Bharatiya Janata Party MP Nishikant Dubey has written to Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla saying that Information Technology parliamentary panel chair Shashi Tharoor has breached confidentiality rules by alleging that corporates are funding channels, a topic that is under discussion by the panel.
“Dr Tharoor has yet again compromised the ‘Confidentiality Clause’ as contained in Direction 55 of the Directions by the Speaker, Lok Sabha,” Dubey wrote in the letter, a copy of which has been accessed by Hindustan Times. “It is also an abject display of truant behaviour on the part of Dr Tharoor to abusively call the ‘Republic TV’ as ‘Repulsive TV’ and also making unsubstantiated insinuations and rant against various reputable Companies/ Entities like Raymonds, Air India, Maruti, Dabur, etc.”
Dubey was referring to a series of tweets by Tharoor on Sunday, in which he alleged that corporates were funding channels that were ‘tearing the country apart’.
“Should such reputable companies be financing hate through ads on Repulsive TV? Raymonds, Muthoot Group, Jio, Max Bupa, Kent, Air India, Star Health Insurance, Nissan, Dabur, Mahindra, Amazon, Samsung, Sony, Maruti, Nerolac, Toyota. Can they find the moral courage to be like Parle?” Tharoor tweeted.
“Shouldn’t Corporates have the ‘same moral and social duties as individuals, to condemn immoral ideology, to abjure hate and communalism, to not incite one community against another, to distinguish between the truth and falsehood,” he added, saying that “these amoral Corporates should know that their ‘Return on investment’ is ‘a society and country being torn apart by the channels they fund. Our Corporates aspire to be global entities but fail to espouse global values’. Why do companies fund hatred?”
Dubey has alleged that Tharoor’s conduct, by openly discussing various aspects under examination by the panel, is ‘an affront’ to the overall working of the parliamentary committees. He asked the speaker to nominate him to some other committee.
According to those close to Tharoor, however, Dubey’s allegations were baseless he has not attended a single meeting of the Committee since its reconstitution and therefore is understandably unaware of what was and wasn’t discussed within the Committee.
“If he had turned up, he would have realised that this is an issue that was not discussed in the committee, and therefore there is no question of confidentiality violation,” said one such person. “The thread of four tweets is specifically linked to a blogpost by Avay Shukla, the subject of which has nothing to do with the committee, any subjects it has discussed, but is about certain challenges with corporate financing.”
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Dubey, however, said that the Speaker was in the know of why he hadn’t attended the meeting. “Tharoor is misusing his position as panel chair,” he told HT.
The Parliament’s panel on information technology on Thursday took up media ethics and flagged that Television Rating Points (TRPs) are “easily manipulated” amid allegations of a scam involving certain news channels.
HT, on October 16, had reported that the panel had unanimously agreed that the TRP is not a robust method to measure viewership. “It is not in tune with current technologies,” said a person familiar with the matter. Over 10 members, including Bharatiya Janata Party’s Syed Zafar Islam and Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore. and the Congress’s Karti Chidambaram attended the meeting.
Source: HindustanTimes