Even while we wonder whether the Prime Minister belongs to the BJP and the BJP is running the government, the Information and Broadcasting Minister who has just started doubling as the official spokesman for the Cabinet says it is absurd for Doordarshan to have two editorial policies one for DD News and the other for Aaj Tak. Would the minister like to explain the editorial position of his own government?Frankly, we're confused. Will the realBJP-led government please stand up? One is the seemingly rational, reasonable face of the party which wants to run the government as the Congress did, like a tight ship where there will be no deserters. This is the message Mahajan has sent out to his own ministry: he will tolerate no white elephants like a DD that doesn't earn its keep and no greenhorns who replace high-earning Saturday films with mythologicals. And though his bureaucrats may present him with a list of cons that outweigh the pros in the note on lifting the ban on Direct-To-Home television, he will not be deflected from his larger goal of making his prime minister seem like the best candidate for a Man of Davos Award.

This is a minister who is not issuing orders clandestinely. He challenges opponents to intellectual debates and asks for a national discussion before he goes ahead and does exactly as he had wanted. So he may want to repeal the Prasar Bharati Act, but first he will have enough people echoing his point of view. He will lift theban on DTH but not before he convinces you that it helps prevent a media monopoly. He will drop private news from DD but not before he has argued with you on the absurdity of one chain newspaper having two editorial pages in two different cities. And if you still think he doesn't believe in Prasar Bharati's autonomy and wants to convert Doordarshan into Atal-darshan, that's your problem.

What you define as creeping control, he thinks is a long-overdue exercise of authority. Edging out the Principal Information Officer is not tampering with the official machinery, he will say. It is giving the media what it wants soundbites and smart images within half-hour of the Cabinet deliberations. After all, as the minister said, this is the age of not just the pen-wielding but also the dandi-wielding journalist, who needs quotable quotes, colour-coordinated clothes, and a signature tune.

And then, of course, there is the drab reality of the party, which like Doordarshan, has first to be seen and then to bemarketed. This is the monolith that speaks in Kushab-hau Thakre's homespun accent, that articulates itself through K.L. Sharma's hardline discourse and that is steeped into J.P. Mathur's most unspokesmanlike disport.

There is the worse reality out there that cannot be hidden by semantic jugglery. That is the reality of attacks on churches in Gujarat, the burning of a missionary and his two sons in Manoharpur and the digging up of a pitch in Ferozeshah Kotla. No amount of fire-breathing about an international conspiracy by a minister carefully chosen to represent the right minority can offset the dark murmurs about combating conversions from the VHP. The Prime Minister may well want a media-friendly minister to sell the image of a nation on the superhighway to the new millennium, complete with DTH, an IRA Bill, no food subsidies and a Gandhian, fast-observing First Servant but there will always be an Acharya Giriraj Kishore or a Vishnu Hari Dalmia or even a Bal Thackeray to queer his pitch. You have to fixthe problem before you attack the reflection. One could start by going beyond a mere national debate on conversions, and actually check the growth of communal organisations? Because even if the image is improving, the reality isn't.