This is with reference to the article 'Art of cover-up on Yamuna floodplain' that appeared this morning i.e. Sunday, 24th April 2016 in the Hindustan Times.
Your journalist Ritam Haldar claims to have arrived at the venue yesterday i.e. 23rd April, to find millions of bits of plastic, chunks of carpet, biscuit wrappers and bottles are strewn for miles and enmeshed in the soil. Either he has telescopic vision or has hiked for miles to support his statement because the Art of Living team visited the site with their lawyer, an environmentalist and mainstream media just five days before on April 18 and nobody present saw anything remotely close to what has been described by your journalist.
The Art of Living handed over the land to the DDA on the 18th of April cleaner and greener than when it was handed to us by the DDA.
Secondly, the pictures accompanying the article that appear on page 1 and page 3 are both file pictures despite the fact that we handed Mr. Haldar photographs of the land post the clean up which show evidence of a new crop of grass growing as far as the eye can see. It seems deliberate on the journalist's part to defame and malign us in spite of having material to prove the opposite of what he is writing.
It is also interesting that the Hindustan Times has allotted valuable front page slots for the Art of Living World Culture Festival story. Ours, was a mere three day, four hour a day event, for which we, with full permission from the DDA, built an impermanent structure which as you know has been removed without a trace. However, the paper has turned a blind eye to the real perpetrators of the crime who have built massive, permanent structures on these very floodplains, destroying the bio-diversity and whatever else you accused the Art of Living of doing in the short time it was on these plains. These are, as you full well know, Delhi Secretariat, the Millennium Bus Depot, the Commonwealth Games Village, Sonia Vihar and Batla House. And as we write this, a hospital which is currently in stages of completion. These have flouted every rule in the book and yet not a word on your pages, let alone the treatment meted out to us day in and day out till today. Something is terribly wrong and is stinks of a lack of ethics.
It leads us to believe that your entire coverage of the World Culture Festival, which was replete with lies (and these have been proven), conjecture and sensationalism is politically motivated.
