While Barkha is a lot like Hillary Clinton, Arnab is similar to Donald Trump, with both men packing more hate than logic in their rants
As my wife is Assamese, whenever Arnab Goswami is on TV I laugh wildly and tell the children: “Look, tumhare mama.” (My wife shakes her head in chagrin.) If I’m visiting my in-laws then on the rare occasion that we spot Arnab, I announce: “Son of the Soil.” They merely bob their heads non-committally. (Neither my in-laws nor anyone else in Guwahati watches Mr Soil; there are shriekier Assamese news channels that make Mr Soil look subdued, even BBC-like.) I have on occasion met Mr Soil; once in Mumbai he was kind enough to drop me at office from the CM’s place and when I said that my in-laws considered him son-of-the-soil, he was so thrilled that I was afraid he might take me in his arms right there in the back of his Innova. (He did not.)
Arnab Goswami and Barkha Dutt
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Barkha Dutt is well-known and well-connected, though there hovers in her past the unsettling Radia tapes, a bunch of phone conversations that revealed the coziness of “the establishment”. Barkha’s calls had to do with proposed Cabinet appointments, and though some tried to link it to the 2G scam, nothing criminal came of it. More relevantly, however, is the way that my wife and daughters see her: they once spoke of her admiringly, and I realised that for women across India (and possibly beyond), she remains a powerful role model.
In fact, Barkha is a lot like her American friend Hillary Clinton, who is despised by many American men the way President Barack Obama is despised — seething and saying how-dare-you take over leadership in a white man’s world. No wonder both Barkha and Hillary appear to their detractors to be ideologically compromised and ethically corrupt; to their supporters these charges are simply part of the staggering obstacles in way to breaking through the glass ceiling.
It’s a no-brainer that if Barkha is Hillary, then Mr Soil is Donald Trump. Arundhati Roy famously called him “Fox News on acid,” though meth is probably more appropriate. Mr Soil’s recent diatribe against journalists critical of the government’s Kashmir policy (or lack thereof) called for action against dissenting journalists. That’s plainly a call to muzzle the press. If the press weren’t critical, it would not be the watchdog of democracy; it would, like Mr Soil and his Hindi-subtitled Sudhir Chaudhary, be a lapdog of power.
Like all of this government’s groupies, Mr Soil is logic-challenged. He does not marshall facts for his rants. He has little use for history. He conflates different issues into one rhetorical weapon. For instance, Pakistan’s support to Kashmiri militancy may overlap with the home-grown anti-India movement, but it is not its cause. It suits polemicists to make them singular because the agenda is clear: keep the land, rid it of people. If you disagree and say, let’s give the Kashmiris a fair hearing, Mr Soil and his ilk brand you as pro-Pakistan. Short on facts and long on fear: just like Trump.
Barkha actually reports from Ground Zero (Mr Soil hasn’t even visited Assam, which has seen consecutive years of floods, the latest claiming at least 26 lives and displacing more than the entire population of Gurgaon), and so his diatribe was aimed at her. She replied with logic and reasoning, though the problem with Mr Soil and his devotees is that they have little use for reason and logic (the tools of intellectuals). They are evangelical about their destiny, truth be damned.
While others like Rajdeep Sardesai have weighed in, the government’s apologists have stayed out, some calling it a ‘personal quarrel’ and some dismissing the controversy as ‘childish’. This puzzled me until Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, out of the blue, lashed out at actor Aamir Khan (and Snapdeal). Parrikar, who earlier looked sane, accused Aamir of speaking against the country, when we all know he spoke against the current atmosphere of intolerance in the country, created by this government. Why this untruth, and why now?
Clearly, Mr Soil and Parrikar are working to a plan. BJP President Amit Shah is desperate to win the 2017 UP Assembly election, but his party keeps scoring self-goals when it comes to Dalit voters. As for the upper castes — the Congress, one government survey allegedly says, will do better than expected. This would be catastrophic going into the 2019 parliamentary polls.
Yet Shah is nothing if not a one-trick pony, and as they did at JNU last year, it looks as if another round of polarisation is being whipped up with an eye on polls. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, the English writer Samuel Johnson said 240 years ago. It is equally true in these terribly interesting times, which is why we can expect more Hillary-Trump fireworks in the days to come, not just in America but right here at home, in India.
Senior journalist Aditya Sinha is a contributor to the recently published anthology House Spirit: Drinking in India. He tweets @autumnshade. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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