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Sucking Up To Musharraf... In The Agra Madhouse |
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And it was at the now-infamous breakfast meeting with Musharraf that the Indian media - at least its representatives, its editors and leading columnists - kicked itself in its own bag of crushed nuts. That's a damnably difficult, contortionist thing to do, but the editors did it anyway. They listened without a squawk to a dictator with a self-arrogated mandate trash the country that had, in its lack of wisdom, invited him to talk a dialect of peace he's never had the occasion or inclination to learn.  Perhaps the invitation was the only way out of the impasse in paradise on Earth. But the Indian media did what it does best - pump up its biceps in an anatomy of acquiescence. This is the same media whose back was broken during the Emergency, that surrendered its inarguable and fundamental adversarial credo during the Kargil fiasco, that supported the IPKF misadventure in Sri Lanka that led, one way or another, to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi - and it has never quite recovered from these various challenges to its verticality.From the day Musharraf landed in India, he had the media spinning round his pinky. The first thing he snapped out at stampeding newspersons when he emerged from Palam airport in New Delhi was (and this is verbatim), "I don't have anything to say to you. I don't want to say anything. I won't say anything to you. But I will talk to you on Monday for hours and hours." And, being a disciplined military martinet, he did - at the breakfast meeting, where a slew of editors made smarmy fools of themselves - most notably a fading columnist who took all of 10 precious, insidiously televised minutes blatting to the dictator what a glorious instrument of peace he was. (The columnist has since been doing salvage penitence on TV to anyone willing to give him time of day.). His was the gist of one strand of the Indian media's refrain. The other strand sought to convince Musharraf that the Indian media was pluralistic and autonomous and, therefore, the most likely and best placed to ventilate his views. Who would refuse such an invitation to exploitation? And today it is revealed that the telecast - ostensibly without the knowledge of the editors present at the breakfast meet - might have less to do with Musharraf's canny forward planning and PTV's proactivity than with one of India's leading television channels playing the professional, hyper-competitive journalist, borrowing the two video cassettes from a PTV cameraperson apparently in order to tape them for editing and later telecast, and then going ahead unilaterally and unfurling them in the ether. Musharraf shot the Indian government in the foot - with a great lot of help from the Indian media. So it's really no use barking at Musharraf that it was the televising of the breakfast meeting that bunged the spanner in the summit's works. If it did, one particular Indian TV channel, given to paradropping correspondents into hothouse and complicated situations and then laying patent claim to exposure and analysis, is responsible for it. Of course, the media covered its ass - by being as candymouthed and supportive of the Indian bureaucratic and political bungledom as it was of Musharraf. When you use words like "grand success" and "perfect timing" and "brotherly bonhomie" and "brilliant and innovative plan" to describe an event whose outcome depends on chemistry between invincible force and immovable object, you are sticking professional your head in the oven. And then, 24 hours later, you have to recant everything that you had described as unambiguously sacred. It takes a chiropractor of ethics to come out of such a situation without a sprain in the brain. Meanwhile, someone should tell Musharraf that the Indian populace that he hopes to access through the Indian media is savvier than he thinks. It doesn't like people or institutions that suck up. RECENTLY ON JAAL: The Tamasha In Tamil Nadu The Agra Assignment Going Ape Over Kashmir Bad Dream Factory Ballot Boxing Borderline Patriotism Bill Clinton's Hidden Agenda The Tapes: Replay The Naked Truth About Sinha's Dream Budget Give Us This Day Our Daily Disaster A Dip Into The Kumbh Hype Hype Hurray The A 2 Z Of Y2K What's Behind Bush? The Florida Ceasefire The Damn Dam Controversy A Weak-Kneed Operation Faster, Higher, Stranger You Have The Right To Be A Volunteer The ICE ICE Baby A Tale Of The Jungle King The Secret Autonomy Report Report When Batsman Became Betsman India's Human Genome Projectile Stone Age Flaws In ICE Age Laws A Dry Spell For Policy Planning Lara's Theme Dotcom Bubble Gum: Burst Or Bust Inside A VIP Cell A To Do About Dos A Dress Code For Klintonji Kajal Basu is the Executive Editor of Tehelka.com SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK ABOUT THIS ARTICLE:
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