Finally, Tytler and Sajjan are out of election race

Finally, Congress was forced to advise Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar to withdraw from the Lok Sabha election 2009.

Now practically every political party is trying to claim a victory. And TV channels like Times Now are taking the high moral ground and questioning the political parties. According to me, all of them are taking us for a ride. Lets take the arguments of some of these political parties as well as TV channel Times Now and blow them apart.

Congress says:

(a) It is a sensitive party and has bowed to the wishes of the Sikh community.
(b) Tytler has not been convicted and that CBI has approached the courts for his acquittal as there is no evidence against him.

If Congress was sensitive, it would not have fielded these two guys. They did this inspite of the fact that Rajiv Gandhi and PM Manmohan Singh had stated that riot tainted people will not be given tickets

Courts had ordered reopening of the case against both Sajjan Kumar and Tytler because it found enough evidence to do so but CBI again did not find any evidence. Why? Well, guess who controls the CBI?

BJP / Akali Dal says:

(a) Important issue is not tickets given to these candidates but bring the culprits to justice.

Well, these guys were in power for 2 terms, why didn’t they bring the culprits to justice?

Times Now says:

(a) I do not know the name of the TV anchor but he is the lead anchor for Times Now and argues his point point quite forcefully. I personally think he is quite aggresive and that is what is required. He argued with the political parties representatives that “Ceasar’s wife should be above suspicion.”

He is of course right but is the Times of India Group (TOI) which owns the TV station and is the proverbial “Ceasar’s wife” above the proverbial “suspicion?” I am not sure as is evident from Sucheta Dalal’s (Financial Express’s journalist) article and mint newspaper article by Nesil Staney & Anushree Chandran. These people have reported two activities of the Times of India Group which could be illegal and amount to misleading its readers. These activities are as follows:

(a) “Media Net” services of TOI which basically amount to printing biased “paid for news” as unbiased news in their newspapers.

(b) Printing positive news about the companies in which TOI has bought stake in without disclosing their financial interest. TOI does equity deals with this arrangement and calls it “private treaties.”

Both the above activities of TOI have the potential of misleading its readers and as such should not be done. For instance, mint financial newspaper always discloses its financial and other interests while printing news.

So I guess people who live in glass houses should not throw stones at others.

avinash narula