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Journalism of Courage
West Bengals list of select newspapers for state libraries is bad news for the government
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee inspires a love for the absurd. The state is to be christened Paschimbanga,metro stations are named after poets so that no one actually knows where they are,Tagore songs are blared from speakers at city crossings. And now,libraries run or funded by the state government will get a reading list,telling them which newspapers to offer readers. The list includes only newspapers which support the government,or at least,do not criticise it. No English language publication makes the cut,nor the major Bengali dailies. Four of the editors working for the chosen newspapers are now members of Rajya Sabha,elected on Trinamool tickets.
This is an act of whimsy,of a piece with spending crores to paint Kolkata blue and ordering people in nightclubs to go home by midnight so that incidents of rape can be prevented. But these are smokescreens to mask the serious problem of governance. Its been less than a year since the TMC came to power but what a spectacular fall its been: a humongous debt,sluggish investment,stalled projects,flight of business and a continuing legacy of political violence. Even rapes and farmer suicides are dismissed as conspiracies. Banerjees record so far in Kolkata ties in neatly with her intransigence in New Delhi,from land acquisition,FDI in retail,the NCTC and Lokayukta to her grandest success till date the roll back of the railway budget.
If Banerjee thinks she can brush all this under pages of friendly newspapers and hope that the tide turns,she clearly underestimates the intelligence of the reader. The CPM did that and she knows what happened to it.
