An Idiot's Guide To Bharat Nirman

Someone wisely said "If you can't blind them with brilliance, then bedazzle them with bullshit..." This works fine for our media folks. For the eighth straight day yesterday they continued to fool the people with the distraction of IPL Spotfixing issue. This is not to suggest that they shouldn’t cover it but it certainly doesn’t deserve the 24X7 coverage that it is being given. Perhaps there were orders from upstairs that the GOI didn’t want adverse coverage of its non-performance on Rajiv Gandhi’s death anniversary and particularly so on the 4th anniversary of UPA2. Both these events passed with minimal assessment of the UPA and Congress performance. The most corrupt govt in the history of the democratic world and the most non-performing one too. That is how I would summarise the govt of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. The latter is easily the most insipid PM this country has ever had. There was another event that the GOI may not have wanted to spoil; the Chinese Premier’s visit.

So Spotfixing was handy for the media to fool the nation. And there was enough incentive too. The spate of Bharat Nirman ads by the Congress with public money has pushed all other ads into back of the mind position. Some have compared it to the “India Shining” campaign of BJP in 2004 which backfired. But the Nirman ads are being viewed in the age of Social Media (SM) which doesn’t hesitate to call BS when it sees it. A couple of news media houses have debated the Nirman ads but other than that most news channels are just happy to enjoy the luxury dole that has dropped into their lap. Why complain! The other big difference from 2004 is that the Congress cannot help making you believe that everything in this country was brought to you by the Nehrus and Gandhis, the rest of India are just passengers who ride their train. You know, like if you travel on national highways of the Golden Quadrilateral the pics of AB Vajpayee have been removed and replaced by Sonia Gandhi. It’s like ‘Made by Sonia Gandhi’ even when she had absolutely nothing to do with it.

The core Congress message of these Bharat Nirman ads are: 1) You are a bunch of idiots and you can be fooled over and over again. 2) You are not smart enough to notice our hypocrisy. 3) We have nothing brilliant to show for performance so you we are going to bedazzle you with bullshit.

So let’s look at a couple of these Bharat Nirman ads and see what the Congress and the GOI really want to communicate to us. The first one is about the great educational institutions their govt has created so that your kid never has to go abroad (Video 1.01mins)

Voila! Move over US and Japan! Our kids have now made robots that serve tea to guests. I can believe that part definitely because Indian kids have proven themselves to be smarter than many others in the world. But for all the screaming about so many great institutions the Congress has created so that your children don’t have to go abroad, where do the ‘motor mouths’ of the Congress have their kids going? You have unauthorised spokies Digvijaya Singh and Sanjay Jha of the Congress thrilled being in New York for the graduation of the sons and nephews. Of course, their party boss doesn’t trust any Indian doctor or hospital at all. Nobody knows her illness but whenever she sneezes she rushes off to New York, Amsterdam or Rome or wherever ‘Veni Vidi Vici’ will take her to be treated. So these institutions are created for desi bumpkins by the Nehru-Gandhi clan, so be grateful and vote for Congress.

As a marketing person, I can tell you, one of the first things in selling a product is to imagine a picture of who your customer is. Preferably even draw a sketch of that customer or group. You will find that exercise quite enjoyable. The Congress is a master at drawing this picture. In other words they are quite clear who their voter is. This is a good thing for any political party. They are even better, they ensure their customer stays the way he has always been; a perfect village bumpkin or a village idiot. Keep them permanently in low education levels and low development of their villages so that they marvel at the wonders of the world the Congress creates. This village bumpkin explains how he saw magic stairs that go up and down. He describes how this that magic thing goes “Trrrrrrr” above ground and “Trrrrrrr” underground and how it has magic doors that open and close. Whoa! What could that possibly be? And the other village bumpkins are stunned and wonder if the Bumpkin No.1 has gone crazy or senile. Watch (0.34mins):

The political tactic of the Congress is stark in the ad. Keep them uneducated, keep them in unemployment. Then the white-skinned ones will come and deliver “magic” to them and overawe them with a basket of doles like NREGA or FSB and make them feel “look at what your mai-baap have done for you”. If after 65 years of independence our villagers have to be still overawed by metro trains then it speaks a lot for how pathetic our govts have been, mostly the Congress govt. Considering the first metro started in Kolkata around 1986-87 you can calculate how far behind in time other cities are. And even the urban transport system is named JNURM after Jawaharlal Nehru. So there you go, if you have BRTS or better buses in your city, it’s a gift from Nehru. Be grateful, bumpkins! While the media does analyse whether these Bharat Nirman ads are “image make-overs” they don’t look at how clinically deceptive they are. Why would they? After all the Gandhi name spells money all over.

