Zakka Jacob pulls an ‘Arnab’ on prime time show

The ongoing ‘meat’ debates raging across the country took a nasty turn last night on CNN-News18’s prime time show. It all began when the anchor Zakka Jacob, discussed the high-handedness of the government while handling the recent shutdown of restaurants and shops that sold beef. The debate ended with an infuriated Jacob pulling of an Arnab Goswami as he asked one of his panelists to leave his show.

The panelists included members from Hindu Right wing organisations like Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Hum Hindu, other than the regulars from Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress. An irate Jacob posed questions to the right wing panelists for cracking down on beef sellers and putting them out of business without concrete evidence against them. “Some Sadhvi comes, and then the police comes and then shuts the hotel. For four weeks he can’t run the business. Ye kya banana republic hai (Is this a banana republic)?,” he asked. 

Even as Ajay Gautam, founder of Hum Hindu, tried to interrupt to say that the shop owners challenged the shutdown in the court, Jacob moved onto his next panelist who was from VHP, Vijay Shankar Tewari. “No thief calls himself a thief. The case Rabani mentioned, it should be investigated before we decide what’s right and what’s wrong,” Tewari told Jacob. To this, Jacob smirked and said, “You’ve pronounced him guilty before the investigation.”

While Gautam interrupted by saying “He is a suspect”, Jacob ignored him completely and continued his rebuttal against Tewari and said that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. 

This is when the debate took an ugly turn and provoked Jacob to raise his voice after Tewari told him to speak in Hindi. An infuriated Jacob continued to speak in English, which perhaps led to Tewari losing his temper and leaving the show as he responded to Jacob’s comment, “What nonsense”. 

And continuing this vein of restrained, collegial conversation, Jacob screamed at his panelist and asked him to “get out of the show”. In October last year, Goswami had a similar verbal spat with ex-cop Shamsher Khan Pathan on Times Now who was also asked to leave the show for insulting women on his panel.