Syed Ali Mujtaba | Clarion India
I MAY like to preface my thoughts with the popular slogan “Modi Hai to Mumkin hai”. I may like to pose the question why PM Modi chose to fly to Leh knowing well Vikas Dubey’s feat? My hunch is this was a planned visit made to manage media headlines.
I like to speculate on why PM Modi chose to fly to Leh on Saturday at about 5 am knowing well that at 1.30 am, Vikas Dubey had killed eight policemen in ambushed at a village, about 50 km from Kanpur.
My premonition says this trip was planned in haste by the BJP’s media managers to manipulate the headlines in India. At least for some time in the day till Vikas Dubey is killed in an encounter.
And this news flash could salvage the ignominy of the UP police under the BJP government from where most votes are pocketed by the ruling party invoking national pride.
Imagine what news would have been played on Saturday morning on the TV channels had the PM not gone to Leh. It would have been the bellicosity of Vikas Dubey and a rebuke at Yogi Adityanath government for presiding over a jungle raj. This La Galwan story could have been milked all day by the TV channels.
As the day may have progressed, this news could have had huge negative political fallout for the UP government that BJP media managers would have found hard to manage. So, in a swift move, they sent PM Modi to fly to Leh in order to take the steam off the Vikas Dubey story.
Their calculation was that the TV channels will remain busy covering PM’s Leh visit projecting him as a knight in shining armour single-handedly braving China’s fury, the nationalist ‘mantara’ which never failed him. And by the time he gets back to Delhi, Vikas Dubey might have been finished.
We all know the story so far, but what we do not know is that such exercise was undertaken to make headlines in India. “Modi Hai to Mumkin hai.”
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Syed Ali Mujtaba is a journalist based in Chennai. The views expressed here are author’s personal. He can be contacted at [email protected]