Lately, the Congress has been screaming the Opposition is “anti-poor” because the Food Security Bill (FSB) wasn’t passed in the last parliament session. That was washed out over Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Bansal. How long can you sustain the poor with doles and overawe them with metro rails? Well, as long as you “walk the dog” and make sure the crumbs are delivered to the poodles in time. Considering the PM and Sonia Gandhi are so concerned for the poor, how does it explain an expense of 80 crores in a single day to mourn Rajiv Gandhi? Here are some figures of the ads released on RajivG’s death anniversary on May 21 from Newslaundry:

The ads were released through the Department of Audio Visual Publicity (DAVP).

65 advertisements were printed in 11 English dailies in Delhi.

Over 38 of these were full-page ads.

And how much did such a restrained display of remembrance cost us the taxpayer?

Hindustan Times – 10 ads – Rs 20 crore

The Times of India – 7 ads – Rs 10 crore

The Economic Times – 3 ads – Rs 15 crore

The Hindu – 6 ads – Rs 10 crore

The prize for the paper of choice for the Congress union ministers taking out memoriam ads goes to The Indian Express.

The Indian Express – 12 ads – Rs 25 crore.

And that adds up to a tidy sum of Rs 80 crore spent in just Delhi.

The pathetic Indian Express gets the most? 25 Crores? Not surprising! This is why I once wrote “Saving Shekhar’s Express” on the ads doled out to the paper. That is just the official spend. If you add up other state expenditures and other surrogate ads the total could go well over 300 crores (Do read “The Gandhi Septology”). Now on top of all these comes election and boom-time with Bharat Nirman. Do you really expect the poodles to be honest? Naturally, the media doesn’t challenge it when RahulG and SoniaG go around stating “RajivG brought computer to India” or “Nehru brought gas to India”. These statements are now the butt of jokes on the SM. That’s how Bharat was Nirmaned!

The Chinese Premier was recently here after the Ladakh incursion. Seems peace was made and that just reminded me of something; an old story. When the Chinese and Japanese made peace after the world war the Chinese decided to present the Japs with a gift. They presented them with a 1mm thick and one-metre long pure-Gold thread. The Japs accepted it but were stunned how the Chinese could create such a marvel. So they got together their best engineers to find out how they could do better. The Japanese finally got it and they drilled a hole right through the 1mm gold thread and presented it to Germany. The Germans accepted it but were rattled that the Chinese and Japs could be better than them at such marvellous engineering and their govt couldn’t rest till they had outdone those two. So the German govt employed their best scientists to make an improvement to the thread. Finally, the German engineers created an even thinner golden thread and passed it through the thin hole in the 1mm gold thread given by the Japs and tied a knot at both ends. The German govt was thrilled and told the Japs and Chinese what they had accomplished.

Years later the Germans presented the golden thread to the Indian govt. Our govt didn’t waste any time calling engineers and scientists to add value to it. The big boss just ordered that it be named as “Rajiv Gandhi Golden Wonder” and the village bumpkins came and marvelled at this wonder. That is how Bharat Nirman happens. Anything that is done, anything that is created with people’s money and energy is courtesy some Nehru or Gandhi. Build anything, dole out anything and just put a stamp on it: “Made by Gandhis”. Bharat Nirman!

  

Walking The Dog

By now ‘Weapons of mass distraction’ (WMD) is a very commonly used phrase. Urban dictionaries define it quite accurately as politically charged non-issues used to distract those who live in a faith-based reality from the catastrophic failings of a political party, regime or ideology. Very often this means using scapegoats. I would use ‘faith’ here to mean MSM as against religion. ‘Weapons of mass distraction’ is also a movie where two filthy media moguls with the dirtiest secrets wage a war to own a football team. In their dirty battle they destroy the lives of many ordinary people. Sounds very much like our own corporations, political parties and media, doesn’t it? Even the innocent looking mobile or smart-phone is a WMD. Look around anywhere or even on TV screens, you will always find a lot people staring at their devices even when it’s not ringing or vibrating.

