The Farce called Electronic Media

Silly point


The farce called electronic media



                      There was a time when Times Now claimed to be the most watched show on television. Arnab Goswami was touted as the most ardently watched anchor. A time came when reams of newsprint was devoted to a close analysis of the reasons for the immense popularity of Newshour.

                    Experts pointed out the reasons for the mass appeal . Arnab was famous for posing a question and then refusing to hear the answer. The most frequently made request of the panellists was a plaintive, ““Let me have my say, Arnab!” or “ If you are not interested in what we have to say, why call us for a discussion?”

                     Meanwhile, Goswami would pronounce his verdict as soon as he popped his question. Obviously, he had a tremendous research team which collated all the facts for him, he had access to all the documents. He read all the articles that had appeared in the print media. He did not have any sides or ideologies.

                     So obviously he was the best fitted to pronounce an objective verdict on a contentious issue. He knew it and used his advantages to the hilt.

                     The other merit of his programme was that there was no discipline of any kind. Arnab gave the lead by interrupting all the panelists without a by your leave. Often he would egg on the silent ones by saying, “this is an open discussion. So feel free to make your point as soon as you feel like it.” He never interrupted a heckler to make him hold his tongue. He never advised the participants to observe the niceties of a debate on national television and speak only when called upon to do so. And whenever he felt the decibel count too low, he would add to the cacophony by shouting, “You have much to answer for., Mister Jyoirmoy Sarkar… you have much to answer for , Mister Jyotirmoy Sarkar.. “   Ad infinitum till other hecklers joined the fray and raised the decibel count to acceptable peaks.

                    I once advised a former top bureaucrat    to join the Newshour debate on an important topic concerning the civil services.. He said witheringly that he had no  intention of projecting a postage stamp face and    be hardly visible or audible unless he became a party to the shouting brigade.

                   These days when one has time, one surfs from one news channel to another. Increasingly, one finds the other anchors trying to out-Arnab Arnab. There was a time when Rahul Shiv Shankar seemed to be a sedate equable personality following all the rules of a college debating society. Now he specializes in calling friends from Pakistan and the separatists from Kashmir and not letting them speak. He pontificates at them and when he loses steam brings into play stalwarts like Marouf and General Bakshi and Ashok Pandit, who can be depended upon in shutting up the enemies within and without.

                   Rahul himself is unable to get in a phrase edgewise and is reduced to saying in a plaintive refrain, ‘Just a second, just a second, just a second...” but no one gives him that crucial second.

                      While on this subject, we should ruminate over the elasticity of time on television.  The anchors often say, “Okay, let us wind up the discussion. You have five seconds each”.  One wonders how elastic those seconds are, as the voluble speakers keep on letting forth steam and sputum for interminable minutes.

                       The antithesis to Arnab Goswami is the patrician Karan Thapar, whose personality exudes the sedateness of the family background (he is the son of General Thapar, a Chief of army staff and a product of Doon School and St. Stephen’s ) and his earlier stint on the BBC. He has imbibed the steely look of “Hard Talk” and can look chillingly satirical and silence his interviewee with an imperious gesture.

                      But Indian television has injected a desi flavour to  his biting sarcasm   and sometimes his subjects turn around and give him a dose of his own medicine. Over the years, he has lost some of his pungency and looks almost human at times. Especially at the end of an interview when he masks his wolfish teeth with a genial smile.

                         The other Rahul ( Kanwal)         of TV Today has a pleasant face and  warm smile. He has no obvious skews in his coverage of news and views.

I like Rajdeep Sardesai the best. He has lustrous eyes and is well up with the facts, but he does not ride rough shod    over his interlocutors. Like his father, he plays cricket and tries to be balanced in his approach. His conclusions come at the end of a programme and seem to be derived from the tenor of discussion.

                         But the fact that the Editor’s verdict comes sharp on the heels  of the debate seems to arouse the shrewd suspicion that his observations  are a foregone conclusion drafted by Sagarika Ghose and his team of advisers.

                           And the story of how Reliance bought up TV 18 in order to get rid of Rajdeep and Sagarika and their mentor Raghav Behl is a scathing comment on the farce called electronic media on Indian television.

The Endgame in Kashmir

Silly point


The Endgame in Kashmir


Sarvanand is the pen name of an astute Kashmiri Pandit, who has been a close observer of the mind games being played out over the decades in Kashmir. He was for long in the Intelligence Bureau and was involved in the manufacture of half the tales spun out by the mandarins of North Block.                
Long after he retired, he once wrote a masterful analysis of why the Kashmir problem could never be resolved. He proved beyond a shadow of doubt that all the parties to the struggle, in India, Pakistan and the valley were vitally and personally interested in an indefinite continuance of the struggle. People remarked that Sarvanand had always been known to be a maverick, but this time around he had really exceeded the outermost limits of forthrightness and was bordering on effrontery. He had been brutally frank and had revealed the innermost secrets of the army brass, the ISI, the RAW, the separatist lobby, the Panun Kashir crowd, the Pakistani Rangers, the BSF, the Americans, the Russians, the Afghans, the Chinese… everyone, every blessed one of them.

They all privately admitted that Sarvanand should not have said what he did, but there was no doubt that he was unfortunately right.

