Arnab Goswami’s unhealthy obsessions peaked last night

It’s no surprise that Republic TV Commander-in-Chief Arnab Goswami’s unhealthy obsession with “pseudo-seculars” has continued beyond the glorious realms of Times Now.

Exposing Gymkhana journalists and the ‘rights lobby’ was after all his stated mission. To this effect, Goswami has not disappointed: There was that long tirade against The Wire and yesterday he took on his favourite among the jholalwala crowd, Ms Kavita Krishnan. Oh, and did we tell you he’s coined a new word for this god-awful tribe? Yes he has: Secularati, like glitterati and Twitterati.

Coming back to Goswami’s prime-time offering, a segment of it was dedicated to Krishnan’s tweet in the context of the Anantnag terror attack.

Yes, a tweet. A prime-time news debate revolved around a tweet. Because it’s not like there are tough questions to be asked of people in the governments at the Centre and the state.

The first few minutes went by with Goswami and Professor Dinesh Varshney indulging in a little tu tu main main. Goswami called Varshney a pseudo secular and Varshney wanted him to take it back. Arnab’s response: You are a pseudo with a capital P. This was as sophisticated an exchange as between two children fighting over whose daddy is strongest.

But what made it classier was the entry of the most sharpest of defence experts (with a capital P) retired Colonel RSN Singh. After a little bit of a spat, Singh said he was surprised that Varshney was a professor — “you are not fit to be a chapraasi in JNU…what kind of psycho teacher…I’ll urge your students to boycott the class of this psycho professor…who behaves like a zombie.” We want to put sic in parenthesis but may be deranged would work better as an indication of something being off with that quote.

Moving on, Goswami referencing Krishnan’s tweet, says, “I found a tweet today from a person who claims to be an activist. She says today…Lashkar-e-Taiba denies the Amarnath attack. So if the Lashkar-e-Taiba denies the Amarnath attack. Who did? Who does it benefit…question mark. Groups that do terror attacks boast about it. Lashkar-e-Taiba is denying it so if Lashkar-e-Taiba is denying it…we should take the Lashkar-e-Taiba at face value…and we should start questioning our own country.”

Then with all the outrage he could muster, Goswami said, “Lashkar-e-Taiba has a LAWYER IN INDIA. I didn’t know but I’d say tonight that the lawyer of the Lashkar-e-Taiba in India and I don’t give a damn Kavita Krishnan what you do. The lawyer of the Lashkar-e-Taiba in India, going by this tweet, is Kavita Krishnan.” How we miss the days when Goswami only blamed people for being apologists of sundry terror organisations.

This was followed by a useful intervention by Major General (retired) GD Bakshi who said he’d like to add “arch hypocrite” to the epithet of pseudo. Because “hypocrisy, you know Arnab, it’s the worst sin.”

Somewhere down the line he made it clear that he’s going to call these despicable people hypocrites, with a capital H.

The rest of the show wasn’t about Krishnan per se but matched the high bar set earlier on. Sample this exchange between two very frenzied gents — Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Sambit Patra and Kashmiri lawyer Syed Babar Qadri.

SP: He is gaddar Qadri. Yeh yahan ka khata hai, Pakistan ka gaata hai. Such people have to be exposed. (He is traitor Qadri. He eats here and praises pakistan.)

SBQ: Ayeee, gau rakhshak chup ho ja! Tu chup ho ja! (Hey, shut up cow protector. Shut up.)

To go beyond being flippant about the whole thing, we reached out to Krishnan and asked her what she felt about the show and Goswami calling her an LeT lawyer. She said, “My views on the Amarnath attack are clear — whosoever the perpetrators are, they want to spread hatred and communal and ethnic tension amongst us and we should not let them succeed. I have expressed no opinion on whether or not we should believe LeT’s statement. But how can Arnab be so sure that LeT and not any other terrorist outfit is the culprit, without an investigation? Why does any citizen asking for an investigation become an anti-national?”

Krishnan further stated that branding her a ‘lawyer for LeT’ is not only false but also endangers her reputation and safety. “Arnab and his ilk are orchestrating and inciting lynch mobs from their studios,” she said, adding that she considered the show defamatory.

We also reached out to Goswami asking him if he sincerely believed Krishnan was an ‘LeT lawyer’ and if he truly felt a terrorist organisation even needed a lawyer. We don’t expect a response. Meanwhile, we sure hope Goswami gets on Twitter to take on tweets he dislikes by replying to them real time, instead of dedicating prime-time shows to social media utterances. Surely, the nation could do with a journalist who’s got his priorities right.

The author can be contacted at manisha.pande1110@gmail.com and on Twitter @MnshaP.