Liar Liar Pants on Fire: NaMo distorts Aiyar’s words to make ‘Aurangzeb’ jibe at Congress

by Guest Mon Dec 04, 2017 11:37 am

is this man incapable of telling the truth consistently?

https://scroll.in/article/860261/fact-check-modi-distorted-mani-shankar-aiyars-words-to-make-aurangzeb-raj-jibe-at-congress

by Seva Lamberdar Tue Dec 05, 2017 9:25 am

Aiyar's mistake. With respect to a comment by someone in Congress on the selection of that party's leadership, Aiyar jumps to and starts explaining the transfer of title among Mughal kings (Jehangir and Aurengzeb et al.) and then questions the low level credentials of the Congressman posing the initial question on Congress leadership and Aiyar even dares him to run in the election for leader.

by Guest Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:33 pm

Seva Lamberdar wrote:Aiyar's mistake. With respect to a comment by someone in Congress on the selection of that party's leadership, Aiyar jumps to and starts explaining the transfer of title among Mughal kings (Jehangir and Aurengzeb et al.) and then questions the low level credentials of the Congressman posing the initial question on Congress leadership and Aiyar even dares him to run in the election for leader.

Aiyar says his remark was distorted by NaMo and others:

A young man, Shehzad Poonawalla, has suddenly sprung out of nowhere as the BJP's darling. While Congresspersons scratch their heads to try to remember if they have ever heard of him, Modi and his minions see him as the perfect foil to the crescendo of support that Rahul Gandhi has received from Congress workers in every nook and corner of the country. Poonawalla seems to think the accolades should be showered on him. And while his antics secure for him the beaming blessings of Uncle Narendra-bhai, and massive media attention, his family (mother and siblings) publicly distance themselves from him, being better acquainted with his eccentricities than those of us who learned he existed only a few days ago.

Nevertheless, he is, of course, entitled to his views. He believes a Mughal-like dynastic succession is underway in the Congress. That, of course, is music to Modi's ears, as also to a panting media that see TRPs shooting through the roof if they can keep the controversy on the boil.

Enter poor l'il me. As I attempt to jostle my way through milling crowds come to see Rahul's election to the helm of the Congress, ubiquitous TV crews descend on me to get a take on my reaction to Poonawalla. I am usually good for a pithy quote. I have just read in the papers of Poonawalla comparing Rahul's election to a Mughal dynastic succession. I begin, therefore, by explaining that in Mughal times, succession usually took place through a blood bath involving the sons of the ruler but whoever won would be one of the sons of the emperor. At which some Goebbels of a TV editor cried "cut" to ensure the deletion of my painstaking explanation that succession of the Mughal kind was "dynastic", whereas what we were all witnessing at the gates of 24, Akbar Road was an election in which Poonawalla was welcome to file his nomination papers and contest, even as Jitendra Prasada had done against Sonia Gandhi in the year 2000. But all that was snipped away, circumcised as it were, to portray me as a pot-bellied, grey-haired, aging version of Poonawalla to provide grist to Modi's mill.

Modi (and the TRP-lusting visual media) grabbed this "fake news" to claim that I was comparing Aurangzeb's succession to succession in the Congress - when, in fact, I had contrasted Aurangzeb to Rahul to underline just how far off the mark Poonawalla (and his new-found patrons, the BJP) were in attempting to portray a democratic election of our party president as "selection". In any case, Modi's (and, alas, young Poonawalla's) grasp of history is sufficiently uncertain for them to have not seen that, quite unlike Aurangzeb, Rahul was killing none of his siblings to walk through corpse-strewn battlefields to a coronation in the palace. Indeed, his only sibling, Priyanka, was rooting for him. Most important of all, there was no throne at 24, Akbar Road (which is no palace, just a rather shabby, overbuilt, ill-kept bungalow) and with no crown (except perhaps metaphorically a crown of thorns) for the successor Congress president to wear.

And so it came to pass that poor Poonawalla found himself vying with me for media attention, the difference being that he was glorying in it, while I was merely annoyed at the shenanigans in TV editors' rooms that found snipping the quote the best way to get their advertising revenues roaring. I survived with a brief four-line clarification. Poonawalla is soon to discover that media attention is astonishingly fleeting. TV is the most trivializing medium of them all, with social media a close second. Shehzad will soon find himself forgotten.

https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/modi-and-media-distorted-my-aurangzeb-remark-by-mani-shankar-aiyar-1782290?pfrom=home-topstories

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Liar Liar Pants on Fire: NaMo distorts Aiyar’s words to make ‘Aurangzeb’ jibe at Congress

Liar Liar Pants on Fire: NaMo distorts Aiyar’s words to make ‘Aurangzeb’ jibe at Congress

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Re: Liar Liar Pants on Fire: NaMo distorts Aiyar’s words to make ‘Aurangzeb’ jibe at Congress

Re: Liar Liar Pants on Fire: NaMo distorts Aiyar’s words to make ‘Aurangzeb’ jibe at Congress