By MM Special Correspondent
New Delhi : The media blackout of Rana Ayyub’s “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up” may be called the second cover up of the Gujarat carnage by mainstream media. In first case the perpetrators tried to cover their crimes and now the media has done the same by not covering the book release ceremony of Gujarat Files which was organized by Caravan magazine at India Habitat Center last week.
But the truth can never be covered up. The same is happening with Rana Ayyub’ Gujarat Files.
In spite of undeclared censorship by the mainstream media the book has become No 2 best seller on Amazon and also most reviewed book of the year within a week.
The release ceremony of Gujarat Files will be remembered as one of the most successful and glittering event of the capital where celebrities were spotted standing in the gallery to witness the event.
It attracted the mighty and powerful to its official launch program last week, managed by Caravan magazine in Delhi, but the media which rushes in swarm to cover everything and anything under the sky remained absent.
No mainstream media print or visual (except Indian Express) has mentioned anything about the book. There has to be something very fetid for a bestseller to be so wholly blacked out by media.
Such a blackout in a secular democratic country like India where freedom of speech is a constitutional right implicates an undeniable, unspoken and unwritten compromise between the media and political powers.
Media anchors who had screamed their throats sour reporting the encounter of Ishrat Jahan –an alleged LeT operative have taken a vow of silence in face of evidence of the encounter being fake.
When Rajdeep Sardesai was asked about it at the book launch he said ‘it may be because no media want a disconnect to develop between them and the top politicians.’
Rana Ayyub had to self publish her book because no publisher had the courage to publish the it. Gujarat. It is an account of an 8 month long undercover investigation into the Gujarat riots, fake encounters and the murder of state home minister Haren Pandya and unearths details that will shock the reader. Rana posed as an NRI filmmaker Maithili Tyagi and met bureaucrats and top police officers who held pivotal positiins in the state between 2001 and 2010. The transcripts of these conversations reveal the complicity of the state, its leaders and officials in crimes against humanity.
The media blackout of Gujarat Files is a very disturbing sign for the existence of democracy in this country.The alliance of media and government result into fascism.
But Rana deserves the gratitude of anyone who is committed to the truth of Gujarat emerging in the public space and justice being done.
Media is infested with rss terrorist ideology and serving Hindutva interest under pretext of Nationalism.
Asif, you are right…Media is infested with rss terrorist ideology and serving Hindutva interest under pretext of Nationalism.