‘Politics often makes strange bedfellows’ couldn’t have been truer than the quaint bonhomie between top Congress leader Digvijaya Singh and Goa’s own satrap of Fatorda Vijai Sardesai.
The Goa Forward Party (GFP) supremo grabbed a headline earlier this week, when he suddenly joined the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in Indore. Although Sardesai explained in a video message later that by joining the yatra, he had only “respected” an invitation he had received from officials of the party he had struck an alliance with in the 2022 assembly polls, it is more than clear that he is more than warming up to an inning of closer ties with his former party.
Sardesai’s act of walking alongside Gandhi at Indore earned him an accolade from an unlikely leader of the grand old party -- former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh.
“Our ally Goa Forward Party Chief Vijay Sardesai walked with Rahul ji yesterday. Thank you @VijaiSardesai.” Singh wrote in a tweet.
The Singh-Sardesai bonhomie wouldn’t have been thinkable after the duo found themselves in the thick of the fiasco, post the 2017 Assembly elections.
Despite emerging as the single-largest party, the Congress was unable to form its government as Sardesai walked over to the other side and embraced the BJP to let the wily Manohar Parrikar cobble up a majority and return as Chief Minister. Singh was the AICC general secretary in-charge of Goa then.
But then, there are no permanent friends or enemies and politics indeed makes strange bedfellows.
Ever since the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) made Goa its permanent home in 2004, the flagship Indian festival which is otherwise a celebration of the art of making movies and the art involved, has often made headlines for the wrong reasons.
This year was no exception with none other than the head of the Jury making a strong but critical statement on one of the 15 movies they judged in the competition section -- The Kashmir Files.
The Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid stirred a huge controversy when from the stage at the closing ceremony, he was critical of the selection of the movie even as he slammed it as a ‘propaganda’ and ‘vulgar’ film.
Expectedly, the statement earned Lapid a huge backlash, given that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had during its release earlier this year, used the Vivek Agnihotri movie to tom-tom its political stance on the early 1990 violence against the Kashmiri Pandits which led to their exodus from the Valley.
No less than the Israeli Ambassador to India, Naor Gilon, instantly issued an apology for Lapid’s comments but the filmmaker himself stood by his comments on the film.
The controversy raged on in the Indian media for the next few days adn eventually, Lapid did “apologise” but to the relatives of the Kashmiri Pandit victims and not to the filmmaker of The Kashmir Files or to the Indian government. He stood by his critique of the film and said he sincerely apologised to the relatives of the Kashmir tragedy if they interpreted his comment as an insult.
This year’s controversy apart, the ‘politicisation’ of IFFI is something that for several years has been slammed by connoisseurs of cinema, the discernable interference of the political bosses at the I&B Ministry included. Stuff of the kind that saw megastar Amitabh Bachchan being a persona non-grata at IFFI in all the years that the UPA was in power.
Undoubtedly the beacon of television journalism in India, New Delhi Television (NDTV) has undergone a major ownership change. With Gautam Adani’s group taking control of the broadcasting channel in the Indian TV news space for over three decades, its founder and the iconic Dr Pranoy Roy has thrown in the towel. Both Dr Roy and his wife Radhika have announced that they have stepped down as directors of NDTV’s holding company and more than indicated they will quit the channel altogether, soon.
Adani, who has seen a metoric rise to become the world’s second richest man after Tesla’s Elon Musk and ahead of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, hails from Gujarat and is not shy of being identified as one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s closest friends. And that is perhaps what prompted Dr Roy to bid farewell to NDTV he founded and nurtured all these decades.
Also scalped in the corporate takeover of NDTV is another journalist of iconic stature -- Ravish Kumar -- arguably one of the few, if not the only television journalist of the genre that speaks truth to power. Kumar, who’s show ‘Prime Time’ had a huge following, also announced his resignation hours after Dr Roy did. The last man standing, it seems, has also fallen to the machiavellian corporate control of the Indian media.
