Wordsmiths & Newsplumbers

BY R.K.MISRA Humankind craves freedom ,power demands servility . The tussle between the two creates mental fissures and physical fragmentation .When creeping intolerance and crawling ambition intrude to usurp free mind spaces ,the media which seeks to protect the right to project the wrong is a sitting duck target .It ,nevertheless ,has its own defence mechanism ,evolved over ages of dealing with both subtle and crass attacks on its own turf. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not but the battle continues. This is most glaringly manifested in the changes that have taken place in news coverage and governmental access to the media in the country’s capital ,New Delhi. Narendra Modi’s advent on the scene as Prime Minister has marked a surgical departure in the manner of government news coverage. In the past whenever governments changed at the Centre ,including the BJP led NDA government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, there were at best some recalibrations .If the BJP came to po

BY R.K.MISRA There is a perversely delicious irony about politics .Overtime it shows the flaws ,exposes the hypocrisies and displays the duplicitousness of its gods. After the BJP led NDA came to power in 2014 ,constituents of the Sangh Parivar have been shrill in espousing the cause of homecoming or ‘ghar wapasi’. On July 5,2015,the Vishwa Hindu Parishad(VHP) proudly claimed that it had brought back 33,975 people to their ‘original faith’ and a total of 48,651 people were ‘prevented’ from being converted to other religions by the organization during the last one year .This affiliate of the RSS had claimed huge success in it’s endeavour at its annual meeting in  Rajasthan’s Bhilwara last year .The report also pointed out that ”the organization arranged marriages for 284 girls belonging to the minority community in Gujarat,while 7,776 were given Sanskrit diksha and 49 sisters from Uttarakhand were brought back to their original religion.” All the figures pertained to the period

BY R.K.MISRA A new year is a harbinger of hope .The first step from the old into the new , one would like to walk with a mind freed of the bitter and full of bonhomie. And so even if it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flair for the dramatic,that saw him walk into his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif’s home ,both of them deserve fulsome praise for it . If I could walk into my journalist neighbour Bashir Pathan’s house in Gandhinagar and he into mine without any fanfare, why can’t they .That’s the way it has been in our part of the world .We call across each other’s home so do our womenfolk and children to exchange  gossip or plain play .Why should we depart from the customs  and camaraderie of our forefathers just because a fence divides us .Brothers do part, sometimes bitterly too when divisions take place but the angst should be a flowing stream not a stinking ,stagnant pool. The fact that Modi and Sharif did not discuss Kashmir,reviving cricket ties or the Hurriy