Electioneering is getting sicker and sicker. Standards of good behaviour are daily being thrown overboard. And the main culprits to ill behaviour are the two parties: the Congress and the AAP. Private matters are aired. The matrimonial status of Narendra Modi is raised, totally irrelevant to electioneering. It is one way of throwing mud at Modi. I wish those who want to play dirty will do me the honour of reading my book on Modi entitled Man of The Moment. Then they will know a good deal of the man. He has been called a Hitler not knowing what Hitler stands for. What is the Election Commissioner doing when such abuse is recklessly made?
May I request all those who believe that RSS had a hand in assassination of Gandhi must read India Foundation Journal (January 2014) which is focused on Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel?
If Nehru was so sure of RSS guilt why did he ask the RSS to participate in the Republic Day Parade in 1963 after the China War humiliated him? As many as 3,500 RSS uniformed volunteers participated in the parade.
And then we have Kejriwal who is reported to have accused the media fraternity of selling out to the BJP, warning the media that anyone found guilty of indulging in such practice would be jailed when his party comes to power. Here Kejriwal sounds like the German dictator. The AAP has reportedly named four channels, accusing them of running ‘motivated stories’. The party claims that it has proof. Why not present the proof to the public?
The American press has been going hammer and tongs at Vladimir Putin the Russian leader as if Russia is guilty of invading an independent nation. The trouble with us is that the Indian media is largely dependent on western news agencies which are anti-Russian. To the best of one’s knowledge hardly any Indian newspaper has a correspondent in Europe, with the result that we have to depend solely on western news agencies. Happily The Hindu has a correspondent in Russia who is himself Russian and can present the Russian case where Ukraine is concerned.
The Hindu correspondent Radyuhin writes: “The Ukraine crisis is viewed in Moscow as a continuation of the western plan to encircle Russia militarily and torpedo its reintegration efforts in the former Soviet Union. The new leaders in Kiev installed with the West’s support are the same people who staged the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine in 2004 and set Ukraine on the path to NATO membership. Ukraine’s induction into NATO would be a strategic catastrophe for Russia.”
As for Crimea voting to split away from Ukraine to return to the Russian fold Radyuhin writes: “ Crimea voted to split away from Ukraine and return to the Russian fold. For a vast majority of Crimea’s Russian-speaking population this is an act of redressing a monumental injustice that happened in 1991 when Crimea which geographically, ethnically and historically is more Russian than many regions of Russia itself became part of a foreign state as the Soviet Union broke up along arbitrarily drawn administrative borders.” Radyuhin quotes a former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski as saying: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire in Eurasia.”
India has to be careful in handling the entire Ukraine/Crimea/Soviet Union issue. Incidentally Radyuhin says that “economic sanctions the US and Europe threaten to impose against Russia will push it further towards China” which will do no good to India. The United States and the West couldn’t care two hoots about India but what is happening in Ukraine and what can happen in the next few weeks will have tremendous impact on India’s own future. This calls for an open debate within the Indian media.
(The writer is a senior journalist and former Editor of Illustrated Weekly)
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