Smriti Irani is an embodiment of every trait the Lutyens media despises. Before she turned forty, she had attained the highest rung in two fields- showbiz and politics- without being the daughter of famous or influential parents. The Lutyens media is allergic to merit, and is structured with entitlement as a cornerstone. She took on the Gandhis directly, almost dethroning the prince from the family bastion of Amethi in 2014 and vowing to return for a second round in 2019.
The Lutyens media has been patronized by the family and their cronies for decades, and cannot bear the thought of the very core of their ecosystem being under attack. She has made the likes of Rajdeep and Barkha eat humble pie on several occasions, and on live television. This is unacceptable to the Lutyens media, who consider these television personalities with fewer viewers than street performers to be the undisputed guardians of India’s delicate social fabric. She is fiercely and unabashedly nationalistic.
The Lutyens media conducts campaigns like Aman Ki Asha, wins accolades from Pakistani terrorists for their good work, and even helps them out sometimes during anti-terror operations. Somebody with Smriti Irani ’s credentials doesn’t deserve to make it big according to the Lutyens media. And yet here she is, mandated with the job to regulate her haters.
Apart from the fact that this is poetic justice at its best, the reasoning behind the necessity of Smriti Irani being entrusted with the Information and Broadcasting Ministry shouldn’t be lost.
The ministry was held previously by Venkaiah Naidu, who will now move on to become the vice-president of India. Among the key reasons she has been anointed as his replacement, is the fact that his way of functioning wasn’t particularly beneficial to the government or the country. A new work ethic was, undoubtedly, the need of the hour.
Naidu has been at the forefront of the party even before Atal Bihari Vajpayee assumed the mantle of prime minister. Despite having seamlessly moved from one era to the next, Naidu still retained a suicidal characteristic of the old guard- a high regard for the Lutyens media. Unlike the Modis, Yogis and Iranis of this world, he had never been subject to their shrill, moronic and baseless hounding. Entrusting the I&B ministry to people with no clue about the cancerous blot that the Lutyens media has been upon our nation, was a strategic blunder by the Modi-Shah dispensation.
One’s blood still boils when one recalls how conveniently Pranoy Roy and Vishnu Som walked into Venkaiah’s office and managed to get the ban on NDTV India lifted. The ban had come into effect because the channel had, as is standard practice with the network in question, potentially helped terrorists during an attack by broadcasting critical details of the anti-terror operations.
It is high time the country had an I&B minister who understood the national security hazard that is the Lutyens media, and dealt with it accordingly.
Smriti Irani ’s acumen, both political and administrative, is another reason she deserves much more than the textile ministry. Politically, she used the 2014 general elections as a springboard to transform herself from a sacrificial lamb to a heavyweight. She might not have won the election from Amethi, but for the first time in decades, somebody gave the dynasty a run for its money. She has focused on the constituency ever since, visiting it regularly and initiating developmental works. It is likely that Rahul will refuse to contest from Amethi in 2019. Her oratory skills are unparalleled and her speeches in parliament have often left the opposition red-faced. Administratively, many claim she was a disappointment as the education minister because she was unable to introduce big-reforms. But for somebody who was taunted by the opposition for her lack of education when she held the ministry, she proved to be a better performer than all her enlightened, academically-inclined, doctorate-holding predecessors.
Smriti Irani achieved in two years what none did in sixty, and her achievements ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime. She built toilets in every school that didn’t have one, a whopping two hundred thousand of them, to increase female enrollment. She digitalized every CBSE and NCERT textbook, and made it available online for free. The building of a record number of central universities was commenced, and several initiatives were taken to bring Indian colleges to global standards. Scholarships were linked to Aadhar Cards, and a genuine push was made towards spreading knowledge with the use of technology and skilling the youth. The biggest achievement probably was the drafting of the new Education Policy, which will release soon and is touted to be a game changer. For the unnavigable cesspool that education in India has become after years of stagnation and mismanagement, it was foolish to expect a complete overhaul in the span of a few months.
In her new role, Smriti Irani will face several adversities. Agenda-driven fake news, evangelical television channels and the absence of a proper framework to take offenders to task, will be her biggest challenges. But having climbed the ranks of the showbiz industry, having faced the most hostile of news-traders, having run the education ministry for two years, having been subject to sexism from the likes of Tehseen Poonwala and on the frontpage of The Telegraph, Smriti Irani is no stranger to adversity. Let us hope she disposes them off as ably as she always has.