Do Journalists Mortgage their Freedom to the Politician?

Journalists are awarded Padma awards for their outstanding contribution to the profession of journalism. Unfortunately, these awards have gone to people of high visibility and low credibility whose nominations have been not based on rigorous and objective investigation, but rather on one sided, and largely false tips from self-interested politicians who have used their columns and programmes to their political advantage.

These journalists have refused to investigate and/or publish highly credible information that undercut the simplistic and largely false narrative fed to them by their biased sources. The Awards Committee has often rewarded such biased and result oriented "reporting" by giving them the Padma Awards.

Most of these decorated journalists have deliberately and mendaciously misled their readers and viewers by choosing to selectively omit from their narrative, reports, documents, testimonies and other evidence that would raise questions about the credibility of their narratives.

This is not journalism. It is certainly not Padma Award-worthy journalism. It is advocacy, and it is advocacy that would get a lawyer disciplined for wilfully withholding exculpatory evidence. It is also advocacy that hurts the truth by encouraging false reports that damage the credibility of important movements and events.

So shame on these journalists and shame on their broadcasting channels and print channels. And shame on the Padma-Awards Committees who have all been overlooking such reporting and encouraging such fake news and shoddy journalism by rewarding it.

Mistakes must be acknowledged and corrections be made in public life. There is no harm in withdrawing such awards conferred upon the non-deserving, not with any intent of humiliating the recipients but only, for protecting the honour of the deserving recipients of the future.

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Slug-Fests Going From ‘Madness’ To 'Beyond Madness'

In the country his family has ruled for 38 years and his party has ruled for over 60 years out of 72 years of Independent India, never ever has the political discourse been taken to such low on content, language and lack of concern for consequences arising out of what is being said, as has been done in the ongoing general elections.

Unable to think through and adjust to the powerlessness for last five years and helplessness against the cases of corruption slowly closing in on him and his family, Rahul Gandhi has stooped to such abysmal low on abusing and accusing not so much Narendra Modi but the Prime Minister of India – that the office of the Prime Minister has been subjected to hate speech from the public platform he uses for election campaigning.

No surprises if he wins the title of “the world's most insulting politician.” He has accused the present government which Narendra Modi heads, of "intolerance” of “crony-capitalism” and of “neglect of the poor” all the charges, his party and his party’s successive regimes stand proven guilty of.

His grandmother was the India's biggest jailer of journalists. During his party’s regime of 2004-2014, which many within the establishment, like Bangaru Laxman, have shown how his mother remotely ran, her law enforcement authorities arrested and indicted a lady for Hindu-terrorism.

The insanity went on; it is probably now beyond the level it was before. The heir of the family and so also the heir apparent of the 130 year old political party criticised the ruling political party for "trying to topple his one-man regime and substitute it with democracy within his party."

It was Rahul Gandhi and his ultra-loyal partners who turned a simple election to a few state assemblies into an existential political war. The promises and allurements for buying votes of the gullible rained like cats and dogs. None of those allurements which were promised for delivery within 15 days, were even intended to be kept and have therefore remained not kept even after 150 days of his party being voted to power in those states.

This general election of April-May 2019, Rahul Gandhi and his ultra-loyal lieutenants are pitching as a matter of "national survival" for India. The ruling party has turned the argument on its head and are pitching the efforts of Rahul Gandhi as desperate struggle for “survival of his party and the control of his family on the party.”

Rahul Gandhi has been trying to exert damage control and keep morale among party fans high. But he seems to remain nervous.

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Inserting ‘secular’ in the preamble - a farcical signal

As originally enacted the preamble to her constitution described India as a "sovereign democratic republic", to which the terms "Secular" and "Socialist" were later added by the 42nd Amendment in 1976. The preamble has been amended only once so far.

On 18 December 1976, during the Emergency in India, the Indira Gandhi government pushed through several changes in the Forty-second Amendment of the constitution. Through this amendment, the words "Socialist" and "Secular" were added between the words "Sovereign" and "Democratic" and the words "unity of the Nation" were changed to "unity and integrity of the Nation"

While many Indians had been victims of atrocities by the government of the day during the 21-month period from 1975 to 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had a state of emergency declared across the country, the citizens, who suffered the most on account of their religious faith, were the Muslims.

Officially issued by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed under Article 352 of the Constitution because of the prevailing "internal disturbance", the Emergency was in effect from 25 June 1975 until its withdrawal on 21 March 1977. The order bestowed upon the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi the authority to rule by decree, allowing elections to be suspended and civil liberties to be curbed. Invoking article 352 of the Indian Constitution, Gandhi granted herself extraordinary powers and launched a massive crackdown on civil liberties and political opposition. The Government used police forces across the country to place thousands of protestors and strike leaders under preventive detention. For much of the Emergency, most of Gandhi's political opponents were imprisoned and the press was censored. Several other human rights violations were reported from the time, including a forced mass-sterilization campaign spearheaded by Sanjay Gandhi, the Prime Minister's son.

Indira Gandhi's government, prompted by her son Sanjay, launched the demolition drive to cleanse Delhi of slums and force poor residents to leave Delhi and move to distant settlements. The residents of Turkman Gate, mostly Muslims, refused to move as they would have to commute every day paying heavy bus fares to reach the city to earn their living. They resisted the bulldozing of their houses. On 18 April 1976, the police opened fire on protesters killing several of them. The government, who had earlier imposed censorship, ordered the newspapers not to report the massacre. Indian public came to know about killings through foreign media like BBC. It was later reported that protesting people were ran over by bulldozers, resulting in several deaths

In September 1976, Sanjay Gandhi initiated a widespread compulsory sterilization programme to limit population growth. Rukhsana Sultana was a socialite known for being one of Sanjay Gandhi's close associates and she gained a lot of notoriety in leading Sanjay Gandhi's sterilisation campaign in Muslim areas of old Delhi. The campaign primarily involved getting males to undergo vasectomy. Quotas were set up that enthusiastic supporters and government officials worked hard to achieve. There were allegations of coercion of unwilling candidates too. In 1976–1977, the programme led to 8.3 million sterilisations, most of them forced, up from 2.7 million the previous year.

