Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: December 7, 2003
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=36742
Introspection. If you were politically
interested enough to have remained transfixed by your television set when
the results of the assembly elections came out last Thursday you would
have heard it a lot. It tripped gaily and recurrently off the tongues of
political pundits and psephologists as they advised the Congress Party
on its future course of action. I found myself laughing every time I heard
the word because if there is anyone who needs to do more introspection,
even than the Congress Party, it is the media. Last week, in this column
I wrote about media bias against the Bharatiya Janata Party but did not
realise then the extent to which this bias should be called dishonesty.
Lying.
It was not just the polls that got
the elections wrong, it was the media as a whole and where the media is
concerned this happened, I believe, because our loyalty to a twisted, bizarre
idea of secularism blinds us increasingly to reality. In Madhya Pradesh
the writing on the wall was in big black letters and so impossible to misread
but throughout the campaign we missed what was happening in Rajasthan and
Chhattisgarh. I cannot speak for Chhattisgarh but having traveled through
rural Rajasthan can say anyone driving down the same roads would have noticed
that the word voters used most to describe what they wanted was parivartan.
Change. Even those who said they did not think Ashok Gehlot had done a
bad job said that change was a good idea.
My last visit to Rajasthan was before
I left for New York in November and I came away convinced that Vasundhara
Raje would win. This is what I told Indian friends in NYC and it surprised
me when they said I could not possibly be right because according to the
Indian newspapers they were reading on the web and according to the polls
they carried there was no question of Gehlot losing Rajasthan. He had even
been voted the best Chief Minister in India, they said. I remember reading
that myself and puzzling over how this conclusion had been drawn. Compared
to whom?
When my friends in New York added
that one of the reasons for this was because, according to the reports
they read, he had 'handled the drought well' I reminded them that people
died of starvation in Vasundhara Raje's own constituency. Remember? And,
I can remember driving through the state - before the rains came - and
everywhere I went people complained about fodder centres that existed in
name only and drought relief that came not in the form of grain but in
the form of strange promissory notes. Vasundhara Raje herself pointed out
during her rath yatra that people could not eat paper. But, us political
pundits, we were not listening. We were too busy sneering at her Rajashtani
costume, just as we later sneered at her chiffon saris. I have seen Sonia
wearing a headdress of horns and beads in the Northeast but never heard
anyone sneer.
To return, though, to bias. What
worries me is that it extends beyond the BJP and the RSS to India itself.
So, many a liberal hack is given to equating Hindu fundamentalism with
the Islamic variety and making it sound as if a victory for the BJP is
really a victory for Hindu fundamentalism. The result is that the American
state department recently did the same and, perhaps, it is because of this
kind of reporting that India routinely gets equated with Pakistan. It is
only when this happens that liberal columnists sit up and start pointing
out that India is a very different country to Pakistan and the Indian state
cannot by any stretch of the imagination be compared to the Pakistani state.
But, it is our own fault if comparisons are drawn.
Our fault too that Islamic terrorist
cells proliferate across the country because not a single newspaper has
made the smallest attempt to investigate what is going on. It is politically
incorrect even to call terrorism Islamic. So, it takes a Bernard- Henri
Levy to write a book called Who Killed Daniel Pearl and in the process
of writing it discover just how deeply the Pakistani state is personally
involved in protecting people like Omar Sheikh.
Should at least one Indian journalist
not have been following that story? Of course. But, we have all been too
busy debating over the nuances of secularism and communalism without bothering
to notice that the debate became irrelevant and meaningless long ago. The
voter knows this and, to its credit, so does the BJP. So, not only did
we not hear about temples and Hindutva during the election campaign but
we also did not hear from people like Pravin Togadia. Yet, we had important
TV pundits repeat ad nauseam that everything the BJP did was guided by
the RSS. Anyone truly trying to analyse this would have discovered that
the last powerful RSS chief was Balasaheb Deoras and the RSS has been gradually
losing its hold on the party ever since he passed on. The RSS has opposed
the Vajpayee government's economic policies from day one and been unable
to make the slightest difference.
And, the truth is that neither Vasundhara
Raje nor Uma Bharati needed the RSS on their side. It is increasingly the
RSS that needs the BJP and if we take our own advice about 'introspection'
we could find that it is time for us in the media to move on. The voter
already has.
Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com
