Thursday, November 18, 2010
‘Times of India’ becomes ‘Crimes of India’
The way current issues of The Times of India, India’s leading English language daily newspaper, have been devoting its Front Pages as well as the next 3 to 4 full pages on breaking news and in-depth investigative reporting on huge corruption cases by the political class, it appears to transform itself into a new identity – ‘The Crimes of India’.
At the beginning, the way TOI covered only corruption scandal like Adarsh High-Rise Building’s flat grabbing by politicians, bureaucrats and army officials as well as Common Wealth games scandal of Crores of rupees being siphoned off from a huge state budgetary allocation to Commonwealth Games, the focus of TOI’s scandal-mongering appeared to focus on the one single ruling party of Congress.
But now with BJP’s Karnataka Chief Minister coming under a open corruption charge of illegal allotment of land to his kith and kin, and the role of BJP’s Arun Shoerie and late Pramod Mahajan awarding mobile phone spectrum to selected and preferred firms, widely believed to be against underhand payments to corrupt officials rather than being collected by the State, TOI’s investigating zeal is dragging it into a bi-partisan and more national focus on political corruption as a high-way robbery by the ruling oligarch in a most brazen and shamefaced manner, treating 1000 million Indian to be mere zombies forced to vote the same corrupt political class again and again. TOI’s lead is rather luke-warmingly followed by other newspapers and New Channels; but with highest readership and TRP coming TOI/TIMES NOW’s way, the impact of its campaign should make a big difference as to where the snowballing effect of this domino game will lead. The amount involved are so huge and mind-boggling that common people are at a loss to even figure out if it is all true.
If a revolution is must to clear up the mess, this is the most opportune time for the people to rise and register their disgust with the system and call for a new crop of secular nationalist leaders to come forward and take over. A home-grown regime change is the need of the hour.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
