How media let guilty Kejriwal off the hook -- Arvind Lavakare

By Arvind Lavakare on 20 Feb 2014

It’s amazing that an otherwise vigilant media of our time has facilitated the Aam Admi Party (AAP) to magnify its reach from just Delhi to almost all across the country in just about two months from the time.

There have been very limited exceptions, no doubt, to this assertion but there’s no doubt also that our TV anchors and Press reporters have been so mesmerised by the self-righteousness  and rhetoric of Arvind Kejriwal that they have, overall, failed to pin him down on his humungous hypocrisy and dangerous unorthodoxy of talking one thing and doing the other, of foul-mouthing his adversaries, real or imaginary, including the media itself, without carrying proof of his diatribe and without caring for the a civilised society’s norms of courtesy and civility.

Here are just some examples of how the media has been almost mute on the humungous deceits of the AAP during its short stint for which it ran the Delhi Government.

1.    Arvind Kejriwal was known to have publicly sworn by his two children that he would not take the support of the Congress to form his Government. But he did it without a word of remorse or retraction. How, then, can one trust anything else he swears by?

2.    The AAP’s election manifesto promised 700 litres of water free to Delhi’s residents. Its Government ended up restricting the promise to just about that small portion of Delhi’s population which had meter connections. Yet, no one really pilloried its Chief Minister. Instead, there were newspaper headlines that said AAP had fulfilled its first promise!

3.    Its promise of reduction of Delhi citizens’ electricity expenditure was similarly partially fulfilled. Shockingly, the media proclaimed that the AAP had kept its second promise.

4.    When the Delhi Government announced a helpline and a licence to conduct a sting operation to catch corrupt officials, there was no outcry that AAP was, in fact, creating a Gestapo regime where even a son could blackmail his father.

5.    Over a Rule of the Government of India requiring the Jan Lokpal Bill being required to obtain the Lieutenant Governor’s prior approval before the Bill’s introduction in the Assembly, the Chief Minister ridiculed the LG as well as the Home Minister of the country. The Home Minister dubbed him as mad but the media kept its ammunition dry.

6.    After he resigned over his stillborn Jan Lokpal Bill, Arvind Kejriwal again rebuked the LG for not accepting his Cabinet’s demand for the dissolution of the Assembly. Once more, the media kept its ammunition dry.

Since that resignation and before, the AAP boss has made wild allegations against political parties and highly placed individuals such as Mukesh Ambani and Narendra Modi. But the media has chosen to give this Chief Minister platforms where he is enabled to convert interviews into his own platforms for delivering his monologues: “Every political party is evil” and “Without me, the deluge”.

All this humbug even as the former Chief Minister does not utter a single comment regarding his Law Minister who has been indicted by a CBI court for tampering with evidence, who has been exposed by a TV channel as a scammer in the spamming business, and who is accused of forcibly testing an African woman’s urine on the road for a suspected drug offence.

The time has truly come for the media to wake up to the Frankenstein monster they are helping create.

Meanwhile, those who are at all interested in the hogwash which the likes of Yogendra Yadav of the AAP peddle about gas pricing and the Adani group’s links with Narendra Modi, may like to read the way he has been stripped naked of his falsehoods in the article available here.