Today, I want to talk about the bar that liberals seem to set for themselves as opposed to their ideological opposites. I’ve been planning to write about this for long, but it kept getting put off. So, here it is, since I had some time on my hand, and thought that my voice on this important subject ought to be heard, and recorded for posterity, like so much of my writing that is written purely as a diary of my thoughts, if nothing, to prove for later generations that I was on the right side of history when it mattered, like Ravish said in his Magsaysay Award acceptance speech: ‘Not all battles are fought for victory – some are fought to tell the world that someone was there on the battlefield.’
<begin rant>
If Arnab Goswami so much as says a few sentences on how horrified he is on the release of Bilkis Bano’s rapists and their subsequent felicitation by the right wing, something that is literally so low a bar for humanity that he couldn’t have gone under it had he tried, he is feted and congratulated for it, with liberals posting and commenting that they must give the devil his due and that ‘where he’s right, he’s right’ and how they should be able to keep his otherwise bigoted, prejudiced, fake-news-spouting, sold-out, yellow ‘journalism’ separate in some hermetically sealed intellectual chamber while showing support and commending the bare minimum lip service he paid to literal convicted rapists being celebrated openly in India.
At the same time, if Adani was so much as to make an attempt at a hostile takeover of NDTV, which hasn’t (as of the time this goes to press) yet come to fruition and will be contested at the very least, liberals start spreading and believing the ‘news’ that Ravish Kumar has resigned from his post, displaying their expectation from this last-man-standing hero who has regularly, and in face of overwhelming odds, remained standing for honest, open, and professional old-school journalism even as the dust continues to settle around him, someone who has consistently questioned the powers-that-be and turned the light on to issues that truly plague this society and country without fear or favour, for his entire life, even being felicitated and celebrated outside the country for this level of commitment to the cause of true journalism.
Why, I ask, should Ravish have a bar set so high that he should be expected to take a moral stand and lose his livelihood at the merest whiff of suspicion of working for a media house that has changed ownership, even when he did not let the current ownership dictate terms to him, while Arnab be applauded for simply saying that he is kind of appalled that convicted rapists and murderers are being celebrated in India and that perhaps this isn’t a good thing?
What privilege explains the liberals not being well, liberal, with the standards they apply to their own as opposed to those who are proven to be the manifestations of all that they stand against? Is it because each liberal somehow thinks of themselves as being the epitome, the perfect human to have gained the right to judge the Man In The Arena?
Why such different standards so widely varying in their requirements for two people in the same industry? Why praise and commend someone for doing the bare minimum because he is someone you are opposed to while vilifying and crucifying someone who is a beacon for your values for not being perfect, with ‘perfect’ being defined as ‘whatever I say it is’?
Shouldn’t it actually be the other way around, with Arnab having to do more, and then some, to prove worthy of the liberal nod, and Ravish having nothing left to prove his credentials? Why this hypocrisy then?
This is the exact kind of circular firing squad the liberals have long been known for. It is ridiculous and self-destructive. And the right wing cannot be faulted for following Napoleon’s dictum of not interrupting the enemy when they are making a mistake.
<end rant>
