ED, CBI in pursuit, AAP plays victim card amid trailblazing ad spree
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, August 19: How is that the mainstream media, print and television, never stumble upon any negative story against the Aam Admi Party-led government in the National Capital Territory of Delhi?
The answer lies in the trailblazing advertisement spree of the Arvind Kejriwal-led city government.
Opposition parties in Delhi have long complained that the media ignores issues raised by them which are against the AAP government.
Yet, there has never been a word on the extent of press freedom from influencers in the public space.
A well-known television anchor had to lose his job as the chief of bureau of a leading Hindi newspaper merely because he once tweeted against the AAP government.
That is the scale of the Kejriwal model of media management.
Television channels would run slots on the AAP government in Delhi on the lines of Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali.
Now, the ambitious AAP government has gone international with its ad wizardry, tapping into The New York Times and The Khaleej Times.
The Delhi unit of the BJP has charged that the AAP government bought the space in the two dailies for the international branding of the education model in the national capital.
Some of the photographs splashed by the two international dailies have turned out to be of the students of a private school in Mayur Vihar in East Delhi.
In the times of the Sheila Dikshit-led Delhi government, scribes had access to sit right outside the conference hall where the Cabinet meetings took place.
The first decision of the Delhi government after Kejriwal became the chief minister was to bar the entry of accredited journalists from entering the secretariat.
Kejriwal claims to be the proponent of an alternative politics, yet on transparency he’s worse than any of his predecessors.
Now that the Central Bureau of Investigation is on a hot pursuit of Manish Sisodia, who helms most of the ministries, while another ministerial colleague Satyendra Jain is in judicial custody, the edifice of an anti-corruption crusader that Kejriwal built is being probed.
A number of liquor traders have burnt their fingers in Delhi, running into heavy losses, after the New Excise Policy of the city government inflated the license fees, while crowding the market places with too many shops.
Facing the heat, the AAP has fallen back on playing the victim card that the party is facing the vendetta of the BJP-led Central government.
Yet, the AAP fails to enthuse any sympathy from the ranks of the Opposition, as the Congress too came down heavily against the claims of the Kejriwal government by citing statistics to prove that the famed education model is bogus.
For the Opposition in Delhi, the education model of the city remains upgrading and branding a few schools in the south and central parts of the national capital, while on the outskirts the students and teachers are treated shabbily.
While the mainstream media plays key role in helping build campaigns, the advertisement ammunition of the Kejriwal government may blank out any intrusive investigations into the affairs of the city administration.
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