Arnab Goswami Resigns from Editors' Guild of India on Live TV

New Delhi, April 21, 2020:

Arnab Goswami, the founder of the popular English news television channel Republic TV, has resigned live on air after accusing the organisation of "hypocrisy" in the aftermath of the Palghar incident in which two Hindu seers were lynched, reportedly because locals were falsely informed that they were "thieves".

Making the announcement live on air, Arnab said, "If this had happened in a state run by BJP, and, instead of Hindus, and let me be very direct about it, they were from any minority community, would Nasseeruddin Shah, Aparna Sen, Ramchandra Guha, Siddharth Varadarajan, and the award vapsi gang, would they have gone berserk today?"

"Whatever remaining credibility was left of the Editors' Guild of India, it has been destroyed because of its abject silence on a series of self-serving stories. The Editors' Guild of India has become a self-serving organization", Goswami said.

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Arnab said that he is resigning because the Editors' Guild of India "for its absolute compromise on editorial ethics."

It may be mentioned here that on April 16, three men from Kandivali in Mumbai, including two Hindu seers, were going in a car towards Surat in Gujarat to attend a funeral. Their vehicle was stopped near a village in Palghar where they were dragged out of their car and beaten to death with sticks by a mob on suspicion that they were thieves.

The deceased were identified as Chikne Maharaj Kalpavrukshagiri (70), Sushilgiri Maharaj (35), and their car driver Nilesh Telgade (30).

After the incident, social media reports attempted to give the incident a communal colour and amid rumours that the mob consisted of minority community people. However, Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh has said that both the attackers and the deceased belong to the same religion.

"I have ordered Maharashtra police and @MahaCyber1 to take action against anyone instigating communal hatred in the society or on social media", Deshmukh later said in a tweet.

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