After Grammar specialist Ashwani Kumar and “innocent” scape-GOAT Pawan Kumar Bansal resigned on May 10 the Tiwaris and Singhvis had disappeared from the media. Fortunately for the Congress party the Pakistan elections were around and their best friends at NDTV and CNN-IBN kept their channels busy with non-stop coverage of Imran Khan and when they found time they covered the rest of Pakistan. A day earlier Barkha Dutt was already in Pakistan at the hospital where Imran Khan was being treated and, with Musharraf in jail too, she found the only interesting person in Pakistan to interview was one Aleema Khan. This Aleema is the sister of Imran. This was a lot like the Priyanka Gandhi interview of April 2009 except in more tragic circumstances. This art of distraction is also called “Wag the dog” which means to purposely divert attention from what would otherwise be of greater importance, to something else of lesser significance. By doing so, the lesser-significant event is catapulted into the limelight, drowning proper attention to what was originally the more important issue. The expression comes from the saying that 'a dog is smarter than its tail', but if the tail were smarter, then the tail would 'wag the dog'.

On Sunday, May 19 N. Srinivasan held a press conference over the latest IPL spot-fixing scam. For a scam which the media has been on and on for the last 4 days the meeting concluded in about an hour and his presser lasted longer. One reporter (probably from one our doggy channels) asked Srinivasan if legalising betting would solve the huge problem. You see, this is where the tail is smarter than the dog. Srinivasan answered the question ambiguously enough to make no sense. But it doesn’t occur to the reporter or our MSM in general that even if betting is legalised, match-fixing and spot-fixing cannot be legalised (Thanks for the wisdom, Rahul Kanwal). Both are two different things. Betting is legal in many countries, match-fixing is not. This nonsensical presser followed by Rajasthan Royals’ management stating they will file an FIR against the erring players was one more instalment of mass distraction. Let’s take a look at the chain of events.

Sreesanth and others were arrested late night on May 15. The spot-fixing incidents as claimed by Delhi police occurred on May 9 or earlier. So why did they wait till May 15 to arrest the accused especially when they had flown to different hotels away from their HQ? Interesting, eh? It so happens that on May 15 Sreesanth was sacked from the RR team by the management (see TOI report). A mere co-incidence? Okay! So on May 16 the story explodes and the Delhi PC, Neeraj Kumar, is all over the place on all channels beaming like a “dulha” on the major catch he had made (The pic is from his interview with Sunetra Choudhury on NDTV). And what does Delhi police do? Every hour they release juicy titbits to the media on how Sreesanth cried, there was a confession, there was no confession, how many bookies were involved, Dubai was involved, Pakistan was involved, Dawood was involved and blah blah. So like the box of parrots they are, our media were waiting to relay every bit of scrap being thrown at them. TimesNow even interviewed Himanshu Roy, the JCP of Mumbai who made no significant comments on the episode. Splendid!

The very next day (May 18) Himanshu Roy holds a press conference of his own in Mumbai to tell the world that they had seized a laptop computer, an ipad, and a mobile phone of Sreesanth. You know, the Delhi police went to Mumbai and arrested Sreesanth but the Mumbai police must have told them “please leave something for us”. So our very considerate Delhi police left these items for their Mumbai friends to mop up. So after the Delhi police left, the next day Mumbai police grabbed all these belongings of Sreesanth. This is truly inter-state police cooperation at its best, isn’t it? So after May 16 and 17 were dominated by the grinning Neeraj Kumar, his PR guys they said “over to Mumbai” and on May 18 Mumbai police hogged the limelight. Three days over a spot-fixing scam?

