In his election rallies, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi announced that if elected to power, the grand old party would conduct a nationwide caste census. He has been pressing on the issue further by publicly seeking caste profiling of Ministers, senior government officials, and management in media industries, and had reportedly asked the same from an Airline Industry. In particular, the Gandhi scion has been asking how many journalists are there from the OBC community in the media industry.
Now, in a recent show on ‘India TV’, senior journalist Deepak Chaurasia, hailing from the OBC community, exposed the hypocrisy of the Congress leader on its poll plank by sharing an anecdotal incident. Chaurasia, who had a long stint in ‘Zee News’, revealed that despite being an ‘OBC journalist’, he had to endure hardships in the UPA era and was abruptly fired when he was the DD head in 2004.
Notably, during the show, ‘Coffee per Kurukshetra’, the panel comprising India TV anchor Saurav Sharma, Deepak Chaurasia, and two others held a fluid discussion on Reservation and caste representation in the backdrop of Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s Fake Video row. The developments in the fake video case can be read from here. Incidentally, the Congress and its ecosystem had peddled the doctored video of the Home Minister aiming to spread fake news that the BJP wanted to strike down the reservation for SC, ST, and OBC communities.
Exposing the Congress party on this issue, Deepak Chaurasia said, “I want to say one thing with a big heart. The amount of fake narratives spread by the Congress party on the reservation has never happened before. To be honest, most of the people will not know (what I am sharing now). I saw a video of Rahul Gandhi, in which he is looking for an OBC journalist. I am here, I am sitting in front. In 2004, Rahul Gandhi and his party removed me from Doordarshan and ousted me. I was the head of DD. I was an OBC journalist, they didn’t see it back then.”
He added that Rahul Gandhi and the people around him might not even know which are the major OBC castes in Uttar Pradesh. According to Chaurasia, today KC Venugopal is leading the entire Congress on behalf of Rahul Gandhi, and even he may not name 5 OBC castes of North India. He claimed the same thing regarding Rahul Gandhi’s current advisor, Jairam Ramesh.
Chaurasiya emphasised that he shared the incident for the first time after 20 years had passed since then and added that he didn’t want to speak further about it.
Senior DD journalist Ashok Srivastava came out to back Chaurasia’s assertions. Taking to X, the veteran Journalist wrote, “Today, Deepak Chaurasiya publicly acknowledged that in 2004, as soon as the Congress government, led by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, came into power, he was removed from Doordarshan despite being an OBC journalist. I revealed this disclosure in my first book, #NarendraModiCensored.”
However, he highlighted that Deepak Chaurasiya was not alone as around 100 journalists were targeted and removed by Doordarshan overnight during the Congress-led UPA regime. Taking a jibe at the Congress party for its hypocrisy on the matter, Srivastava added, “Today, the Congress is loudly proclaiming ‘freedom’ for the media in its manifesto.”
Jitesh Jethanandani, another journalist from Rajasthan hailing from the OBC community narrated the same ordeal. He stated that when he was overseeing the Rajasthan bureau of the national channel, TV 9 Bharatvarsh, he was fired from his job for saying that Bharat is, was, and will remain a Hindu Rashtra.
According to Jethanandani, back then it was the BJP government that was in power. But many Congress leaders and poet Kumar Vishwas, along with leftist journalists exerted pressure on the BJP government and got him fired from the job, he added.
He asserted that whosoever wants to see proof of it, he can show it to them while noting that since then he has been facing several economic hardships. He pointed out that while some organisations that have a Nation First mindset did try to help but lamented that leftist journalists still dominate the media landscape. He concluded by saying that the condition of the media remains the same even under BJP rule.