On the eve of Jawaharlal Nehru’s 45th death anniversary I feel impelled to write about his celebrated press conferences, usually held once a month, that became a unique institution — an exhilarating combination of information, education and entertainment, the like of which has never been seen after him. To be sure, Lal Bahadur Shastri tried to keep up his predecessor’s practice. But at his very first press conference the hack pack of those days treated him with such churlish familiarity that he gave up.

The scribes were more respectful to Indira Gandhi when she tried to revive her father’s tradition. But in her “goongi gudiya” phase she was inarticulate and lacked her “papu’s” encyclopedic knowledge. Once she caused roars of laughter by declaring that her “main problem was inflation and rising prices”. After 1971 she had become deft in handling the press but first the Nav Nirman in Gujarat and then the JP movement engulfed her. The Emergency put paid to the prime ministerial press conference.

During his 28-month tenure as prime minister, Morarji Desai did hold half a dozen press conferences. But they were eminently forgettable because he answered every question with a counter-question. By Rajiv’s time, the exponential expansion of the press corps, the “invasion from the sky” by satellite television and Doordarshan’s unfailing propensity to telecast every word he uttered made press conferences by him superfluous. He did hold one in 1985. It had to be shifted from a commission room in Vigyan Bhavan (more than enough in his grandfather’s time) to the main hall. It resembled the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly. Because of a fire in Vigyan Bhavan, V. P. Singh held his one and only press conference in the Siri Fort auditorium. Lasting three hours, it turned into a political brawl at one stage.

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