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Blame
It On Our Stars
It’s
that time of the season when we start blaming everyone and everything
for things that go wrong only because we were unprepared. I am amused
to hear that people are now blaming Prannoy Roy for sabotaging the
summit only because the editors’ breakfast with Musharraf was
ostensibly telecast live without their permission.
Let
us face some home-truths: what are these editors scared of? If you
talk to them they pretend to be violent man-eaters: quite another
matter that some of them won’t even be advertisements for Mighty
Mouse: now these are the same people who would flock to any television
studio only to give their opinion on any subject be it Lagaan’s
music to Sushma Swaraj’s views on life beyond foot and mouth.
So why on earth is such an issue being made?
Prannoy
Roy runs a news channel: he is not the Ministry of External Affairs
that he has to be bothered about every diplomatic nicety so those
who today shriek and abuse Star News are doing it only because they
missed the story: they had no clue that such a telecast was arranged
for and today they regret looking foolish in front of the nation
as it were. For the Government of India to now blame Star News for
the collapse of the summit is an admission of its own limitations,
which are both intellectual and political in nature.
Let’s
face it: this was one battle that Pakistan won. They managed the
media so brilliantly well: true at times they literally had even
senior editors for breakfast but the fact is that Musharraf pulled
off a coup: this time in India. The fact that the Indian side maintained
a stony silence and a true Jaswant Singh like stiff upper lip only
made matters worse. Satish Jacob of BBC was telling me the other
evening how the Indian side was content on offering a one-line brief
whereas the Pakistanis would make every effort to draw out the journalist
and explain things to him. I have said this before and it merits
repetition: we may be a country led by very very old and infirm
people but we must have young and agile minds: we lack the agility
of a super-power: our MEA officials are like a cast from some sunken
opera house off the coast of the Baltic sea!
Our
handling of the media was pathetic and look how we have shifted
the blame: the other accusation flung against Star News has been
that they promoted the Hurriyat by constantly referring to their
leaders but the truth of the matter is that if the dictator thinks
they are relevant enough to be invited to a riotous tea-party, they
would be worthy of comment on television as well. Why do we have
this absurd logic that the media is responsible for the ills of
the nation. While everything that the media did during the Agra
summit cannot be condoned — especially the comments on what
the dictator ate and how fluffy his goose-down pillows were —
there are several things that they did right as well. I was constantly
switching channels between Aaj Tak and Star News and I found the
coverage rivetting enough many a time.
Blaming
it on the media is not the step forward, Mr Prime Minister. We need
to better our media management skills: the people who were managing
the media on our behalf must either be sacked or made ambassadors
(like you did recently to one of your officers) but they must not
be allowed near any such summit. I may also mention blaming Sushma
Swaraj for the summit’s collapse is equally silly: she was
only doing what she had been asked to and there was nothing wrong
in the statement she made: certainly nothing that should have invited
such serious comment from the Pakistanis.
In
the end analysis, I as a viewer got more than my money’s worth
watching the summit: I learnt more about Agra; had a glimpse of
parts of Old Delhi which I would have never visited; understood
the difference between Nalli Ghost and Achari Murg and saw a Begum
and her dictator romance the tomb without any affection at all:
so typical of married couples!
But
the highlight of the coverage was undoubtedly the breakfast that
Musharraf had with our editors: sad that none of them could see
a camera in the room even though most of them are in front of it
all the time. But this is why yeh mera India!
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