Author: Udayan Namboodiri
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: April 19, 2006
From a journalist's point of view, I have
never seen anything like this before. This is the phoniest election I have
encountered in my whole life. It's not just that everything is so low key
in the West Bengal election of 2006 (it's something like a cracker-free Diwali,
what with the Election Commission's strictures on use of wall graffiti and
loudspeakers) but even the involvement of the principal forces is so detached,
so profane, that one soon begins to suspect whether somewhere in a corner
a time bomb is ticking away.
For one, I have never seen the Press of an
Indian State so cut off from the ground reality. Take the biggest English-language
newspaper of Bengal for instance. It still claims to be printed from 'Calcutta'
though the name of the capital of the State is Kolkata for at least six years
now.
This paper prints every news under the sun
but leaves the most important concerning the future of its readers to either
one inside page or the metropolitan section.
The Bengal elections, one would think glancing
through this paper, is happening in Spain. You would also get the impression
that Kolkata, sorry Calcutta, is something of an international transit point
filled with people who are just passing through, without any stake in the
system.
Yet, this paper, along with almost all its
peers, does have an immense stake in the system. All of them would like the
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee-led Marxist regime to continue in power for another
five years. And, most probably, they will display the same sentiment in 2011.
And so on. Why? Because in continuity there is security.
Today, they are the mouthpieces of an entrenched
elite that has invested all its eggs in one basket. If there is to be a regime
change, the denizens of these little empires would have to begin from scratch
again, build fresh contacts, cover up for their pasts, and, what is most disturbing,
suffer implosions which would cause the disintegration of cushy jobs.
Nothing unique about this. I remember what
Ronen Sen, who was India's last Ambassador to the USSR once told me. "On
New Year's Day 1992 there was no more a Soviet Union. We had to start all
over again with a new set of people."
That's the chief reason why the TV channels
and newspapers of Bengal - with notable exceptions of course - are so keen
on whipping up an impression that Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is coming back to
power for a seventh time, and that too with a record margin.
Yesterday, at the end of the first phase of
polling in three districts, they came out with exit polls that showed that
the Marxists are going to get not the lion's share of seats, but the whole
lot, leaving only some crumbs for the combined opposition.
It only showed their bias. And their genuine
lack of understanding of their viewers and readers' psyche. They failed to
gauge the reality that nobody in this State who is in his right mind would
admit to voting against the Marxists. They know the consequences of speaking
out to strangers.
Moreover, 29 years of mental conditioning
has made most people wary of the Press of Bengal. Much like its police and
bureaucracy, the media here is perceived as the dog that sleeps, only to wake
up for morsels from the master's table. This morning, I encountered many people
coming forward to tell me not to be discouraged the dalal media's exit polls.
The good news for the people of Bengal is
that central intervention, in the form of the Election Commission's adoption
of unprecedented security measures, has acted as a tremendous boost to the
collective sense of confidence.
I tell people in my own street-corner meetings
that this is not just about BL Tandon and West Bengal, but about the might
of the Indian State coming to help the people of one province who have been
in the shadow area of the great Indian democracy for the past two-and-a-half
decades.
But the people of Bengal are hardly exuberant.
They know the virtue of silence as a weapon. On the streets of Kolkata and
its small towns you would hardly encounter anybody willing to discuss politics
with a stranger. And, when they do, it is only with known people, always with
hope for change the central theme.
That's why everybody finds the media's role
as the cheerleader of the Marxists most disgusting. The disconnect between
the mood of the people and that within the provincial fourth estate is really
something spectacular: For instance, the large scale rigging enforced by State
Minister Sushanto Ghosh to win the Gorbeta seat in the 2001 election by over
75,000 votes (incredible margin for an Assembly election) is quite entrenched
in the smriti-shruti tradition of Bengal.
Everybody remembers the sensational revelations
made by Ghosh's confidential assistant three years after that infamous incident
which left nothing to the imagination. Yet, the leading newscaster of Bengal
- a poor man's Pranoy Roy really - had the gall to ask the opposition candidate
live through the link during the exit poll last night: "You lost by over
70,000 votes last time. What will be the margin this time?"
So sickened was Barun Sengupta, the doyen
of Bengali journalism by all this, that wrote in a signed piece the other
day: "The journalist should not play the role of the middle man. We should
not imagine that we have the power to influence public opinion."
