Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Is India joining the ranks of North Korea, China, and Russia when it comes to the freedom of the media? India’s rank in the World Press Freedom Index as well as many other similar indices has been declining rapidly in the recent years. The cover story of the December issue of The Caravan magazine, one of the few remaining independent journals in the country, is about how Mukesh Ambani has become the media manager of Narendra Modi. Ambani’s Reliance bought News 18 in July 2014. The year is significant. Modi had just come to power in Delhi. Eventually News 18 bought off many TV channels and journals. The Caravan informs us that using these media Modi is doing exactly what Kim Jong Un has been doing in North Korea, Putin in Russia, and Xi Jinping in China. The first major casualty, when the government takes control of the mass media, is Suppression of free speech and dissent . The Caravan reveals how scores of journalists who refused to propagate what the government wanted the...

Modi was in Kerala the other day. His speech was distressingly interspersed with the ominous phrase “Modi’s guarantee”. For example, he would say: “Every Indian will have a toilet, this is Modi’s guarantee” or “India will be a $5 trillion economy, this is Modi’s guarantee.” This morning, the latest edition of a Malayalam weekly, Sathyadeepam , reached me along with other subscribed publications. I was impressed by its editorial. Please allow me translate it and bring it to you because I think it deserves to be read by many more people than the limited subscribers of Sathyadeepam . Those who wish to read it in the original Malayalam can do so here . The translation is not literal, I have taken the liberty to edit it for the sake of better clarity to a non-Keralite reader. I hope the Sathyadeepam editor will forgive my transgressions. M odi is not the guarantee, the country's constitution is . Since the prime minister has the constitutional obligation to ensure development and se...

Half of the world’s population will go to the polls this year. Forty countries will be voting for a new government in 2024. That will be 3.2 billion people exercising their democratic privilege of choosing who will govern them. If we add the local body elections and county/state elections, then the number of countries going to the polls will rise to 76. Open Society Foundations of the USA conducted a survey a few months back to study the health of democracy in various countries. The survey covered 36,000 adults each (18 years and above) from 30 countries including India. That is a mammoth survey. Some of the findings may be a little disturbing for those who love democracy.  A large number of youngsters seem to be losing faith in democracy, according to the survey results. While among the people in the age group of 56 and above, 26% preferred a strong leader to democracy, the percentage of youngsters (18-35 years) who made the same choice was 35. Nearly half of this latter gr...

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 i...

“If you keep doing the same things, you will keep getting the same results,” Dave Ramsey said. It doesn’t matter who Dave Ramsey is. I don’t know, in fact. Albert Einstein could have said that as well. From the time BJP came to power in Delhi, India has been doing more or less the same thing: sectarian politics which favours one particular community and marginalises all others. Since the majority of Indians belong to the community favoured by BJP, no other party could arrive at an effective strategy for winning elections. People obviously want favours from those in power. And BJP is giving those favours to the majority. The majority will then vote BJP. BJP continues to rule. Happily. Till date. And so some genius in the other camp struck upon a strategy. Divide the majority community along caste lines. This is not a new strategy at all. This was effectively made use of in all the Hindi belt states earlier many times by many parties. What is new now is that almost all the non-BJP ...

Image from cleanpng.com The latest raid by India’s ED [Enforcement Directorate] on NewsClick and the arrest of its founder remind me strangely of Joseph Heller’s character named Orr in the novel Catch-22 . Orr and Yossarian are both in the US Air Force. Now Yossarian is in the hospital undergoing treatment. The war is going on and hence Yossarian, like most other soldiers, would love the treatment to go on endlessly. Yossarian’s pain in his liver refuses to become jaundice. “If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him.” Orr is Yossarian’s roommate. When Orr was a kid he used to walk around all day with crab apples in his cheeks, he says. Yossarian wants to know why. Orr says it’s because crab apples are better than horse chestnuts. Yossarian repeats his question. Why would anyone walk around all day with anything in his cheeks? “I didn’t,” Orr says, “walk around with anything in my cheeks. I walked around wit...

One of the infinite trolls on the various media in India says, “When a clown enters the palace, he does not become a king; the country becomes a circus.” Has India become one such enormous circus? Today’s Malayala Manorama [15 Sep] newspaper says that the 400 nurses recruited by one single agency in Kochi at one time alone are struggling to eke out their living by mowing lawns and doing other jobs such as painting walls. They spent over Rs12 lakh to get to their El Dorado in the hope that all their financial problems including those of their families would be over soon when they start earning handsome pay-packets as nurses in good hospitals. Millions of young jobseekers are leaving India every year. “India saw a 30% decrease in jobs for young people since 2016,” say news headlines . It is not only jobseekers that leave the country but also young students who complete class 12. From the school where I am teaching, half of the students go abroad for higher studies after class 12 b...

