Aditya Sinha: The era of unfriending in India

My first chief reporter Yogendra Bali passed away on Thursday Bali Saheb headed our city team at the Times of India in Delhi in the midtolate 1980s surrounded by cigarette smoke and tall tales He winked compulsively and it was so bad that not just sentences but also subordinate clauses were punctuated with a knowing wink But he had a large Punjabi heart When I started he had me acquaint myself with Delhi by reporting in a series on its communities on President Zail Singhrsquos last day at Rashtrapati Bhawan he sent me there to watchandwrite and one Sunday I woke up and saw Bali Saheb hovering over me We happened to live in the same South Delhi apartment complex ldquoGo cover a terrorist attack in Punjabrdquo he said launching me on an arc that defined my careerPolice and CRPF personnel have been deployed at the National Institute of Technology Srinagar after students clashed over Indiarsquos recent T20 World Cup defeat The issue was quickly politicised PicPTIUncannily I remembered Bali Saheb just three days before he died when the Indian Express published exposeacutes based on the Panama Papers midday asked if I would write on it but the stories were more sensationalism than prima facie illegality and mindnumbingly so They were a reminder of how complicated and unfair taxation laws are and how the rich and powerful routinely game the system So ridiculous is this system that Mukesh Ambani hardly ever figures among the top income tax payers In fact Nitin Gadkari had before the 2014 election studied the feasibility of abolishing income tax That reminded me of Bali Saheb once I had grumbled about the tax on my princely salary of Rs 1500 so he said Nani Palkhivala wanted to finish off income tax and replace it with an expenditure tax And then he winkedI occasionally bumped into Bali Saheb during his morning or afterdinner walk He never embarrassed me and reciprocated my wishes with a nod and smile And he would be wearing either a Himachali cap or a skull cap Back then people did that without selfconsciousness or fear of attack Nowadays people see a skull cap and whisper ldquoISISrdquo Despite his birth in what is now Pakistan Bali Saheb did not suffer a refugee complex Instead he was a connoisseur of Hindustani culture and received the Urdu Academyrsquos lifetime achievement awardI was close friends with another in Balirsquos team Anirudhya M who joined TOI the same day as I He his wife and I spent much time together On Diwali we went to old Delhi to buy raw material to make our fireworks and on Holi we dragged other reporters out of their houses and had wild bashes We were like brothers In the early 1990s he came to Mumbai and produced a TV serial that was the Indian Baywatch minus the babes After a stint in Bollywood he moved abroad and we lost touch only to pick up the thread again when I moved to Mumbai in 2011I recently found four messages from Anirudhya in my Facebook inbox They comprised a lecture about my columns that I preached a personal agenda that I should reflect on why so few people ldquolikedrdquo my writing that my animus towards Narendra Modi was personal that I was a ldquoknowallrdquo journalist out of sync with the general reader It was aggressive insulting hurtful but most of all it was out of the blue Irsquom still in the dark about what brought this on I could have said many things ldquothe personal IS politicalrdquo I dislike all parties equally fb lsquolikesrsquo donrsquot equal readership my job is to engage and debate etc but I said nothing Instead I ldquounfriendedrdquo himDepressingly this type of attack has become commonplace Be it the threat of beheading those who donrsquot say Bharat Mata ki Jai the politicisation of another campus at ground zero in Srinagar with a wink to elections or the lynching of a 12yearold cattle herder the country has changed It is like what Atlantic magazine recently said about Donald Trump that even if his bid to become US president fails Trumpism has already come to stay It now serves as a warcry against nonwhitesFormer Home Secretary Madhav Godbolersquos lecture on secularism that has been cancelled by a nervous state government was published by EPW and itrsquos worth a read It seeks political and legislative besides social and intellectual commitment to keeping religion and politics separate the opposite of what is currently happening Godbole himself points out that the Indian polity especially the Congress has only paid lip service to secularism so even if the NDA loses power in 2019 there may be no turning back Hatred has become fixed in our lexicon Trumpism has trumped India In this milieu the image of the late Bali Saheb with his skull cap and a knowing wink seems like an impossible memory from Once Upon a TimeSenior journalist Aditya Sinha is a contributor to the anthology House Spirit Drinking in India to be published in May He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom