Press, power and politics

The octogenarian Narayan Dutt Tiwari excites sympathy. Not because he is accused of denying paternity (which may or may not be true), but because he can expect no respite from the media.

I am not questioning the propriety of the Supreme Court’s decision to reject his appeal for an order restraining his putative son from disclosing the result of the blood test to newspapers and television. I am commenting on the fact that the veteran politician seems more afraid of the publicity than of being proved to have fathered Rohit Shekhar.
Many will gloat over this as evidence of the power of the press. But it’s the power to embarrass and to pull down in which I have never taken much pleasure. It takes me back to my early days as a reporter in England and the magistrates’ courts I covered. A pinched-looking working class housewife was convicted in one of them of stealing a couple of tins of luncheon meat from a shop and given a suspended sentence and put on probation. The next case was called but that little old woman didn’t budge from the dock. Instead, she kept looking at us in the press box with a pleading expression. “It won’t get into the papers, will it?” she murmured, “The neighbours… ” and her voice trailed away piteously.
That was the cue for the chairman of the magistrates’ bench. English magistrates are public-spirited lay people who take themselves terribly seriously and are generally self-righteous. This one was exceptionally sanctimonious. She had done wrong, he intoned piously, and it was only right she should be punished. The court had in its leniency let her off with a light sentence but England was proud of its free press, and the court couldn’t muzzle newspapers. If the press reported the case and her neighbours got to know about it and reacted accordingly, she must accept that as part of her just punishment.
Justices G.S. Singhvi and S.J. Mukhopadhaya, who turned down Mr Tiwari’s appeal, reminded me of that magistrate. At 87, Mr Tiwari can only look forward to the past. He has been three times chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and once of Uttarakhand. He has been a state governor. Some remember him as obsequiously helping Sanjay Gandhi put on his sandals. I recall his rapier swift reply — “No sir, Mr Gandhi accompanied me!” — to Justice J.C. Shah of the Shah Commission’s loaded question, “Did you accompany Mr Gandhi to Dehra Dun?” More than 30 years later it gives me pleasure to recall the smug Justice Shah’s discomfiture.
As with that Englishwoman, so with Mr Tiwari, our system is such that once something is in the public domain it can no longer be kept a secret from the media. He could not expect his privacy to be respected after Rohit Shekhar demanded the blood test. That brought the matter into the public domain. Without that fig leaf, the media is on the whole quite discreet about the follies and foibles of the great.
I had no idea, for instance, that Jawaharlal Nehru smoked until I read in the old Manchester Guardian that he sliced cigarettes into two, and had been caught having a quick puff like an errant schoolboy in a Red Fort embrasure before Saudi Arabia’s King Saud arrived for an official reception. No Indian paper mentioned it just as no Indian paper mentioned whisky in connection with the late Zail Singh or Atal Behari Vajpayee. After visiting Delhi in the Sixties, a British journalist was struck by the fact that everyone linked Indira Gandhi’s name with a titled minister but there wasn’t a whisper of it in any newspaper. I reminded him that British papers were equally discreet about Harold Wilson.
The Western press was, in fact, always more proper if only because its editors and managers had a better grasp of what social propriety was all about. It was an unwritten rule in Fleet Street never to take pictures of royals while they were eating. Most American journalists knew of Jack Kennedy’s peccadilloes as they did about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s. It wasn’t done to write about them. The “inevitable” link between press and politicians that Tony Blair mentioned to the Leveson inquiry into the culture, ethics and practices of the press is an old tradition. It held good until the advent of television blew everything sky high.
That’s why I continue to be surprised by the Indian media’s reticence about Sonia Gandhi. Her illness wasn’t probed. Her visits abroad are not investigated. Nothing appears about her private life or friends. She wasn’t even mentioned in connection with the recent disclosures by Sten Lindstrom, Sweden’s former police chief who blew the whistle on the Bofors affair, and the earlier ones of Yevgenia Albats, the Russian KGB expert. I hope I shan’t be hanged, drawn and quartered for saying I find this silence about the most powerful person in the country, and a glamorous European woman to boot, extraordinary in this age of brash Page 3 journalism. There may be nothing to write about but that doesn’t stop our gossip columnists from throwing dirt.

Tailpiece: Narendra Modi has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find reasons why Rajasthani voters in Surat should support him. He told them recently that Maharana Pratap’s horse Chetak was from Kathiawar in Gujarat. Since plebs aren’t usually privy to equestrian secrets, one can only conclude that the aristocratic Jaswant Singh, who is an adept horseman too, whispered it in Mr Modi’s ear. If so, what does that say about the fluid and fluctuating power equations in the ambition-ridden Bharatiya Janata Party?