It’s election season and time for news channels to take up issues that matter – you know like the state of civic amenities and matters pertaining to health and education indicators. Or, say, more topical ones like the impact of the Good and Services Tax on voter sentiment, credentials of candidates fielded by each party and so on. Yeah? NO.

That is too much to expect of certain channels and news anchors that are happy to play pawns in political propaganda. Real journalism after all can be tough work. Why bother when you can spend hours, night after night, on mindless political khit-pit between party spokies and then wonder out loud why the issue at hand was being politicised.

It all started when Congress youth leader-over-40 Rahul Gandhi visited the Somnath Temple in Gujarat. Presumably because visiting Dalit households in Uttar Pradesh didn’t get the party anywhere.

His name, according to a Zee Gujarati journalist and Bharatiya Janata Party’s cell of information and truth, headed by Amit Malviya, was noted down in a register for non-Hindus. This bit of news was picked up by virtually all Big Media organisations. You can’t blame them, can you? Because Zee Gujarati + BJP IT cell = authentic information worth pursuing.

Our favourite among the news offerings was, of course, CNN News18’s Bhupendra Chaubey’s Viewpoint at 10 pm. Chaubey, while elaborating on Congress’ claims that Gandhi is a proud “janeu dhaari Brahmin” (thread-wearing Brahmin that some feel is sacred) stressed on his own Brahminical credentials – “I have proclaimed this very proudly on many earlier occasions that I am indeed a proud Brahmin… I am indeed a proud Hindu and that doesn’t make me… take my belief away from the idea of secularism and equality for all in India.” It didn’t occur to him that calling oneself a proud “janeu dhaari Brahmin” was sort of akin to calling oneself a white man proud of his Confederacy heritage. (Trolls, here’s your bait. Take it.) Oh, and there were banal observations like: “Rahul Gandhi is a public representative… is this public representative a Hindu?”

His thought-out, nuanced “viewpoint” involved asking the question why Gandhi doesn’t describe himself as a 100 per cent Hindu. “Will India ever know the actual religion of Rahul Gandhi,” he asked. He ended the show in faux exasperation: “Who is actually speaking about the actual real citizen’s issues… who is speaking the aam Gujarati?” Certainly not you Chaubey Ji, certainly not you.

Times Now’s Navika Kumar on The Newshour at 9 pm started off the show stating that: “The baseline question tonight is: Is the non-Hindu register signature controversy likely to hurt the Congress party in the Gujarat elections?”

Take a deep breath and note the fact that there is such a thing as the “non-Hindu register signature controversy” in Independent India in the 21st century. The rest of the debate was so insipid that it doesn’t deserve a mention in the “so bad that it’s so good” category, which the channel’s erstwhile editor-in-chief has mastered. Speaking of whom, Republic TV had the most inspired hashtag to go with its debate: #RahulHinduOrCatholic.

Full marks to Goswami, though, for kickstarting the show with an honest declaration: “Whether Rahul likes it or not, whether his cronies in the Congress party like it or not, religion matters in a political contest…”

Goswami held up a 1998 article in The New York Times, which for the record is no longer a western propaganda newspaper, as proof that the Gandhi kids were raised as Roman Catholics. How, then, can Rahul be a Shiv Bhakt?

No prime-time can be complete without the laments of Old Soul Rajdeep Sardesai of India Today. Before Sardesai presented “My Take” duly signed by him so no one confuses it for anyone else’s take, he says: “I wish I could speak on the vegetable prices in Gujarat or the Gujarat model.” WHO STOPPED YOU?

Meanwhile, some journalists actually reached out to the Somnath temple authorities, who said that the Congress vice-president had not signed the register maintained for non-Hindus during his visit to the temple. WTF! And here we thought this was a real controversy.