Since the spot-fixing scam goes beyond borders and indicates Hawala transactions there must be room for some more to join the fun. Enter the Enforcement Directorate! What do they say… “maan na maan me tera mehmaan”! So the ED jumps in and says they will now start a money laundering probe (Outlook). So in a couple of days you might find some ED guys on TV telling us what they are going to do, when they are going to do and how they are going to do it. That reminds me. The original IPL guy that the ED is still chasing, Lalit Modi, is happily settled in London and is on TV every time something happens in IPL. And Modi lectures everyone on the chastity of IPL when he was in charge. Talking about ED reminds me of another one. This Rajasthan Royals, the focus of all attention, was slapped a 100 crore fine by the ED for foreign exchange violations. Did they pay up? What happened to that? If you go the Telegraph article I challenge you to decipher who the owners of RR really are although the face being shown to us is that of Shilpa Shetty. There are names of so many finance companies and even Lalit Modi’s ‘jiju’ Suresh Chellaram is mentioned. All pretty complex as most IPL owners appear to be. And Shilpa Shetty says “Zero tolerance”. I believe her.

Maybe the IT and ED should first scrutinise funding of the owners of each IPL team with a fine tooth-comb before they venture into the spot-fixing scam which is of much lower value. But why should the news media be so carried away with this for over 4 days and still be going on and on about it. Surely, even if they are parrots they can’t be that dumb, can they? Or may they are wilfully so. All other issues of national interest have been pushed aside as former diplomat KC Singh laments. In the last 4 days other issues are covered only as a “break” like the Chinese PM’s visit or the resignation of two corruption-tainted ministers in Andhra Pradesh. Throughout this period there is a massive “Bharat Nirman” campaign running on all the channels. Mind you, these are not small 5-10 seconds ads, these are mostly full 90 seconds ads or even more.

The APCL (Andhra Pradesh Corruption League) has been covered up and pushed into to a corner of news items for over 4 years now. Even that “Truth V Tripe” guy didn’t have time to pay any attention to it. Propaganda channels like NDTV, CNN-IBN and lately Headlines Today simply refuse to do a complete story on the APCL. As high a minister as Home Minister Sabitha Indira Reddy and Roads & Buildings Minister D. Prasada Rao have been forced to resign because of corruption. It’s not just these two, there’s a whole team of people who are accused and I quote from The Hindu:

Other accused in the case include Jagan, V. Vijay Sai Reddy, Puneet Dalmia, Y. Srilakshmi, V.D. Rajagopal, Sajjala Diwakar Reddy, Sanjay S. Mittra, Neel Kamal Beri, Joy Deep Basu, Raghuram Cements (presently Bharati Cements), Dalmia Cement and Eswar Cements (now merged into Dalmia Cement) in that order.

The continuous coverage of the IPL spot-fixing, with mostly nothing new to add, is simply mind-boggling. I don’t believe that media houses have only now realised that the late YSR was running the most corrupt State govt in the country. The corruption loot could well match the 2G levels. Jagan Reddy, YSR’s son who is currently in jail under CBI cases, alone is reported to have acquired assets worth over 40000 crores. Amazing for a guy who had nothing much to start with! The Congress corruption in AP is not even debateable. No channel is demanding resignations and no channel is even talking about it. Even the UP Lokayukta decision to recover 1400 crores from Mayawati & Co. is blaring on all channels. Lately, NDTV is obsessed with Afghanistan. Understandable! WMD apart, someone is clearly walking the dog. I wonder who.

Welcome To Hunting Season

Since the present-day FBI was founded in 1935 J.Edgar Hoover was its life-time Director. He headed the FBI all of 37 years till his death in 1972. This is quite unheard of in the US; one man holding the same office for 37 years. Hoover became the most powerful man in the country and had dossiers on every politician and public figure of his time. He had enough dirt on Presidents, Presidential candidates, Senators, Congressmen, film stars, celebrities, sportsmen and activists. Every one! It’s not a surprise no one could unseat him except death. Since then FBI directors can hold only a single 10-year term in office. In contrast, the Supreme Court called our very own CBI a “caged parrot”. The Congress party has reduced it to not just a parrot but a puppet. It has used CBI to do hatchet jobs on its opponents at will, especially in the last 9 years of the UPA. Make a wild guess on who now plays the role of Hoover in India. Elections are less than a year away and the CBI is one of the key players in the operation to neutralise enemies. No, not enemies of the nation but enemies of the Congress party. The other key players who will now do the hit jobs on opponents of Congress are from the media.

