Just hours after senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai on Tuesday called out his former colleague and Republic TV’s managing director Arnab Goswami’s claim in a YouTube video that his car was attacked by Saffron goons while covering Gujarat riots in 2002, the video has been taken down from YouTube.
Goswami in the video claims his car was attacked while covering Gujarat riots, but Sardesai who was his colleague disputed it saying Goswami hasn’t covered Gujarat riots.
The video of Goswami’s speech that Sardesai, currently a consulting editor at India Today TV (and formerly at NDTV with Goswami), used to rip him apart on Twitter is an old one. The anecdote being told by Goswami though, is straight out of Sardesai’s book written in the aftermath of the 2014 general elections.
In one of the tweets Sardesai said, "Wow! My friend Arnab claims his car attacked next to CM Res in Guj riots! Truth:he wasn't covering Ahmedabad riots!!"
Sardesai, who has 7.23 million followers on Twitter, in another tweet said: “Fekugiri has its limits, but seeing this, I feel sorry for my profession.”
Although the YouTube video has been removed now by the user, here is what Goswami narrates in the video:
"2002. And we came out 50 meters from his residence, we are stopped, suddenly our ambassador car is stopped and there are people who are breaking the windows with ‘trishuls’. All the windows are broken. It is almost as if there are trishuls all around. I know it's very unsavoury, but I must share with you the reality of life as I've seen it. When that happens, we are all told to reveal our religion. It is 50 metres from the chief minister's house. How it happened, I don't know. We said we are journalists. ‘No, No, what is your religion? What is your religion?’. And, thankfully, let me tell you, there was nobody from the minority community with us. But one of our people; we had our identity cards, press cards. My driver did not have a press card. And I look at... I was sitting in the front [of the car]. I've an obsession of sitting in the front seat; I looked to my right and I can see the look on my driver's face. When people talk about secularism, I've seen hate from up close and I know that group of people could have killed him. He had a tattoo. He put up a "Hey Ram" or something on his... it is not a tattoo, it is just an imprint that you put which stays with you. He showed that and we walked out. But I saw for that moment how scared you..."
Sardesai has referred to the incident in his book while speaking of his time reporting from Gujarat during the riots close to fifteen years ago.
