Modi-bashing is season's fashion
by nagesh singh on Dec 18, 2007 01:50 PM
Perhaps no other State Assembly election in the recent past has generated so much heat as the Gujarat poll. After Emergency, this is the first election when an individual is ranged against a battery of opponents -- a hostile media, a fairly united Opposition, 'eminent' intelligentsia and hordes of party defectors. But unlike post-Emergency, Mr Narendra Modi, the protagonist of the Gujarat election, remains hugely popular with the people of the State. Never before have we witnessed such an openly partisan campaigning by a prominent section of the media as in the present case. A host of television crews shooting in Gujarat has been jeered by hostile crowds that rightly believe that the media has gone completely overboard. Is it that this brigade of 'secular' mercenaries, comprising journalists, filmmakers, social 'scientists' and activists, has descended on Gujarat merely to rid it of Mr Modi? There is a kind of intellectual snobbishness associated with the phenomenon too. Some 'brown sahib' graduates from JNU, AMU and DU have arrogated upon themselves a Thomas Macaulay-like urge to 'civilise' Gujarat's entrepreneurs whom the Nehruvian socialists see as less evolved educationally. For, the most of post-independence period, the jholawala's writ has run unchallenged. It, therefore, frustrates them to see Gujarat refusing to yield to their wisdom. Despite socialism having lost its case worldwide, the JNU-type jholawalas notice a clear threat in the success of Gujarat's capit
