FACT: Balbir Punj writes-“Blatant myths and fiction have lacerated the facts on Gujarat. The Times of India (March 3) reported Modi’s much-publicised misquote of Newton’s third law— “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. In fact, the CM had never said such a thing and no other paper except for Times of India had carried the misquote in its original reportage. But later on, numerous editorials were penned on the basis of this canard. All his denials were thrown in the dustbin…”
Virendra Kapoor wrote in Cybernoon on 19 March 2002-
“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.”
Even the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigating Team (SIT) said in its report submitted to the court that there is no evidence at all of Narendra Modi saying “Every action has equal and opposite reaction” and his statements were quoted out-of-context and twisted.
When anyone makes an allegation, he has to prove it. No one has ever been able to prove that Modi ever uttered these words. And these people- far from apologizing- have not even published Modi’s denials.
