Missing the forest for the trees

"Innocent middle-class" citizen Shoma Chaudhury with Ram Jethmalani

Perhaps Tehelka is getting some heat for their SIMI clean chit project. We don't know. But they reacted just like they did after the Gujarat fake sting - they let the choir gal out.

Shoma Chaudhury writes:

As privileged middle-class Indians, as a rule we mostly live in cocoons of well-being. This makes us dangerously innocent. We believe the world is a straight place.

Awwwww, Shomaji, you don't say. You are no ordinary middle-class citizen. Journalists seldom are. After all which other ordinary middle-class Indians get to hobnob with senior Congress leaders and ministers? Sad to learn that her political cherry popped only about seven years ago.

The point is, we find it hard to believe she wrote this article with a straight face. More likely she was bursting into peels of laughter while penning this. This sort of defense is put up in elementary schools.

In case after case, issue after issue, the Tehelka people claim to be "innocent". Innocent of what? Their innocence is broken when they discover a "terrifying", "disturbing", "frightening", "dark" secret. And all this is happening way after they attained adulthood. They must have been really clueless!

The second common theme can be best described as persecution complex. For a magazine with insignificant subscriptions, they have not only survived, but spread their tentacles deeper and wider. It is a racket. Recently we noticed CEOs writing funny columns and coincidentally ads of those companies were appearing on the same issues. What is this? "Advertisement for article" scheme?

In this environment, Shoma Chadhuri's claims of being "innocent" and "clueless" about the dark world of intrigue yonder is quite untenable.

TEHELKA holds no brief for SIMI. (Or any other organisation.)

This statement from Tehelka invites scrutiny not just for what it means but for the sheer number of times it is repeated. Will Tehelka's office boy believe it?

Shoma Chaudhuri goes on to claim that they pretty casually decided to investigate SIMI. Someone said "Yeh SIMI wala chakkar kya hai?" and they did the project. Maybe so, but the fact is they did not investigate SIMI. They already had a conclusion. They merely conducted interviews (only SIMI members) and filled in the gaps. This is neither investigation, nor journalism. This is propaganda.

There are complex and sophisticated arguments that SIMI intellectuals put forward to back their stances. “Why don't people want to have a dialogue and hear out our views instead of jailing us?” says one SIMI activist.

There is nothing sophisticated or particularly complex about SIMI's arguments. These are savages with medieval mentality. Tehelka's sanctimonious self-defense can not blind us to the fact that they have gone so far batting for a certain type of politics that they are now forced to cheer for an ideology which does not even recognize the values Tehelka claims to stand for.