On Friday, a senior journalist of Republic TV resigned from her post alleging humiliation from her seniors including the channel's editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami. In a Twitter post, Shweta Kothari had said she was accused by Goswami and other senior editors of being a 'mole' of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor who had recently filed a defamation case against the channel over its reporting of the ongoing probe into the death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar.
However, hours after Kothari's social media post, anti-nuclear activist S.P. Udayakumar wrote a hard-hitting letter to the journalist, reminding her that 'what you sow, so shall you reap!'
Referring to his meeting with Kothari earlier this year, he alleged that she had lied to him about her identity and recorded his conversation “illegally, immorally and indelicately”.
“Your calm demeanor, gentle head shake, deceitful smile, ungrateful attitude, lying through your teeth and the sheer criminality all make you very capable of being a mole of not just an MP but a whole array of foreign agencies,” he said in his letter, apparently referring to the report of a sting operation Republic TV aired shortly after its launch.
“When you accused thousands and thousands of hardworking and well-meaning ordinary citizens of India of being stooges of the Catholic Church, greedy for foreign money and all that abhorrent nonsense without a shred of any evidence, you thought it was high class journalism, right?,” he asked. Udayakumar is the founder of People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy which has been campaigning against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu.
Earlier, in her post, which she had shared on both Twitter and Facebook, Kothari had said: “I have never met/contacted/known Mr Tharoor in any capacity. Nobody bothered to clarify. I was left in the lurch. My loyalty questioned, my vanity hurt.”
To this Udayakumar said: “Other human beings also have similar feelings, you know? You are hurt by the 'scrutiny of character' that Arnab and his mad gang did on you? Weren’t you doing the same on us all, just a few months back and crying hoarse to the whole country on your TV without even asking yourself if it was all fair to do so.” He also urged Kothari to read her statements in front of a mirror.
“You may be anything, a spy, a mole, or an infiltrator as your bosses allege! But certainly not a good journalist!,” he said.
