He™s the individual everyone loves to hate and according to Outlook magazine, the man who killed the 9 p.m news. But there™s no denying there™s a je ne sais quoi appeal in the argumentative nine o™clock news format devised by Arnab Goswami, the combative anchor of the nightly news telecast on the Times Now channel. Although there™s much head-shaking and condemnation about the slanging matches on his 90-minute five-nights-per-week News Hour, it™s Times Now™s proud boast that its audience is bigger than of all half-a-dozen English language 9 p.m news channels combined. According to a recent report of the Broadcast Audience Research Council promoted in 2011 by broadcasters, advertisers and government to supplant the compromised TAM (Televison Audience Measurement) Media Research promoted in 2006 by A.C. Nielsen and Kantar Media Research (UK), the News Hour commands a 76 percent share of the English language 9 p.m news viewership.
There™s no shortage of explanations why Goswami has the country™s most influential English-speaking elite in a thrall. The explanation of your editor, who also loves to hate Goswami, is that the News Hour™s coverage of political issues is cleverly mixed with expos©s of in-your-face VIP arrogance, police corruption and apathy, medical negligence and civic maladministration which directly affect lay people and which other anchors (and editors) consider too unimportant in the cosmic order of things. Moreover, he seems totally unafraid about puncturing humbug and plucking the mighty from their seats while exalting the humble and meek. That™s a winning formula.
Yet it™s curious that the lords and masters of Bennett Coleman & Co, which owns Times Now (and numerous money-spinning Times of India group print publications), who have a reputation for cutting overweening editors who discomfit incumbent governments to size, have given Goswami unprecedented freedom to take on all comers, be they ever so high. And the way things are going, the only threat to India™s most pro-consular (œthe nation needs to know) television interrogator is from within.
Circling culture vultures
Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler™s infamous propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels famously said: œWhen I hear the word ˜culture™ I reach for my gun. That could well become the reaction of the country™s small and shrinking intelligentsia to the utterances of the high and mighty within the BJP which was swept to power in the General Election of 2014 when the effete epicurean leaders of the Congress party handed them victory on a platter.
Since then during the past 18 months, ill-informed but highly-opinionated spokespersons of the ragtag and bobtail affiliate organisations of the RSS ” the ideological mentor of the BJP which is committed to establishing a Hindu rashtra in India ” known as the sangh parivar (RSS family) have been regularly sounding off on wide-ranging cultural and moral issues which have aroused the hatred, ridicule and contempt of liberal academics and intellectuals.
Recently Mahesh Sharma, Union minister of state for tourism and culture ” who presumably abhors the Western culture of social interaction of unmarried men and women ” went on national television to express disapproval of the urban practice of ˜girls™ night out™, under which a small minority of the country™s unfortunate women citizens try to snatch a few moments of fun and gaiety. Speaking in the first person singular, Sharma said he œhas a problem with œwesternisation for westernisation™s sake. Quite obviously, it hasn™t occurred to this ill-read worthy pitchforked into ministerial office, that if he has this problem, he should consult a psychiatrist rather than translate his problems into public policies.
These are just a few examples of how the BJP and sangh parivar leaders and vigilantes, who seem wholly unaware of the Constitution and its liberal provisions, are interfering with the daily lives of citizens, particularly women. Recently, a Chhattisgarh class X government school textbook, authored by a sangh parivar intellectual, informed young teens that working women are to blame for mass unemployment. Bleak days ahead as ill-qualified impostors infiltrate the country™s already ailing education institutions.
Constitutional illiteracy
At first, the demand was pressed by way of subtle hints of operational harassment for which post-independence India™s bureaucracy has achieved global notoriety. But of late, Karnataka™s d©class© neta-babu nexus has cast covetous eyes upon Bangalore™s  vintage private clubs ” islands of orderly governance and calm in a sea of civic chaos ” and has made its demand for ex-officio admission into them shamelessly overt.
Notwithstanding the grim reality that the neglected rural hinterlands of the state experience one farmer suicide per day, power outages are hourly and roads statewide are riddled with crater-size potholes, a high-powered committee of the Karnataka legislative assembly expended considerable man hours to draft a Karnataka Entry into Public Places (Removal of Restriction on Dress and Regulation of Membership and Fee) Bill, 2015. Under the provisions of the Bill, private clubs shall not deny admission to visitors in clothing œreflecting Kannada culture or any other Indian traditional dress. More insidiously and self-servingly, the proposed law mandates that no recreation club, association, trust, company or society shall deny membership to MPs, MLAs and MLCs, and also invests government with the power to regulate membership fees charged by private clubs, which often runs into lakhs of rupees.
But there™s a problem. According to the Delhi-based Association for Democratic Reforms, 74 of Karnataka™s 223 MLAs have serious criminal charges filed against them and an overwhelming majority of them have assets disproportionate to their declared sources of income ” qualifications difficult to reconcile with a family club (of which your editor is a member). To avoid court strictures and disgrace, this overweening community should disqualify itself pre-emptively.