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The Hinduatan Times
9
May
2006
Done to death
The media went way
over the top while covering the death of Pramod Mahajan. It’s tragic
that the Indian elite is taken in by the artificial glitter and lack of
substance For vast sections of the Indian media which felt at home with
corporate coverage and celebrities, life began and ended with the likes
of Mahajan
V. Gangadhar
E XCESSIVE ADULATION clouds one’s judgment.
Blinded by all that talk of Camelot, the
US media
for a long time ignored the frenetic womanising of President John F.
Kennedy and his poor political judgment in going along with the CIA in
the Bay of Pigs fiasco. If President George Bush, during the early days
of the Iraq war, got away with murder, it was not due to personal
charisma but because the media were slow in changing their pre-conceived
notions about the Arab world and there was an element of arrogance about
a superpower pounding an enemy.
Charisma is a doubleedged weapon. Quite often, it misguides the
media. There are times when charisma is created by the media and
attributed to certain personalities. Hero-worship crosses all limits and
obliterates even glaring faults. This is a clear sign of immaturity in
the Indian media. With television’s increased coverage of national
affairs, this quality is on the rise.
Take the media’s coverage of the death of BJP leader Pramod Mahajan.
The death nipped a promising political career in the bud and had enough
drama to attract extravagant media attention that, unfortunately,
developed into a soap opera. In a way, this was inevitable because
Mahajan swung between life and death for nearly ten days. The fate of
Indian celebrities is now meat and drink for the Indian media,
particularly the television media that seems to have no idea when
saturation point is reached. Some months ago, it was Amitabh Bachchan.
Then it was Pramod Mahajan’s turn.
But what was disturbing was the quality and theme of the coverage
that projected Mahajan as a super hero of Indian politics. We were
constantly reminded of the significance of his initials, ‘PM’, and that
the nation, in his death, was deprived of a future prime minister. I
don’t know what the current BJP leadership thought of such media
speculation because, within the party, it had not generated any
enthusiasm. He was regarded as one of the frontrunners among the second
generation leadership of the BJP. But here too, Mahajan had his rivals.
Anything above that was media puff.
Millions of words were written about Mahajan’s organisational
skills within the BJP and elsewhere. The BJP is now a badly split party,
split at the top, middle and lower levels. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K.
Advani are bickering over the shameful act of the NDA government in the
handing over of Islamic militant prisoners, after the hijacking of the
Indian Airlines plane by Taliban terrorists. Former Foreign Minister
Jaswant Singh is threatening to reveal the sordid facts of the episode
in his forthcoming book. The top two also disagreed on Advani’s sudden
discovery that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a secular leader.
At the middle level, the infighting is more intense. Uma Bharati,
no friend of Mahajan’s, finally quit the party after abusing the
leadership for several months. Madan Lal Khurana is out, Venkaiah Naidu
is sulking, Sushma Swaraj will neither shave of f her hair nor wear
white and eat chana at the plight of her party. Poor Vinay Katiyar is
fending for himself while contesting against Sonia Gandhi in the Rae
Bareli Lok Sabha by-polls. Where are the so-called organisational skills
of anyone, let alone Pramod Mahajan’s?
A troubleshooter is expected to carry all the ranks in the party
with him. But Mahajan had to face flak from others after Vajpayee
anointed him as the party’s ‘Lakshman’! Outside actual politicking,
there was much talk about Mahajan’s skills in organising various BJP
functions, like the ‘rath yatras’ and the last BJP convention in Mumbai.
Shall we then consider him only as a successful event manager? If you
have money and political clout, organisation is no problem. Money talks
everywhere and more so in Mumbai where we have all kinds of expensive
jamborees throughout the year.
Mahajan certainly excelled in ‘fixing’, and was certainly a cut
above Amar Singh. But did that make him a national hero? If that were
so, why was Mahajan not very successful in contesting and winning Lok
Sabha polls from Mumbai? And why did he have to enter Parliament through
Rajya Sabha?
The media, however, were particularly happy because their
requirements were taken care of by Mahajan. But then, the BJP has always
bent backwards to please the media.
It was here that Mahajan excelled. A former jour nalist, he
followed the BJP pattern of cultivating the media that had resulted in
some former Marxist stalwarts switching over to the saffron brigade and
being rewarded with plum posts in the gover nment or nominations to the
Rajya Sabha. Nothing was spared in efforts to woo the media.
Many of us were dazzled and flattered when allowed to interview him
in aeroplanes or helicopters. His accessibility and superficial
sophistication made him a per manent fixture on channels like NDTV.
Most Indian journalists are dazzled when they come close to
political power and tend to lose their balance. The overkill in the
Mahajan coverage was caused by this factor.
Mahajan never shied away from the fact that he found it easy to
move in the company of the nation’s richest and most powerful
industrialists.
Adapting to such a lifestyle was easy for him and this was the
lifestyle that the media also cherished. So, we were told in breathless
prose how, thanks to Mahajan, we were ushered into the mobile telephone
age. We basked in the ‘India Shining’ environment which Mahajan helped
create. For vast sections of the Indian media which felt at home with
corporate coverage and celebrities, life began and ended with the likes
of Pramod Mahajan.
This is a major tragedy of the educated elite of
India that
is taken in by the artificial glitter and lack of substance on issues.
Did Pramod Mahajan have any solutions to tackle widespread malnutrition
among children in Maharashtra or far mers’ starvation deaths in Vidarbha?
I am also appalled at the media’s insensitivity in heaping undue
praise on someone who stood by the likes of Narendra Modi and who saw
nothing wrong, even while upholding ‘democracy’, in cementing an
alliance with an undemocratic rabble that is the Shiv Sena.
There were hardly any comments in the media about Mahajan being
mentioned in the Shivani Bhatnagar murder case or his unsavoury comments
comparing Sonia Gandhi to Monica Lewinsky.
The Congress survived the killings of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv
Gandhi and the untimely deaths of men like Madhavrao Scindia. How then,
can some TV anchors and newspaper columnists make idiotic comments about
the BJP having no future without Mahajan?
Of course, his death was a blow to the BJP, but it has men and
women to carry on with the battles that lie ahead. Unlike Indira and
Rajiv Gandhi, Mahajan was not a martyr to the national cause. He was
killed in a family dispute. That need not detract the loss suffered by
his party and family. But the media were clearly guilty of overkill.
Mahajan could have become a national leader in the true sense of
the word. But we hastened too much in passing judgment. Nothing in his
career merited any comparison with the likes of Rajiv Gandhi or
Madhavrao Scindia. He stood for a completely different kind of politics.
It is harmful not to have an open mind that can analyse political
leadership dispassionately, and jump to conclusions based on close
personal relationships, that tend to shut one’s eyes to the basic
realities of life. |
