The national media has become the mouthpiece of the establishment to take on a non-existent Opposition, veteran journalist Saeed Naqvi has said.
At an interaction with journalists here on Thursday, he said that the role of the media in the past was adversarial to the establishment.
“Today, it is adversarial to the Opposition. Instead of taking on a powerful establishment, it has become a mouthpiece of the establishment to take on a non-existent Opposition,” Mr. Naqvi claimed.
He said that the media was now being controlled by corporates who had placed it at the disposal of the government to do what it likes. “No one knows what is actually happening in the country. There was demonetisation. But did it help? Who knows?” Mr. Naqvi alleged that crony capitalism and the government had joined hands, and the media was on their side.
The veteran journalist, the author of books such as Being the other: The Muslim in India, said that the Hindu-Muslim problems were embedded in the decision to partition British India into Pakistan and Hindustan. “Once you had created Pakistan, we had automatically become a Hindu state. Secularism was being imposed on us as an external value,” he said. Instead of that, there should have been some rule of law equally applicable to Hindus and Muslims. There could have been some bargain between both sides.
About communal politics, he said, “Congress did it softly, subtly and gently and the other party is doing it brazenly. The first communal riot in Gujarat happened in 1969 when the Congress was in power. More people died then than in 2002.” Narendra Modi came to power at a time when the post-9/11 wars were launched by the Americans. So, the Islamophobia in the world became a huge canopy which muffled the 2002 riots in Gujarat, he claimed.
“Because the BJP came to power when the post 9/11 Islamophobia was spreading in the world, they got justification. Our communalism became part of the global Islamophobia. That which we could control ourselves is now being controlled by Jerusalem and Washington D.C.,” Mr. Naqvi said.