Who are these targets? They’re mostly from the major Opposition party, BJP. Of course, I didn’t forget, they have their permanent target in Narendra Modi, the greatest threat to the Congress. In some states regional politicians will be targeted, like Mamata Banerjee, J. Jayalalitha, Mayawati and partly the Samajwadi party in UP. The CPM, CPI will be spared because they are the ideological bosses of the media and a Congress partner at large. The courtesans of the Congress party in the media will assist in tarnishing reputations, bring out fake reports, rehash old issues with new meaningless sting ops and they will get lucky if the Congress, through its many “funded” NGOs, manages an FIR or two against Modi. Times Now is already on its way running a documentary questioning the success of the nuclear tests of 1998 under AB Vajpayee. This is because one scientist claims it was a partial success but the intended perception is that the “test was a failure” and BJP fooled the nation. Make no mistake about this attempt.

Lately some voices in the print media are talking about it a bit more openly. Firstpost calls it “The ‘incestuous relationship’ between Congress and media” and in another it asks “Why this secrecy over Sonia Gandhi”? These shameless morons are like a bunch of blind men who suddenly discovered coal. It was evident to even a mild observer that the media was not just incestuous but actually a security guard that protected the Congress and SoniaG all this while. This blog has written about for over three years. There is even a post on this site asking “Why is Indian media scared of Sonia Gandhi”? way back in 2011. So it’s not as if these media folks have suddenly discovered their impotence. I believe they must have suddenly discovered some temporary herbal cure for it before they go back to being themselves.

On May 15 one of the born-again Congress cronies, HeadlinesToday, started to air a sting on Varun Gandhi’s ‘hate-speech’ case of 2009 in partnership with Tehelka (the specialist in stings on Congress opponents and which uses call-girls for journalism). If not for the IPL spot fixing disclosures this spurious sting claiming judiciary was duped by VarunG would have aired the whole week. Bad luck! But nothing to worry, just like HeadlinesToday brought back some spurious Gujarat 2002 sting op a few weeks back this orchestrated sting on VarunG will come back at the right time. And to aid their operations in targeting Congress opponents HT has even purchased a ‘transfer’ of Ashish Khetan, the stinger of Tehelka. Sometime back HT claimed to have exposed a major scam in Salman Khurshid’s NGO for the handicapped. It is now all forgiven and forgotten. HT is back in the good books of Congress and you can tell by the number of ‘Bharat Nirman’ and NREGA ads on the channel. HT is not the only beneficiary though. The other media courtesans aren’t missing out on the dole. I doubt anyone misses the irony of a scam-infested govt and party claiming “Bharat Nirman”. Some people jokingly call it “Bharat Nilaam”.

No reporter from Open Magazine or Outlook will likely be ever invited to any panel on NDTV. On the other hand Shoma Chaudhary, the so-called editor of Tehelka, is a frequent flyer on the channel. Both these magazines exposed the Radiagate and the involvement of Barkha Dutt and NDTV in the related scam. Calling NDTV and Tehelka as incestuous partners of the Congress would be an understatement. Here’s what Hartosh Bal of Open Mag recently wrote about the two:

“As far as some media organisations such as NDTV and Tehelka are concerned, their closeness to the Congress is no secret. Barkha Dutt’s role in the Radia Tapes did not seem to point to an individual act but an institutional malaise. It is only illustrative that today a Sanjay Jha of Hamara Congress as Executive Director of Dale Carnegie Training operations can hold a workshop at NDTV for those very people who could be asking him questions on a prime-time evening show. But beyond institutional closeness is the issue of individual reporters who have covered this government over the past nine years. Access requires give-and-take, and several reporters have developed an unhealthy proximity to a number of Congress leaders. In the durbar politics of the party, where it is necessary to strike down potential competitors, the media has played a vital role”.

