Does he not realize that he is under the microscope? He has two choices: pay his way or disclose his funding sources (that was already happening). The latter path will still leave him open to accusations of bias, but that is the problem of being (and promising to be) Mr Clean.
By taking India Today’s private Beechcraft
flight today (March 7, 2014), you make me feel foolish that I ever
supported you or reposed some faith in you as a politician of a new
India. Your representative on the prime time chat show may have
pathetically tried to defend the indefensible with such pitiable excuses
as 1) the Beechcraft ride was paid for by India Today and not by you,
and 2) that you took the flight in the interest of saving time!
Your
defender didn’t seem to reflect for a moment that just this morning in
Gujarat you had eloquently fired away several questions at Narendra Modi
on his use of private flights and then within hours you had hopped
aboard one yourself, after all the moralistic stance you had taken all
this while about eschewing the VIP culture, the red lights, the
security, the cavalcade and other perks of office and what have you.
The
truth is that your action today tantamounts to spitting on the face of
all those true aam admis who have stood by you and believed in the
values that you pretended to abide by all this time. The truth is today,
you don’t have a shred of a fig-leaf left to hide your abject bareness
behind.
regards
Published by
Brown Pundits Archive
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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