By TwoCiclres.net staff reporter
Delhi: Noted social activist Shabnam Hashmi has accused the TV News channel Times Now of threatening to publicly ‘name and shame’ her and her organisation ANHAD. In the statement she alleges that the channel reporters are “threatening to do stories against Anhad
and me.”
ANHAD (Act Now for Harmony and Democracy) is a non-government social organsiation that she started, along with other colleagues, in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Shabnam Hashmi (left) with Syeda Hamid in 2011. [TCN file photo]
When Hashmi was in Gujarat for over six months before the assembly elections, she says, she was invited many times for the Times Now prime time show News Hour, hosted by channel’s Editor Arnab Goswami. But as she increasingly felt humiliated as she hardly got opportunity to speak her mind and was met with a hostile host. She hence decided to never go on their panel, particularly after the one show where she felt, she was “pushed into a corner and it was an absolutely unbalanced panel.”
According to her, she had however accepted to come on the show again, when channel guest coordinators met her in person and “ensured that it will not happen in future.” She came back to the panel on the night of December 28, 2012 as well as on January 2, 2013 over
her resignations from all government panels and her FIR filed against Akbaruddin Owaisi, respectively.
However, as she found the same “uncivilized and aggressive behavior” of the host, she wrote on her FaceBook on January 4, 2012: “Times Now – my status – not available-goodbye Mr Arnab Goswami – sorry for denying you the pleasure of being the ‘conscience keeper’.”
In the public statement she alleges, “All hell seems to have broken out since then. I have been receiving calls after calls from various Times Now reporters. They have barged into Anhad several times, threatening to do stories against Anhad and me. “
She further clarified that Anhad has been running from 23, Canning Lane’s Garage for 5 years now. There have been over 30-40 press conferences big and small at Anhad itself attended by all media fraternity including reporters from Times Now. Times Now reporters
have come and taken my interviews in this office tens of times, they have attended press conferences, sent their ob vans and pick up cars for Talk Show.
They have suddenly come up with the new evidence now that Anhad runs from 23, Canning Lane, New Delhi which is Dr Syeda Hamid’s garage, she writes.
She further says, “Despite being informed by my colleagues that the garage was provided to us free, they have asked me the same question four times-How much money you pay?”
When TCN contacted her to ask if she is planning to file a complaint against Times Now, she said that she has no such plans, but added, “I have sent the same public statement to the Press Council of India Chief Justice Markandey Katju as PCI is the appropriate body to take actions in this regard.”
Asked if any senior person from Times Now or Times Group contacted them today expressing apologies, she denied any communication.
Hashmi accuses the news channel of blackmailing and harassment. “This is the first time that we are faced with a situation where I personally in 32 years of my grass root activism and Anhad as an organisation in its 10 yrs of work feel being harassed, stalked, and blackmailed,” she says.