How the ‘opposition’ has extraordinary powers that they use to scuttle voices of dissent as ‘journalists’ rejoice or look the other way

“If any media writes against Telangana and its culture, we will break their necks and bury them 10km deep”. “Behave properly,” said Mamta Banerjee, Chief Minister of West Bengal, to the media. In fact, for all of the instances mentioned above, you would expect Rajdeep Sardesai to be fuming on his nightly debates; you would expect an “Editors Guild has released a statement” tweet from the Editors Guild; you would expect running commentator Shekhar Gupta to “cut the clutter”; you would expect an eloquent editorial from Malini Parthasarathy’s The Hindu deriding the authoritarian attitude; you would expect Sreenivasan Jain to separate out the truth and hype; you would expect YoYa to wax eloquent in front of a mike irrespective of where he is speaking; you would expect an angry Nidhi Razdan demanding apology after apology, and you would expect a quirky only liner tweet from the boss of all – Rahul Gandhi. It then stuck to me that the “Opposition” that the media keeps referring to, actually holds extraordinary power that is often used to scuttle voices of dissent; that is often used to settle scores with opponents; that is often used to dole out freebies to the media – and all of this without any repercussions when things go south. Adjectives that are freely employed in describing Narendra Modi are strangely absent when similar comparisons have to be made with the Chief Minister of “opposition” parties.