He was the Editor-in-chief of the premier community journal being brought out from Delhi. The uproar over his editorial was so strident that he had to be removed from his position. So much for freedom of speech and expression!

I recently had a long chat with Sarvanand and wanted to know what he made of the present situation. To my rational mind, Modi had been taken for a ride by Mufti Mohammad Syed. He had made Modi believe that India could keep Kashmir and hold it too, and that Mufti would help him in this enterprise. I said that Mufti was an old campaigner and Modi a comparative novice, and that although Modi was a shrewd player, this time he had met his match and he was all set to lose.

To my surprise, the usually disenchanted Sarvanand said that he felt in his bones that the Kashmir Problem had finally met its Master Player. For the first time, the Indian side had a plan. It was somewhat convoluted like a game of chess, where a player had to have the capacity to anticipate the opponents’   twentieth move ahead, but there was a Plan.

Modi’s opening gambit was the vociferous selling of Mission 44. He launched a blitzkrieg of a media campaign to assert that the BJP would bag 44 seats in the Assembly. And because he had taken UP by storm against all odds, there was a credible possibility that Mission 44 just might succeed. Delhi had not happened as yet. Modi had a dark suspicion that the results of the Delhi poll might not be as sanguine as that in U.P. So he delayed the polls in Delhi as much as possible.

This was the first master move. Mufti and the separatist lobby   fell into the trap. They outwardly called upon the people to boycott the polls, but their secret call was for 100 per cent turnout. They failed to perceive that Modi had no possibility of achieving Mission 44. He had merely floated a canard so that the voter turnout would be an all-time record. He could then claim ( as he later vociferously did ) that the common people in the valley were happy with the Indian constitution, they had a deep and abiding faith in the electoral process, and thus could be said to have rejected the options of independent Kashmir or  Kashmir as a part of Pakistan.

In the second phase, Modi wanted to show Mufti in his “true” colours. Mufti had pretended to be anti-India and pro-Pakistan, but he had negotiated with his arch-enemy, the outrageous emblem of a saffron India, the BJP, for forming a government of sorts in Kashmir. His main strategy should have been to keep the BJP out at all costs. But he wanted to be the Chief Minister and only an alliance with his arch- enemy could place the crown on his head. By starting a long-drawn out negotiation process, Modi was able to demonstrate that Mufti was only interested in his own coronation and as far as he was concerned, the people of Kashmir could go to hell!

Mufti was now in a double fix. His popular ratings had plummeted to  an all-time low. He could have broken off the negotiations and clambered on to the moral high ground.  But age was against him and this was probably the last time he would come within striking distance of the crown.
This is where Modi showed his genius as a player, said Sarvanand. Since the day he took over as Prime Minister he had led Pakistan a merry dance. He was cordial, even effusive with Nawaz Sharief. He shook hands with him and embraced him; he presented a sari to his mother. And when his guard was down, he stabbed him in the back. He made a great houha over the Pakistani High Commissioner calling the Geelani and party for their annual cup of tea. He cancelled the Foreign Secretary level talks. He even told the Indian troops to inflict maximum damage on their Paki counterparts. Sharief did not know what had hit him.

And come Republic Day when Modi was able to persuade the first citizen of the USA to attend the festivities and not pay the customary call on Islamabad on his return journey. Sharief was now in an absolute tizzy.

In their disturbed state of mind, all that Mufti and his Pakistani mentors could think of was the strangely incongruous remark that Mufti made minutes after he took the oath of office as Chief Minister. He expressed thanks to Pakistan and the separatist lobby in the valley for letting the election process to be smoothly conducted.

But people of Kashmir are not fools. They noted the fact that Mufti had dragged the negotiations on till the BJP conceded the Chief Ministership to him for all of six years.

Now Mufti was really in a soup. He tried to redeem himself by releasing Masrat Alam and letting Andrabi hoist the Pakistani flag and lead a squad of burqa-clad women in singing the Pakistani national anthem.

But Modi refused to intervene in the matter and thereby put the problem back on to Mufti’s plate. Resultantly, the PDP spokesperson was forced to concede that the State Government’s decisions to arrest Alam and register an FIR against Andrabi were based on the procedure laid down in law, and had not been taken under political pressure from the Centre.

So what is the state of the game today, Sarvanand asks. Today, the PDP comes off as a party prepared to sell Pakistan and its agents if they are allowed to rule the state in peace for six years. And BJP is the Good Samaritan only interested in the welfare of the flood-hit people of Kashmir.

Sarvanand is sore at the channels which project the riff raff separatists as anti- national villains, who deserve to be condemned on prime time television. Left to himself, Modi would have killed these nonentities not in encounters with the security forces, but just by ignoring them.

What is the endgame that is being played out now, I ask Sarvanand. He has advised me to keep an alert, watchful eye on Modi’s schemes for promoting the welfare of individuals, subsidising the hotel and tourism industry, persuading the film units to recreate the magic of the romantic sixties, rehabilitating the displaced families and distributing munificent largesse to persons devastated by the natural calamities and so on.. He is just waiting for the Durbar move, when the government shifts to Srinagar, says Sarvanand.

That will be the time for the final moves and checkmate!

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