Dear Editor, your halo is slipping

The Niira Radia scam has created its own set of spaces. It has emphasised the need for privacy and the impending fear of banana republics. Beyond the scams that screamed out for attention and competed for the noise of Parliament, there was a silent scam that few noticed and fewer spoke about. There was silence around the Niira Radia tapes and what I want to explore is the nature of that silence and the later noise that accompanied it.
When crooks are corrupt, there is predictability about it. When people with a reputation for integrity look suddenly askew, there is a sense of surprise. Their piety, which they wore like a halo, now looks dull. When Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt, two great favourites as journalists were seen as fixers, the silence was deafening. What made it doubly suspect was not the fact that they did wrong but that newspapers clammed up about them. The media with a few exceptions was silent, behaving as if there was a self-imposed emergency.
The transition from piety to hypocrisy was perfect. The media met the reports with denial. What was interesting was a silence of bumblers. The rituals of silence were not confident enough. They leapfrogged to the noise of denial.
Between silence and threat, one confronted the diversions of Ratan Tata, deeply upset that his phone calls to Ms Radia had been tapped. He gets maximum space in the press to tell us we are a banana republic. Here is a man who insists on table manners when a violation of ethics takes place. He is silent about the antics of his PRO, has little to say about Ms Dutt or Mr Sanghvi, but opens out with an announcement of a banana republic. It is as if a threat to the Tatas is a threat to India. The more critical question is the layers of corruption in India, the sense that corruption is a chain of being, and splicing a slice does not quite add up to understanding. The 2G was a scam but so was Ms Radia’s sense of politics and the Sanghvi-Dutt approach to her questions. Tata’s tuning fork stops with himself. A good conduct certificate for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is welcome but one needs a more acute analysis. Corruption in India is not an add-on but a structural part of the system.
Many people have provided indictments of journalists and media. I want to tempt the reader to a different kind of exercise. I want to compare the Radia tapes as a discourse with the TV show Bigg Boss.
I am serious about this. I admit that Bigg Boss is fanciful under the guise of a reality show. The tapes leave one incredulous about how power and the logic of power can contaminate those we felt were above pollution.
The tapes reveal the porousness of categories. The journalist, the PRO, the fixer, the promoter, the investigator, all seem porous categories. The difference between slanting news and planting news from the rigours of investigation disappears. The media becomes a tout to power, indifferent to its own integrity. Forget personalities. Look at the logic of the conversations, the indifference to ethics and values that pervades the texts. The media offers itself as a plumber of news, ready to create leaks or to fix them. Compare it to Bigg Boss.
The collection of characters in this show belong to a circus. They are loud, blatant, crude. They are obvious about their goals and tactics. They are crude and crudely ambitious. The vixen, the bully, the chauvinist are easy types. Bigg Boss commands a crowd because they see power at play in a hobbesian everydayness. You can watch it, condemn. Yet you realise this is a middle class idea of what ambition and mobility mean. It is blatant in its urgency.
The Radia tapes are more subtle. They seek to tamper with power in an indirect way, hinting at possibilities, displacing candidates, changing the combination of a Cabinet. There is a sense of sophistication, the snobbery of name-dropping, a catalogue of the who is who of power.
The reader or listener juxtaposing the two realises that both are models of power politics. The first is easy to laugh at because it is open in its ambitions. But ask yourself, is the second really less instrumental. The veneer of PRO hides an equivalent ruthlessness. Bigg Boss’ Dolly is blatant but does Radia really belong to a different stable? The only difference is between an elite perception and the middle class search for success. We laugh at middle struggles for power because we don’t have the courage to condemn the elite idea of power. In a moral sense, both are contemptible.
I am juxtaposing the two to understand the silences of power. We can condemn a pickpocket, a local bully or clerk, but we seem coy and silent when the high and mighty display their sense of power. We sit silent or create a rabbit patch that focuses on a side event. We can be voyeuristic but we fail to look elite power in the eye and label it as wrong.
The Radia tapes are as much a morality play as Watergate. But on Watergate, journalism stood ground, found a conscience and even a code of responsibility. In the current episode journalism lost its tongue, preferring to play host to corporate power rather than point fingers.
The coyness is interesting given the almost hysterical fury of media in being inquisitional. But when things get closer home, the silence is intriguing. There is a sadness here because it is more than hypocrisy. There a sense of a herd instinct. I wish the media had some rituals of looking at its own scandals.
India today stands between two models, the Stalinist idea of the non-person and the sycophantic idea of the inviolate person. The media seeks to erase the persons it targets to oblivion. Yet when it faces its own kind it pretends to be like Gandhi’s monkeys. More than corruption, it is the silence about corruption that corrodes. Silence is an acid that can destroy years of integrity. That much the media must realise and make amends for.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist