questions and answers were ready long before the interview was conducted. Probably the interview was just a chai per charcha and a photo session. Yet another of those well-known Modi gimmicks.

Let Modi keep spending money on propaganda. He will definitely win the next Lok Sabha elections. He will be India’s PM yet again. And India will become a Hindu Rashtra. The minorities in India will suffer the same fate as the minorities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That is, Modi will make another Pakistan of India. We become like our enemies, some writer said. Modi will prove that statement’s veracity yet again. Some silly people will think that history is avenged. A few, very few, intelligent people will know the truth: the masses are easy to be fooled. Endlessly. Magazines like India Today will go on eulogising the ruler even if the party changes, the ideology changes, whatever changes… the Puries just want to laugh all the way to their banks. 


 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    "The Press" has been guilty of influence (and being influenced) by politics since ever it developed. I despair at the possility of there ever being anything like unbiased news. It is a near impossibility. But one can at least hope for alternate points of view, some counterpoint and balance... clearly none present here! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If the press tries to be unbiased Modi won't let them survive. He knows every strategy possible for keeping enemies away, real or perceived.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. Undoubtedly, especially when he will come back next year with a bigger majority.

      Delete
  3. Too many in the press are more interested in access than journalism. And too many are beholden to monied interests so much so that they don't even try to dig deeper on pressing issues.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Some rulers make it impossible for the press to be honest.

      Delete
  4. It honestly boggles my mind that every other day we hear about N number of people leaving India, and still nobody wants to question it !?! Insane how foolish we've become!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Probably India has learnt about the futility of raising certain questions.

      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

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some