What happened to Arnab? Questioning govt on Aravallis, taking shots at ‘Rs 15 cr anchor’

In a curious turn, Arnab Goswami, primetime anchor and Republic TV editor-in-chief, went on air last night criticising the Centre and the Supreme Court for their inability to protect the Aravalli range from “big billionaire companies”. He even took a clean shot at “the [Rs] 15 crore anchor paid by the Government of India” – an explicit reference to DD News host Sudhir Chaudhary – for his silence on the issue.

His call for protecting the Aravallis comes after a recent Supreme Court ruling that has triggered outrage among environmentalists by defining the hills based on a 100-metre elevation threshold. Experts caution that this restrictive definition risks removing legal protection from 90% of the range, potentially enabling widespread mining and deforestation across Delhi-NCR, Haryana, and Rajasthan, not to mention the devastating effect it will have on the worsening air quality in the region. 

“You can destroy them (hills) and we, the citizens of India, can't open our mouths about it. I thought this was a democracy. If this is a democracy, I want to know under what rule of democracy can you destroy a two-billion-year-old ecological formation – a living mountain system,” he said. 

“The 15 crore anchor paid by the Government of India cannot ask this question. But I'm asking this question on your behalf... State governments will argue that we are only following the Supreme Court's definition. This is the new trick for the government – ‘Aravalli’s destruction… We're doing nothing. We're only making a recommendation. The Supreme Court is deciding.’ And corporations will make billions and billions and billions and billions… What is the government doing? Water conflicts will intensify across Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi-NCR,” he added.

He demanded intervention from the prime minister’s office and the environment ministry to #SaveTheAravallis, saying that if they fail, “We will not be a Viksit Bharat. We will be an environmentally destroyed Bharat.” He further added, “The government must intervene and must not think that the media of the country will not do its job,” without realising the irony of what he said. 

He didn't take a direct shot at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But he did have a lot of smoke for the hapless environment minister Bhupinder Yadav with ‘5 Stinging Questions’, while again directing his guns towards “anchors in other Lutyens channels” for failing to ask counter questions to him, and letting him off easy on claims that the government hasn’t destroyed the Aravalli Hills yet.   

Recent shots against the BJP 

But this isn’t the first time in recent days that Goswami has taken on the government or the BJP on a range of issues. 

A couple of days ago, on his show, Goswami took on the BJP-led Delhi government for failing to fulfil the promises it made in its manifesto to tackle air pollution in the capital. A primetime Godi media anchor asking questions of the ruling party for not fulfilling their manifesto promises? Suffice to say, it surprised many people online. 

Similarly, earlier this week, he expressed his disgust at a BJP MLA in Madhya Pradesh for lighting up the sky with firecrackers at his son's wedding – spending upwards of Rs 70 lakhs. Responding to this spectacle on primetime, he criticised a “new trend among BJP leaders to display money, their connections.” He called out BJP leaders in governments they run – or in coalition with other parties – for owning “huge amounts of property”. He contrasted this with recent tragedies: a pregnant woman in Madhya Pradesh's Rewa died after being stranded near a flooded bridge for two hours without medical help, and six children in the state with thalassemia became HIV positive after a botched blood transfusion.

He argued that “on an issue-by-issue basis, the people are the opposition.” In an extraordinary remark, he even reminded BJP leaders that flaunting wealth by the uber-rich in Nepal "made people very angry.”

On the recent IndiGo flight cancellation fiasco, he called out the Modi government by name on Republic Bharat, exclaiming, “India is asking: What is Modi Sarkar doing?” He said the situation at airports was worse than at bus and railway stations and even accused the government of succumbing to ‘IndiGo’s blackmail’. 

Goswami's recent run of primetime debates has elicited four kinds of reactions: one, where people are praising him for questioning the government; two, for finally doing his job as a journalist, which is to hold power to account; three, where people are sarcastically noting that things have gotten so bad that even he's speaking up against the government; and four, where people are speculating about the cause behind this shift. 

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