Prime Time
Congress leader Kapil Sibal was TV’s lead man Tuesday, with his press conference where he tried to explain his presence at London’s EVM hackathon. Sibal was seen seated comfortably at home, throughout Tuesday, late into the evening on Zee News, India TV and others.
Most prime time anchors found his explanation — that he just happened to be in London — rather feeble. CNN News18 called it Congress’s `biggest self goal’.
Others news channels had moved: Mirror Now to UP. Anchor Faye D’Souza wondered if more cows attended schools in the state than students.
News X went with ‘ChowkidariCV’ in which it claimed, “PM chor jibe jousted”. Jousted?
Times Now and Republic went after the “tukde tukde” gang with “authentic” recordings from the February 2016 JNU meeting which have resulted in a sedition case against Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and eight others.
One problem with the debates: no one said what many legal experts have emphasised: shouting slogans is not a case of sedition.
On Times Now, Rahul Shiv Shankar played out the ‘super exclusive’ tapes and then asked Madhu Kishwar, on JNU’s Academic Council and the only one on the panel, he said, to have studied there on how she viewed the tapes.
Kishwar replied that slogans apart, that Kashmiri militant organisations were “handpicking” students and “planting” them in “sleeper (terror) cells” at JNU. The father of Umar Khalid, one of the accused of sedition, had “SIMI links”, she added.
Shankar happily agreed: there were attempts to “Balkanise” the country, he claimed.
Republic TV had the “anti-India sloganeering tapes” too. It used the debate to promote its new Hindi news channels, Republic Bharat, with its Associate Editor, Alok Verma, fronting the report on the “authenticity of the tapes”.
Before the debate with Arnab Goswami began, political analyst Nishant Verma questioned the tapes authenticity. He said that the tapes were fake, doctored.
Goswami insisted the tapes were real and “exposed the tukde tukde gang”.
ET Now’s anchor Supriya Shrinate travelled to Davos where she interviewed former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan.
Asked to forecast the 2019 Lok Sabha election results, Rajan replied, “Elections create uncertainty about what the next political establishment will be. I take comfort from previous elections — people have consistently brought in governments that have stuck to reforms’’.
Ranjan also pointed out failures in Modi’s reforms: “The Modi government has done little on labour and land reforms.”
On Aaj Tak, Rahul Kanwal interviewed Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath. Kanwal asked him if BJP was wooing Congress MLAs in Madhya Pradesh, like it has in Karnataka. Nath replied, “They are in contact with at least six of our MLAs but I have full faith in my party.”
Front page
It’s another morning when the newspapers have little in common, at least on the front page. What’s going on? Is there too little big news or has the media caught cold in the rains that cleaned up the air in northern India?
We can breathe easy for now, or so Times of India, Hindustan Times and The Indian Express inform us: ‘Delhi air cleanest in 4 months, thanks to rain’ (TOI, pg7), ‘cleanest since September’ adds HT (page 02). ‘Rain brings down temperature and pollution’ (Express).
One of the few stories common to the leading newspapers is the EC complaint against the “hacker” who claimed that manipulated EVMs helped rig the 2014 election results.
HT and TOI mention him on page 1: “EC fumes, Sibal faces heat over EVM hack claim,” reads HT’s headline. TOI has “Delhi police file FIR in EVM rigging claim”. It allows Sibal his say on why he attended the London hackathon: “’Why is the (law) minister pointing fingers at the Congress instead of proving the veracity of the claims made?”’, it quotes him saying.
The Hindu and Express leave the controversy to their inside pages.
Sabarimala makes news again in two very different stories. Hindu has “Sabarimala review hearing awaits Justice Malhotra’s return”, as lead headline.
Justice Malhotra, on sick leave, was the lone dissenting voice in the SC judgment that allowed women of all ages to enter the temple. She felt the exclusion of women from the temple to be an “essential practice”, which “has since then become a rallying point for the review petitioners”, writes the paper.
HT reveals something more sinister in the Sabarimala controversy: “BJP banks on Sabarimala to be Ayodhya of the south” reads its headline. The BJP hopes that the temple dispute will “catapult the party to political prominence…just as the Ram Janmabhoomi movement lifted the party’s fortunes decades ago in the north”, it writes.
On the same theme, Express says “Hindu outfits get NRIs to sign up for Ram temple” “in a corner stall” of the ongoing Pravasi Bharitya Divas (pg 6).
HT leads with Pravasi Divas on page 1 where PM Modi took potshots at the Congress “for failing to tackle corruption during the years it was in power”. The Express notices he spoke to a “cheering crowd”.
Opinion
The Indian Express writes in ‘Congress like BJP’ that the ruling party in Rajasthan “seems to be going its predecessor’s way in terms of rhetoric and policy vis a vis the cow”.
On cow vigilantism and lynching “law and order” problems, the Congress has “signaled a worrying reluctance to distance itself” from the majoritarian discourse targeting minorities in the name of the cow.
Express is dismayed that the newly-elected government has done little to protect minorities or the cow economy.
“Kamala Harris for President?” asks HT, calling her candidacy the “first credible one by an Indian American”. The paper feels Indians and Americans have always got along because of how well Indians integrated into American culture.
“Nothing could cement the argument that India and the US are ‘natural allies’ as well as the election of the first Indian American president” it writes, optimistically.
Hindu’s, “A wide Democratic field” writes that Harris enters the race, “… with the heft of her star power, having accumulated considerable political capital through her tough questioning of President Donald Trump”.
Tweets of the day
This is really terrible. Journalists in Kashmir are routinely caught in the indiscriminate violence unleashed by armed forces. Journalists outside Kashmir should raise their voices over this. https://t.co/x0B5kS4NF4
— Shehla Rashid (@Shehla_Rashid) January 22, 2019
…big Crooked Hillary law firm, represented by her lawyer Michael Sussmann (do you believe this?) who worked Baker hard & gave him Oppo Research for “a Russia probe.” This meeting, now exposed, is the subject of Senate inquiries and much more. An Unconstitutional Hoax. @FoxNews
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2019