The last line in the above quote is really the key: “striking down political competitors”. Let me just say: Hunting season has just begun. We are headed into an election year. NDTV, Tehelka, Headlines Today, Hindustan Times, CNN-IBN, Indian Express, Times of India, Aaj Tak, ABPNews will all be already preparing their spurious attack schedules. Every Opposition leader will be targeted, except Arun Jaitley. I guess Arun Jaitley will be spared because he is quite “friendly” with Barkha Dutt and heeded her request not to bring up Radiagate in the parliament committee. Apart from running the VarunG video of the hate-speech case over a 1000 times during the election campaign of 2009 NDTV went a step further. In April 2009 Barkha Dutt conducted an interview with Priyanka Vadra sitting on the lawns. If you ever wanted to know what a “suck-up” interview is just search and look it up. Oh yes, during election times Priyanka V also becomes Priyanka Gandhi. Barkha gloated then that PG could even use words like “epiphany”. I swear some school the lady must have attended.

And Sanjay Jha is giving management lessons to the propaganda artists at NDTV? Nothing can be more laughable. The man himself is the Congress whipping boy on media panels when things go bad for the party so why would people at NDTV need lessons from him? People at NDTV are bigger masters at cover-ups, distractions, reactionary mud-slinging whenever Congress is in trouble and, of course, “saving the tigers”. It should be Jha who should be taking more lessons from NDTV on improving his cronyism and propaganda management skills. Hartosh Bal wonders how these people could be taking lessons from a man they could be questioning on prime-time. He is wrong! They are all “durbaris” and the workshop probably relates to preparation for hunting season.

Hoover had a principle of going after bigger criminals and making a big show and point of it. He disliked going after petty gamblers and liquor smugglers. In contrast, the Delhi police chief, his deputy were on all channels beaming over the IPL betting racket. Betting and match-fixing are two different crimes. Betting is legal in many countries but match-fixing is not legal anywhere. While bigger criminals are getting away in Delhi the PC and his deputies seem to spend a huge amount of energy on the betting racket over multiple state jurisdictions. I am confident that except for the players being banned nothing much will come of it. But when it does come to chasing others the CBI typically spends a lot of energy on opposition party members. The best example is the case against Amit Shah. He has been given bail in a case where he has been accused of murder and in every hearing the CBI case and claim has been torn to shred by the courts. Arun Jaitley also pointed out that the case against Shah was meant to lead to Narendra Modi. Consider that with the case of Pawan Bansal where the CBI was quick to give him a clean-chit immediately after his resignation. Your guess is as good as mine on how many cases may be filed against Opposition leaders in the run up to the elections. Hunting season is ripe.

Shockingly, channels like NDTV, CNN-IBN, Aaj Tak, Headlines Today, ABPNews who scream their heads off over corruption never had one word to say about the most corrupt state govt in India. Andhra Pradesh is being looted for a decade and is in shambles. Not once have Rahul Kanwal, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Arnab Goswami and their poor cousins in Hindi channels ever shown the guts to talk about the massive corruption of the YSR govt. In chasing Jagan Reddy with CBI for breaking away from Congress what turned up was that over a dozen ministers in AP are corrupt and should be prosecuted. This report says it all. By the standards of our TV channels, all these ministers are angels. Is it any surprise than that our media is the defender of the corrupt and corruption? There is a massive incentive and reward for all this as Kanchan Gupta tells us. Even in 2009 Swapan Dasgupta mentioned a 400-crore bail out for certain media channels.

In the near future we are likely to more “manufactured” stories constantly being played out on TV and in print. Rift in a practically non-existent NDA. Few more attempts at filing FIRs against Modi funded by none other than his detractors. More Gandhi propaganda from NDTV and tears from Sheila Dikshit on some channels. The little sidekicks like Ashutosh and Wagle will heap mindless abuse on Modi. The documentary on Sonia Gandhi which portrays her as a widow and saviour of India will be played endless on your screens. Like before every election someone will release a new book on the great life of Rahul Gandhi. NDTV’s “sources” will multiply in peddling unverifiable reports. There will be endless stories of infighting in BJP over PM candidate. CBI may come up with some more cases. SC will be littered with petitions against certain political leaders. And most of all, there will be huge chorus of “communal” in most of the TV channels and newspapers as will that of “saffron terror”. If by accident the shoe is on the other foot, time out will be called, some joker will come up with some betting scam for entertainment. Elections are around the corner; Delhi, Rajasthan, MP, AP and India. Welcome to hunting season.