Dear Editor,
Bengal – the latest ‘hotel topic’ in national sphere, right from Centre to media. If the sorry picture of rest of India gets cleverly swept under the carpet and all focus gets directed towards the state of affairs in Bengal by the Who’s Who of the BJP, the central government, the biased section of the media and vested interests, naturally Bengal would come in centre-stage.
Political killings. Be it in Kerala or Odisha, political killings are rampant.
As far as the medical field is concerned, physical assault on doctors is an all-India, even international, phenomenon with such incidents also reported from Pakistan to China and USA. None other than the Indian Medical Association had reported that 75% of Indian doctors have experienced physical assault at workplace in 2017.
More than 100 children have died in Bihar due to encephalitis within a few days. Had it happened in Bengal, the Centre and the national media would have taunted and abused Bengal and Mamata Banerjee in the most vulgar fashion possible, projecting “collapse of medical infrastructure” in the state.
During the last five years, Haryana to Karnataka, and Gujarat to Assam saw how absolute innocents were cold-bloodedly murdered in the name of gow mata. Intellectuals to journalists shot dead for protesting against communalism. The less said about the atrocities on the Dalits or the spate of ‘honour killings’ the better.
Immediately after the start of the second innings of ‘good days’, cow-related lynchings have been witnessed in Madhya Pradesh. A poor Muslim was shot in Bihar’s Begusarai with the diktat of ‘Go to Pakistan’; a youth in Haryana has was beaten up for wearing a skullcap. While a Hindu doctor somehow escaped the wrath of the ‘nationalists’ in New Delhi (who gheraoed him) by uttering ‘Jai Sri Ram’ as demanded, no such luck for a group of Muslims in Assam’s Barpeta who were severely thrashed for refusing to bow down to their diktat.
Not to forget the arrest of Jitrai Hansda (professor-cum-drama personality) in Jamshedpur for his protest against infringement on the dietary rights of tribals (beef) through a Facebook message posted as many as two years ago. What about detention of journalist Prashant Kanojia in Uttar Pradesh for a mere tweet deemed ‘objectionable’ to some high profile person?
And saffron-led Uttar Pradesh – the land of the BJP ‘stalwarts’ and hosting the Lok Sabha constituency of none other than the Prime Minister. Not a single day passes when gangrape, torture on minor girls to Dalits to minorities don’t take place there.
Yet neither to UP nor to the other states the Centre asks for any sort of report despite the series of scandals, failure, and violence. Also, the media (a large section) do not make it centrepiece news, unlike the happenings in Bengal.
If this selective portrayal of one and only Bengal in bad light where ‘democracy has got throttled’ is not a bizarre specimen of political vendetta, if this is not biased journalism, then what is it?
It is high time the BJP-led Centre learned to act liberal enough to view all states, irrespective of the colour of the local regime, in an absolutely equal footing because Central governance should reside above all norms of petty parochialism and political bickering. And a large section of the media should also learn to exercise their neutrality instead of acting biased and prejudiced in favour or opposed to any political party or state.
Sincerely,
Kajal Chatterjee,
Kolkata