Exclusive: Why Times Now is intelligence agencies’ favourite stressbuster

With external enemies at the border and internal enemies at home, the mood at India’s intelligence agencies has been rather grim. And if highly confidential sources are to be believed, the brainiacs at the security establishment have devised brand new games to ward off the blues.

“The latest one is called ‘Sherlock Shivshankar’. We take some godforsaken material and email it to Times Now as a scoop,” said a senior source. “A forged letter threatening the PM’s life was quite a hit for a couple of years. After a green drive at the office, we started sending emails.”

But with the work growing jarring by the day, the sleuths are punching up the dose of creativity.

“Yesterday, we sent them a public video from Facebook as ‘private tapes’,” said another young officer, blushingly. “My seniors kept guessing what I had done. When we finally watched Arnab Lite’s primetime during dinner, everyone was in splits. It was therapeutic.”

On Monday, Rahul Shivshankar played a month-old webinar from a Facebook page called The Pedestrian as a “sensational secret recording”. The webinar, titled "Reclaiming Freedom of Speech and Liberty in Times of Intensified State Aggression and Repression", featured activist Teesta Setalvad, among others.

On his show, Shivshankar said that Times Now’s reporters accessed the video after it was “leaked” to the intelligence agencies. The hashtag was #UmarLobbySecretTape.

“Is it not a good one? Be honest!” the senior officer exclaimed over the phone. “They did a 45-minute show over it, with a whole panel of charlatans. This chap — our junior — set the bar high. I’m already excited about next week.”

The episode gives us a refreshing glimpse into the lives of hardened patriots. Asked if the agencies have been leaking similar stuff on the SSR case to Republic TV, the senior source was taken aback. “Absolutely not. That would be highly unethical.”

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