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Journalism of Courage
Amidst the ongoing protests over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), renowned cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle has come out in support of the country’s youth saying the government needs to listen to them.
Bhogle in a Facebook post wrote, “Winning elections isn’t a good enough reason for highlighting differences between us. My naive view of the world tells me that creating opportunities through liberalisation and openness and togetherness could win more elections.”
Bhogle added, “This is a great time to be a benevolent government; to think of education, of infrastructure, of technology; to remove barriers, to embrace openness, to free this beautiful generation to take India beyond where we think it can be.”
Remembering his early ’30s, Bhogle wrote about how two former Prime Ministers, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, brought about a revolution in the nation.
“I was in my early 30s when two quiet gentlemen brought about a revolution. Maybe Narasimha Rao was forced into opening up India by the calamity that would have befallen us otherwise. Maybe Manmohan Singh had no choice but to deliver the budgets he did. But they saw the writing on the wall and they acted,” he explained.
After Parliament passed the CAA, thousands of concerned citizens have poured onto the streets in protest against the new law. Speaking on the ongoing situation, Bhogle wrote, “I think young India is speaking to us. It is telling us what it wants to be; and that it doesn’t want to be what we are telling it to be.”
Appealing to the ones in power and the common citizens, Bhogle requested everyone to not burden the next generation with cultural differences. “We have played a very nice innings, we have been lucky to have been Indians for the last twenty five years. Let us not burden the next generation with talk of war and cultural differences. They are going to be better than we were. Let them be. In a happy, open, secular, liberal world, they can become the best in the world.”
