Title: Modi Misquoted
Author: Virendra Kapoor
Publication: Cybernoon
Date: Mar 19, 2002 
URL: http://www.cybernoon.com/bombay/bombay8.htm

Modi Misquoted
A case of giving the dog a bad name and hanging it

DID he or did he not quote Newton's third law to justify the communal carnage in Gujarat? The Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi insists that he did not. His critics say he did. At issue is a highly inappropriate and tasteless remark sourced to the Gujarat CM at the height of the communal riots. Modi is said to have referred to Newton's law which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This he is said to have quoted in order to justify the communal killings following the torching of the 'Kar Sevaks' in the Sabarmati Express at the Godhra railway station on the morning of February 27. But Modi vehemently denies that he said any such thing and insists that the quote was the figment of the imagination of the so-called secularist elements in the media.

An angry Modi wrote to the English daily, which had first put the quote in his mouth, protesting that he had never met its correspondent nor had he an occasion to say what he had been quoted as having said and that it was only fair that the paper made amends for its wholly 'inventive reportage.' The newspaper editors, however, refused to do so and two weeks later were still sitting on Modi's letter. Left to himself perhaps the paper's senior-most editor may well have published Modi's letter but since his writ does not run and the place is teeming with new-fangled journalists who openly talk of blacking out all news about the Sangh parivar, and the paper's management is only obsessed with packing nothing other than revenue-earning advertisement in its columns, Modi's letter has not been published. Modi, therefore, is not entirely wrong in complaining of the bias of the media and the attempt to tar his image. For, the quote in the said paper was immediately recycled and rehashed by the rest of the print and audio visual media.

Inquiries reveal that no one from the paper had met the Gujarat Chief Minister on the day he is supposed to have quoted Newton's law to its correspondent to justify the revenge killings of the minority community in Ahmedabad and other places in the state. The paper's editors too have concluded that the said quote was 'invented' by the correspondent to indicate 'the attitude of the Modi government.' Indeed, it was all a cooked up job to justify what the paper's deputy bureau chief in New Delhi said at a gathering of secularist scribes to 'fight the fascist forces and not to give them any space in 'our' papers.'

Time the owners woke up to this little upstart who seeks to usurp the ownership of their paper for his own brand of fascism.

Meanwhile, Modi is contemplating taking his complaint to the Press Council of India.