From The Print India is going to be a superpower. When my Prime Minister says that I should feel proud. My veins should bulge with the thrust of rushing blood of patriotism. I wonder why my blood doesn’t rush. Am I not patriotic? Am I an antinational Modi-baiter who should be put behind the bars like hundreds of others ? A whole state called Manipur is burning in the imminent superpower. People are killing one another. The Prime Minister hasn’t said a word about it though the violence has been going on for nearly three months. When a video surfaced showing the brutal treatment that the PM’s supporters extended patriotically to two women in Manipur, Modiji condescended to say that such treatment of women was very un-Hindustani. And that was an utter lie. Hindustani culture burnt women on their husbands’ funeral pyres. And Modiji is a diehard fan of that great ancient Indian culture . The great Indian culture has always stifled the vast majority of people in various guises like th...

From India Today Knights in Shining Armour Narendra Modi visited the Northeast of his kingdom more than 60 times after he crowned himself as the emperor of India-to-be-renamed-as-Hindustan. Travel is one of his countless passions and hence the number 60 need not bother us. The only place left on the earth for him to visit is Timbuctoo. It is rumoured that he wanted to go to the moon on the latest edition of Chandrayan but the scientists were not quite sure of whether their thing would land in Pakistan mistaking it for the moon. The scientists who made that rocket went to the Tirupati temple to ask Venkateswara (Modi may not know that Hindu God yet!) to direct the rocket scientifically to the moon instead of Pakistan. At that time Modi was in France preaching peace to the world. Om shanti. Let there be peace, said Modi to France. And Manipur burnt. Manipur has to burn for the sake of world peace. Narendra Modi is the name of the last incarnation of God, according to the latest Hind...

People of my generation are very familiar with the name Arun Shourie.  As editor of the Indian Express , he did a tremendously bold job of questioning Indira Gandhi in the days of the dreaded Emergency.  Later he joined the BJP and became an MP in the Rajya Sabha.  He has written a number of books which are thought-provoking.  The 75 year-old intellectual spoke to Swati Chaturvedi , author of I am a Troll , a book which exposed the BJP’s digital army which abuses and harasses people online for questioning Narendra Modi and the party.  Let me highlight some interesting points from the interview.   In happier times Emergency-like situation in India Mr Shourie thinks that the Prime Minister has created a “decentralised emergency”.  The country is run by mafia groups who terrorise those who criticise Modi or his policies.  Gau rakshaks, for example, are not motivated by “love for the cow” but the need to dominate other people. ...

Narendra Modi has replaced Mahatma Gandhi with himself in the 2017 wall calendar and table diary brought out by the Khadi Village Industries Commission .  Everything else that the narcissistic prime minister has done so far dwindles into insignificance with this latest feat.  Picture Courtesy: JantaKaReporter The Mahatma and ‘the’ Modi are poles apart.  Where the former sowed love, the latter bred hatred.  The former stood for peace and tolerance while the latter has instigated strife and intolerance on many an occasion.  The Mahatma deserved the appellation conferred on him by none other than Rabindranath Tagore.  The Modi will have to be reborn at least a dozen times even to understand the profundity of that great soul whom he has replaced shamelessly on the calendar and the diary. I’ll be doing a tremendous injustice to the Mahatma if I go on elaborating the differences between him and his replacement.  There is not even a worthwh...

Speaking during a function in Raigad yesterday, Prime Minister Modi threatened the nation with more “difficult decisions.”  From today's Times of India A couple of days back, Steve Forbes, Editor-in Chief of Forbes magazine condemned Mr Modi’s demonetisation as immoral and theft of people’s property.  A few days back, Wall Street Journal wrote that “Instead of factory openings or large new investments, the images that tell India’s current economic story include snaking lines outside banks, distressed workers migrating back to their villages, and tax raids on jewelers and officials caught with hoards of allegedly illicit cash.” Today is Christmas, a festival that marks the birth of a man in whose name a major religion came to be founded.  Christianity has always upheld suffering as a virtue.  It has relished imposing more and more rules and regulations, restrictions and penalties on its people.  Its priests and other leaders love to threaten t...

BJP has made a clean sweep of the Chandigarh municipal elections by winning 20 of the 26 seats.  Amit Shah has already declared the victory as the people’s approval of the demonetisation.  We should not disregard Shah’s declaration as the Hanuman’s natural devotion to his god.  In fact, BJP’s sweeping victory is an indication of things to come.  The party may end up winning many more elections in the coming months.  As many as seven states are going to assembly elections in 2017. “An economic measure should be, and normally is, judged on the basis of how it  benefits  the people, and any measure that brings distress to the people is derided for that reason. What we find in the present case however is just the opposite:  the more demonetization brings distress to the people, the more it is applauded for its wisdom and courage.”   Prof Prabhat Patnaik wrote recently in The Citizen .  [emphasis retained from the original] There...