“Pen is mightier than the sword”, in Kashmir the pen is torpedoed to an unrecoverable extent. With the death of the Senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari, who was gunned down by terrorists last week in Srinagar, gives us a reality check that the ‘pen’ is gone forever now. The gun has defeated the pen and the tribes of the pen have surrendered. They are afraid of calling a spade a spade. Soul of the broken pen is demanding justice but all his cries for justice are falling into deaf ears while the gun is sitting comfortably, celebrating and watching everything with a victory smile on its face. Arrogance and selfishness of the pen have sealed its faith at the hands of the gun holder forever and now the pen is just another puppet.
The terrorist sympathiser mainstream media in its joint statement regarding Shujaat Bukhari’s death completely toed Pakistan’s line and used the death of Shujaat Bukhari to peddle their intolerance agenda shamelessly. They are now making a career out of Shujaat Bukhari’s death. All mainstream media agenda peddlers gathered in New Delhi’s Press Club and began their vulturism. They defended Shujaat Bukhari’s freedom of speech and expression and also lambasted those who criticized Shujaat Bukhari and demanded an inquiry against them. Freedom is not free, criticism is the price we pay for it. These self-declared crusaders of freedom of speech and expression just want their monopoly over freedom of speech and expression, they don’t want others to have the same right. Their hypocrisy is very well understood in Thomas Sowell’s following quote. He said, “It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say — which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.”
So-called fearless veteran journalists gathered at Press club, refused to name and shame the killers. The Fear in their eyes was clearly visible. Instead, they subtly put the entire blame on a certain type of social media users who time and again exposed their lies, agenda, double-standards and dishonesty. They are using the brutal murder of their own fellow journalist to settle their personal differences. Journalists who termed Atul Kochhar’s truthful tweet as bigotry didn’t found Shujaat Bukhari’s murder bigotry. People, who after Gauri Lankesh’s murder blamed and cursed an entire section of a particular ideology without any evidence till date, maintained a stoic silence on the religious and ideological affiliations of the terrorists. Bernard Cohen has rightly said that the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people,” Cohen continues, “depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.” They subtly gave a clean chit to terrorists and Pakistan. Well, that was expected as we all know that they have a soft corner for terrorists, separatists and Pakistan, we have grown up seeing all these and now we have become used to their hypocrisy.