In the growing public anger against the emergency, forced sterilisations generated a strong anti-Sanjay sentiment among the people in general. This sentiment was much stronger among Muslims because of their perception of being targeted for such forced sterilisations due to their faith. Sanjay Gandhi was the first Hindu politician, son of an authoritarian Prime Minister from Congress, who targeted Muslims through a forced social-engineering project of the government. Indira Gandhi government had indeed acted in a non-secular way.

So, nearly 18 months after she had promulgated an “internal emergency,” what did Indira Gandhi mean, when in 1976, she said that she wanted India to be "secular?"

Indira Gandhi was only speaking “symbolically,” not about shifting from a non-secular state and governance to a secular state and governance, but merely sending out a political signal to very angry Indian Muslim.

The concept of India being secular, in the opinion of Indira Gandhi and her Government was symbolic of the political demand for a backing-off from the focus, for reasons of their faith and customs, on Muslims in the area of population control.

Thus, when Indira Gandhi said she wanted India to be “Secular,” she was not saying that thus far India had been non-secular nor was she speaking about instituting a new governance and state system, but merely sending out signals of comfort towards the Indian Muslims.

One could also say that “India is secular” is an empty phrase. The government is not concerned with any actual equality and uniformity in dealing with her subjects, but with more affirmative support in favour of non-Hindus.

Why would Indira Gandhi even start talking about a Secular India? Actually, there was no real debate about secularism in India; and everyone with the slightest political knowledge knows that it is a political propaganda and not least for constitutional reasons.

The incidences of non-secular actions by the governments after the inclusion of the word “secular” in the preamble have only gone up. Some of the biggest embarrassments in recent years include, Shah Bano case, Triple Talaaq, Muslim Personal Law, forced entry into Sabarimala Hindu Temple and so on.

Politics of minority appeasement has all along been driven for the purpose of vote-consolidation much to the detriment of all ideals of secularism. Once the politicians began to notice majority alienation due to such skewed policies, they tried to change the narrative of public discourse such that any favourable bias towards the consolidating minority vote-banks became a moral and social correctness while any complaint of even the consequential unfavourable bias towards the majority became non-secular and taboo. Apparently the truth about secular politics, secular governments and secular nation is so bad that the public should not be allowed to know about it.

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It Takes Enormous Acumen to Make a Sham Political Narrative Work

Doesn’t matter if the storyteller is an accused on bail, low on intellectual credibility, immature in behaviour and clown-like in public-conduct, RaGa could still pose to be doing ‘good’ without being ‘good.’

RaGa used a slogan, “chowkidaar chor hai,” and kept repeating it ad nauseum until the pitch and the frequency of his utterances started re-engineering narratives and characters to remove perceived inconsistencies, discomfort, distaste and the inappropriateness, focusing attention on sometimes highly imperfect humanity, making the audience beginning to believe that there ought to be some truth in the allegations, punching a massive hole in NaMo’s credibility.

The alignment RaGa created in the financial secrecy of the Rafael deal and the financial despair of Anil Ambani Group was fine bedrock to re-engineer the narratives and characters of NaMo and RaGa to make them more ‘correct, balanced, even, fair and ultimately inoffensive’ (sic) to the perception of “possibility of corruption.”

Bad is good, especially in storytelling. Most interesting stories in the world have God against Satan; Ram against Raavan; Yudhishtir against Duryodhan; Good against Bad. Bad provides friction. Discomfort and imperfection make for more interesting narratives. RaGa pitched himself as the ‘Bad’ against a ‘Good’ NaMo. People love a good “baddie.” Remember the Robin Hood stories. In fact, our waking dislike of goody-goodies mostly outweighs our dislike of baddies.

Then RaGa got down to ironing out the creases of our imperfect humanity, our need to swear and cuss, our sometimes sleepwalk stereotyping; our baseness, old prejudices and new loathing; our lazy referencing, erasing all of that made no sense to many.

The baddie was our best bit in an election discourse which was devoid of any themes or issues. The mad, bad and dangerous to know RaGa was the greatest unrealised character in the whole idea. In fact, in true megalomaniac, socio-psychopathic, fully paid up, narcissistic fashion, it was turning out to be all about him. RaGa was the flame that the moths would fly to. RaGa in all his camp, scratchy, self-obsessed, slightly savant, childish, distracted, brutal and nihilistic ugliness was the most beautiful thing that we had in this election.

But that is where RaGa, whom some call as “Pappu” turned out to be a real “Pappu.” He was smart in building the false narrative but he could not sustain it to its conclusion. His falsehood came to the fore through his goof-up with the Supreme Court. The moment he tried to infer that the virtuous court was an endorser of his narrative, the narrative fell apart. If there was a chance to recover, his “Pappu” interview with the NDTV and India-Today killed it. Having confessed of his game plan to destroy the popularity of “Good,” the traction, which his narrative was getting, also blew apart.

We need the baddie to be the best character because, in most traditional storytelling, the baddie is usually us, at our ugly worst, unvarnished and heavily flawed; and the heroes are us, as we could be. The baddie is the measure by which we mark our hope, our optimism of what we could be and the journey to it. In all storytelling, the “Bad” is never an idiot; rather wise and intelligent; but these interviews pitched “Pappu” as real “Pappu- devoid of any wisdom.” 

Game over. Propaganda will fizzle out. “Baddie-the wise” is a winner not “Baddie-the Pappu.”

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