For years, Arnab Goswami was accused of asking questions selectively – loudly interrogating the opposition, softly stepping around power. That caricature, fair or otherwise, has now developed a crack. And that crack is unsettling many who once found comfort in predictability.
In recent weeks, Arnab has raised a set of issues that do not sit easily with the optics of power, money, and impunity – and the reaction has been swift. Social media, which once functioned as his echo chamber, has turned accusatory. The charge is not that he is wrong, but that he has changed. The nation, it seems, wants to know why.
When weddings drown out funerals
Arnab’s anger over the Rs 7 million spent on fireworks by BJP MLA Rakesh ‘Golu’ Shukla from Indore at his son’s wedding in Madhya Pradesh was not merely about money. It was about obscenity.
In the same state, a pregnant woman stranded on a flooded bridge died waiting for help. That juxtaposition – fireworks lighting the sky while governance failed at ground level – became the moral anchor of his argument.
His question was blunt: Will the Enforcement Directorate, the Income Tax department, and other agencies that scrutinise political enemies also examine this kind of public splurge? Every transaction and every rupee. Or does conspicuous consumption acquire immunity when it comes wrapped in political proximity?
Private jets, luxury cars, Instagram lifestyles – Arnab called it despicable. Not illegal, perhaps, but indefensible in a country where governance routinely collapses under monsoon rain.
Where responsibility begins
He went further, and this is where the discomfort deepened. The BJP leadership, Arnab argued, must send a clear message – that this cringe-worthy display of wealth by netas is not acceptable. That the people of India are watching, even if there is no effective opposition left to do the watching for them.
‘Just because there is no opposition,’ he said in effect, ‘you cannot do what you feel like.’ That line alone explains the backlash.
Arnab even invoked the RSS – the one institution that still projects an image of austere living. He named Mohan Bhagwat, Indresh Kumar, and Dattatreya Hosabale, expressing hope that they were watching. It was a deliberate appeal to moral authority over electoral arithmetic.
For a man long accused of defending power, this was a pivot – from protector to prosecutor.
No free pass for the blockbuster
While Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar is rewriting the box office history of Bollywood, Arnab took a position strikingly different from that of most news anchors and cultural cheerleaders.
‘Dhurandhar is fiction. We don’t want to see Akshaye Khanna dancing. If anyone has guts in Bollywood, make a movie on real crime – the Unnao rape case,’ he said.
It was not a comment on cinema craft, but on cinematic conscience. In an ecosystem where big-budget nationalism is rarely interrogated, Arnab’s refusal to applaud on cue came as a surprise. For once, he was not amplifying the spectacle, but questioning its priorities.
Aravallis, courts, and the future
His criticism did not stop with weddings, wealth, or cinema. Arnab took on the Supreme Court’s interpretation that effectively weakens protection for the Aravalli range – a two-million-year-old ecological shield. He warned that redefining the Aravallis is not a technical exercise, but a civilisational gamble that could redraw India’s ecological map.
Mining will boom, infrastructure will surge, clearances will become easy, foreign investment will flow – but farmers will not benefit. What will disappear, quietly and permanently, is a living heritage.
He clarified that the redefinition itself predates the BJP and was done during Ashok Gehlot’s tenure as Rajasthan chief minister. His objection was not partisan. It was institutional – aimed squarely at the court’s interpretation.
Just because three judges delivered a verdict, he argued, does not make it the last word. When the future is at stake, reconsideration is not defiance – it is responsibility.
There is currently a stay. But Arnab’s question lingers: does paryavaran remain a slogan, or does it survive as policy.
Air, blood, and accountability
His other sustained campaign has been Delhi’s AQI – air so toxic that it becomes an invisible emergency. Add to this his sharp question on whether BJP leaders were aware of children being given HIV-infected blood, and a pattern emerges.
These are not culture-war distractions. They are governance failures – slow, systemic, and inconvenient.
Cynics argue that this change of heart is driven by sagging advertising revenues and a bid to revive Republic’s TRPs. Perhaps it is. But motive does not automatically invalidate an argument.
Even if commercial pressure prompted the shift, the questions being asked are not trivial. They are questions that should have been asked all along.
Arnab Goswami spent years insisting that the nation wants to know. Now, when he asks questions that unsettle power rather than flatter it, the nation seems unsure whether it wants him to know at all. The irony is complete. In a country with no effective opposition, even a partial one becomes intolerable.
