Prannoy Roy writes to PM against Swamy. Says would fight till the end!

The veteran journalist and proprietor of one of the prominent news channels of the country NDTV, Prannoy Roy has shot a letter to the prime minister Narendra Modi complaining about Dr Subramanian Swamy and his loyalists for damaging and degrading India’s image internationally and causing immense harm and loss to the reputation of NDTV through unethical and dubious methods aimed at muzzling and silencing the free and impartial press and the organisation like NDTV. The relations between the government and the NDTV have been at loggerheads since the Modi government assumed power at the centre in 2014.

Prannoy Roy and NDTV is considered to be the voice of the progressives’ and the pro BJP/ saffron forces and rightists blame it as the news channel propagating the progressive ideology and that of the Congress. Just a year ago raids were conducted on all its office locations nationally and the Income Tax department has also fixed a penalty of several hundred crores on the TV channel for allegedly cladestinely saving the taxes and thus misleading and fudging the authorities concerned. As a result more than 200 employees had to be retrenched from job recently leading to chaos amongst the staff and the media fraternity. According to the contents of the letter: Prannoy Roy accused Swamy of using various unethical and dubious means to inflict baseless, biased and outrageous accusations of money laundering and indulging in sham transactions with NDTV against the finest US Corporations viz GE and NBC through the IT and ED.

The letter adds that the charges made by the Indian authorities are such that they may in the future invite harsh prison sentences for Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GEC and the CEO of NBC Jeff Zucker who is currently the president of prestigious news channel CNN and an outstanding media executive in America. This has resulted in creating a shocking and dismaying environment amongst the global business leaders thus discouraging them to invest in India who are expressing apprehensions of possible harrasments and lodging of false cases against them. Prannoy asked the PM : at a time when you are inviting more and more foreign direct investment in India, this sort of wild and baseless charges are damaging India’s reputation globally.

A leading US businessman recently said to us: Why should we come to invest in India- false cases might be filed against us. While the two page letter is quite in detail it concludes by saying: In nutshel: Mr. Swamy and a small group ( includes Gurumurthy as well) are damaging the reputation of our country in a motivated an egregious attack on the free media in India- we at the NDTV are proud of India’s tradition of media and press freedom and we will fight these falsehoods and not be suppressed or muzzled.
SUNIL NEGI