|
|
|
Let me begin by recommending to you an interesting little
exercise. Before you sell last month's newspapers to the
kabadiwallah just scan through the front page headlines. You will
notice that the only political leader whose speeches were
reported nearly every day on page one was Sonia Gandhi.
If you are a perceptive reader of newspapers you may also notice
that nearly all the stories sound vaguely similar. Wherever she
went, you will read, she 'touched an emotional chord', Women
wept, children waved, grown men lost control and she set the
agenda'. The meetings she addressed will almost invariably be
described as 'mammoth and crowds seemed always to go berserk if
they caught a glimpse and a wave of Priyanka.
Then, after her speech had been made in 'flawless Hindi' you will
read that Madame's helicopter took off into the sunset as the
massive crowds raced towards it raising clouds of dust. Yet, when
the votes got counted, it turned out that Mrs Gandhi had failed
to make much difference to the Congress campaign. Should there
not then be some explanation from the press? How could our
newspapers, and at least one private television channel, have got
it so wrong'? Was Sonia really the star campaigner or was she
merely an invention of the media?
why did newspapers choose to a most ignore Atal Behari Vajpayee
and LK Advani? Even if they managed to draw large crowds
themselves why did not often get reported as a large crowd but
not quite as big as the one Madame drew?
These questions will neither get asked nor answered because
journalists as a breed axe notoriously allergic to putting
themselves through any kind of selfexamination. But, they need to
be asked if only to explain to ordinary newspaper readers the
kind of control the secular liberal-left has always had and
continues to have m the Indian press.
The trend began, perhaps, in Jawaharlal Nehru's days since he was
one of the leading members of this school of thought. Then,
somewhere along the way, the communists seemed to make inroads as
well so that in the seventies, when I became a newspaper
journalist, it was hard to meet anyone whose line of thinking did
not veer towards the Left. You also met almost nobody who could
be described as even slightly rightist and if such a person did
exist he would already have been labelled as a CIA agent. This
kind of labelling continued pretty much through the seventies and
eighties and ended only when the Cold War did. After the collapse
of the Soviet Union and virtually every other communist country
aggressive Leftism went slightly into remission but has begun to
reappear with the emergence of the BJP.
So, already a new process of labelling is underway in Delhi.
Journalists who did riot actively back the Congress Party during
the election campaign are now being stuck with a BJP label and a
concerted attack has begun. Columnists have started sneering at
'certain editors whose political leanings are well known'. You
can be sure when you read about someone's well-known political
leanings that they will not be talking about someone who is pro-
Congress or pro-United Front. It is politically correct to be pro-
them just as it is politically correct to overlook the more
thuggish aspects of people like Laloo and Mulayam Yadav. Both
Yadavs depend for their political survival on blatant casteism
and minority communalism. Their politics is as much about
dividing and ruling as anyone's has ever been but you will not
read about this much in the Indian press because Leftist thought
dictates that these are the good guys and the BJP the baddies.
The bias is so obvious that more perceptive readers may have
noticed that very few newspapers have criticised the cynicism
with which the United Front and Congress tried to come together
to form a government.
It was as shameless a political exercise as any we have seen in
Delhi but, by and large, the press treated it as an honest
attempt to 'keep communal forces' out. Any number of articles
created this impression but you could count on the fingers of one
hand and number of articles that said that the BJP and its allies
were closer to a majority than anyone else and should be given a
chance.
There are other obvious distortions that result from the press
being so staunchly liberal-left. One that comes immediately to
mind is the difference in reaction to Kanshi Ram refusing to give
journalists an interview and Sonia Gandhi doing the same. Kanshi
Ram, if you remember, refused once when a group of journalists
turned up uninvited at his doorstep.
He considered it an invasion of his privacy, which it was, an
altercation began and things got so ugly that it ended in
fisticuffs. Next days newspapers splashed the story as if it were
the biggest assault on the right to information that had ever
occurred. Yet, as I have pointed out before in this column, there
has been not the smallest murmur of protest over Sonia Gandhi's
adamant refusal to give interviews. Is it not the public's right
to demand that the leader of the Congress Party answer questions?
No questions will be asked, though, because the liberal-left has
decided that Sonia represents 'secular forces' whereas the BJP
are rank communalists. So you will not hear many questions,
either, about the behaviour of the Congress in the pogroms that
followed Indira Gandhi's assassination.
In a recent TV show I asked Congress rising star, Jairam Ramesh,
what he had to say about Rajiv Gandhi having justified these
pogroms and he replied with refreshing honesty that, "It was
wrong to do that and Mrs Gandhi has apologised". But, no sooner
was the show over than I was accosted by colleagues who said that
I had appeared to be too obviously pro-BJP.
In other words it is legitimate political journalism to demand
answers from the BJP on its communalism but wrong to demand that
the Congress also establish its secular credentials. It is
legitimate to demand that the BJP explain its 'upper-caste image'
but wrong to demand that Laloo and Mulayam explain their lower-
caste image. Does that make sense? That the liberal-left school
of journalism is why off the mark, in more ways than one can be
seen from the increase in the BJP's voteshare across the country.
Does this mean that all of India is communal? If not then it
really is time for the press to do some introspection.
 |
||
|
||
|
||
