In a Facebook post, Prasar Bharati Chief Executive Officer and former culture secretary Jawhar Sircar lists the challenges of working for a public broadcaster and lashes out at journalist Rajdeep Sardesai.

Here’s the complete text:

For quite some time ever since DD [Doordarshan] and AIR [All India Radio] has improved a bit, I find furious agitation in the media because we were taken as dead and gone.

Recently, for instance, I was disappointed to see Rajdeep [Sardesai] swirling a bit too heady. Not good for heath: after all, he’s my respected senior, Bhaskar Ghose’s jamai. I had to tell him and other well-off media friends that the passionate defence of India’s plurality is not a monopoly of some media crusaders. They have made it big and have acquired the comfort of the solvency of several crores, even if its done correctly via the non-farm-house route.

Good for them, but one cannot bracket all in DD or Prasar Bharati or IAS [Indian Administrative Service] as inefficient cartoons. That would include Rajdeep’s father in law as well.
There other poor souls like us who have led a straight but bold life in government and remain very much a part of the struggling middle class. We have no such financial security, but still fight every day against powerful forces, for our non-negotiable values. We may not succeed all the time, but we don’t flaunt our so called ideology around.

Why don’t some big mouths, fat wallets and starry statuses in the media take up my job in Prasar Bharati at Rs 59,000 per month, a car and a flat? Instead of running after multiples of crores?

Try managing 30,000 government employees with unions and sarkari work culture, along with some 20,000 other casual hands ? After all, we have thousands of installations to manage and be responsible for, not one fancy studio.

Try catering to the politics of aggression every day as well as corruption, internal opposition and sabotage?

Try handling some scurrilous rags that defame you morning and evening, instead of lecturing the world about what’s wrong with it and giving quotable for banner headlines?

Try it and maybe some would acquire a much-needed virtue of humility. They may then appreciate the other’s plight, for pursuing the mistaken ideals, like serving the nation for a pittance compared to media heads or corporate czars.

I refuse to be target practice for their arrows, for the sins of other crafty babus who are wrecking the country. I have said and written about, and fought against these mafia, when many of these whiz kids were in school.

These nefarious babus do so in broad daylight, irrespective of which political party is in power: they can suck up to any. And they are richer than Rajdeeps!

So, please try to earn your living in the media by exposing these rotten elements in government as stay away from the fury of the upright.

____________________________

I thanks all my friends who for such overwhelming support. I like Rajdeep, but enough is enough. We do not fight against the tyranny of corrupt politicians and babus to succumb to the arrogant media stars or to manipulative merchants and their stranglehold on all systems.

Buzz off brothers, preferably to North Korea or some other backward unchallenged sultanate.

Jawhar Sircar

12^th May 2015

*********

The post was apparently in response to certain comments Sardesai had made during journalist and author Nalin Mehta’s book launch in Delhi last week.

Sircar also tweeted out a piece headlined “Thank You Barkha, Arnab, Rajdeep And All You Senseless Pieces Of Disgrace: You’ve Done It Again” that spoke about the Indian media’s reporting in Nepal.

To which Barkha Dutt replied and later tweeted out how some sites try and garner hits with crass headlines.