Twitter turned into a virtual battleground yesterday. The ones “badly” hurt by PM Modi’s anti-India (Yeah! That’s right) remark were busy trending #ModiInsultsIndia. Memes, funny pictures, random facts, forwards and jokes of all kinds were being traded openly and freely. Someone who stormed to the Indian Political scenario riding on the waves of unwavering nationalism and steadfast loyalty to the motherland had allegedly disgraced his own country, hence, it was a grand jamboree for the anti Modi brigade, many of whom lurk on Twitter. Soon the Pro Modi brigade came out of their slumbers and within a matter of a couple of hours, #ModiIndiasPride became number one trend. A massive win for the Bhakts (as they say).
But what really happened? Modi allegedly insulted India by saying that people were earlier ashamed of calling themselves Indians. The India under Modi is brimming with more optimism and pride. He made this remark while he was addressing Indians in China.
Here is the video of his full speech:
Watch the video 20:00 onwards and decide for yourself if Modi really did insult India? This was what he said “Unless we start believing in ourselves, the world won’t believe in us either. If a mother keeps chiding her child in front of his friends, all day long, the friends will never take the boy seriously. Hence, we need to respect our roots, our glorious legacy and the immense capabilities that we contain”. I tried reading this phrase in active and passive voices, by rephrasing the sentences, by swapping the subjects and the predicates. I couldn’t come to a conclusion that the aforementioned lines mean “Indians were earlier ashamed of calling themselves Indians”. So like most of the earlier accusations, this turned out to be all fart, no facts as well. This trend was a slander campaign envisioned to malign the image of Modi while taking the focus away from the deals made and MoUs passed in his foreign visits. Almost all Media houses got a sure shot winner of a news and without a lot of fact finding. The IEs, The Hindus and TOIs published full page reports.
While in USA and other countries, there is a fair representation of the right wing voice in the media, In India it is the left liberals who outnumber the right wing voices by a huge margin. Almost all of the leading dailies are Left aligned. In USA, There is a Fox news for the NY Times but the likes of India TV and Zee news are no match to the combined strength of The Hindu, The Times of India, ABP, NDTV, The Tribune, Hindustan Times, The Statesman, The Indian Express and more. Hence any news against the right wing ruling party of India gets more coverage than news favoring them. This was one fine example of it.
But it was amusing to see the hypocrisy of the ones trying to shame their PM who in their prejudiced opinions had shamed India. Many of them were AAP followers, a party which has no respect for the status quo, has a sour relationship with Police, selectively hates media and contemplates imposing a defamation suit on them, has a soft stand on Naxalism, has no stand on separatists and radical Islamic terrorism. Some of them were Congress supporters, a party which ruled the nation for 60 long years, set new records of corruption, raised an army of sycophants and as an unrivaled gesture of chutzpah asks the 1 year old ruling party “Why are farmers committing suicide?”
Do you want to know who shamed India or rather who has been shaming India?
The ones who do not respect the system of the nation.
The ones who indulged in massive scams.
And the ones who in spite of being called the fourth pillar of democracy continued printing and broadcasting their prejudiced opinions in place of real news.
Image Source: Indiatimes.com