Banswara Marks A New Low

Sandeep Sahu 

April 22, 2024

When I saw those print advertisements with the caption "Will you trust this man?" along with the picture of a bearded Sikh taxi driver in Congress advertisements published in leading English dailies during the campaign for the 1984 elections (which was also the first election I covered as a journalist), I had thought communal rhetoric during electioneering cannot get any lower.

 

But I was wrong!!

 

Prime minister Narendra Modi has left that veiled slur against Sikhs in the 1984 advertisement designed by Rediffusion miles behind with his brazen, outrageous and no-holds-barred tirade against Muslims at a campaign rally in Rajasthan’s Banswara yesterday (April 21). He not only demeaned the exalted office he holds, he also sought to paint the over 20 crores Muslims (we don’t know their exact population since Modi ji has made sure there was no Census in 2021) as enemies of the nation!

 

BJP spokespersons and apologists of the party are trying to explain away the out-and-out communal speech of the Prime Minister by claiming it was directed at ‘infiltrators’ - and not Muslims per se - are simply bluffing. As anyone (anyone who hasn’t joined the burgeoning tribe of Bhakts yet, that is) who has heard the speech can see, what he said was directed at the entire Muslim community in India and not any particular section of it. The reference to Dr Manmohan Singh’s 2006 NDC speech where he had said the ‘the minorities, particularly the Muslim minorities, have the first claim on resources’ and linking it to the promise of redistribution of wealth made in the Congress manifesto for the 2024 polls left no room for any doubt on that score. He insinuated that the Congress, if voted to power, will ‘snatch away’ the gold jewellery (including their ‘mangalsutras’) of Hindu women and distribute them among those who ‘produce more children’ and ‘infiltrators’! Apart from being the crassest case of fear-mongering, it was also a plain lie because the Congress manifesto makes no such promise. All it promises is a ‘nationwide socio economic and caste census’ and ‘strengthening the agenda for affirmative action’ based on the data thrown up by such a census. Talking of redistribution of wealth, was it not Modi himself who promised, in the run up to the 2014 elections, to bring back all the black money stashed away in Swiss banks and having Rs 15 lakh deposited into the account of every Indian’ (something that his able lieutenant Amit Shah sought to pass off as a ‘jumla’ later)? And we have given him two successive mandates for failing to keep that promise. I was as opposed to Dr Manmohan Singh’s 2006 statement as anyone in the BJP. But I am appalled at what the Prime Minister of the country has just said. With this statement, he has stooped to the level of the Akbaruddin Owaisis – not Asaddudin Owaisi, mind you.

 

While the Prime Minister’s statement is cringeworthy, the Election Commission’s timid “No Comments” response raises serious questions about the credibility of the Commission and its commitment to a ‘free and fair’ election. If it has ‘no comments’ to offer – and no plans to act, by extension – on this blatant attempt at communal polarisation, I wonder if there is a need for such a body. If it acts and behaves like a government department, then it might as well be wound up. And if this does not constitute ‘hate speech’ and a violation of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), which is supposedly in place, I wonder what does?

 

The Congress has been guilty of ‘minority appeasement’ in the past whenever and wherever it has been in power. No questions about that. In fact, the polarisation of the country’s electorate along communal lines and the consolidation of the ‘Hindu vote’ today is a belated collective response to the appeasement policies followed by the Congress and many of its fellow travellers in the INDIA Alliance for decades. The Sangh Parivar and the BJP, its political offshoot have been harping on this theme for as long as they have existed. But it is only in the last few decades that it has started paying political dividends. If Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani laid the foundation for the Hindu vote, Narendra Modi has built a whole skyscraper on it! But unless the people of India – the vast majority of them Hindus – stop in their tracks and do a course correction, they would have prepared the ground, unknown to themselves, for civil war and another vivisection of the country!        

 

 

 

City Beat

King for 10 mins

Have you ever felt like the Chief Minister of the state? Spider recently did. While on the daily errand of dropping Mrs Spider at her office one of these days, Spider found to his pleasant surprise the cops and the traffic team, instead of stopping all traffic as they normally do, actually busy clearing the way for him. It so happened that Spider drove, uninterrupted by traffic cops and other commuters anywhere on the way, from the gates of the Chief Minister’s residence to the gates of his office, known to the city as the secretariat.
There were at least five traffic crossings on the way where Spider normally has to wait for his turn to cross while the traffic on the other sides is cleared. But on this particular occasion, he drove past in royal splendour with the traffic on the other three sides looking on helplessly: the Airport gate, Airport Square, Ekamra Square, Capital Hospital Square and the AG Square, the biggest of them all. For once, Spider had the luxury of driving at a reasonable speed on the empty road while the cops kept waving animatedly to stop all traffic that might come in Spider’s way than stop Spider himself. Not once did he have to change gears while covering the nearly two and a half kilometre distance. Spider could hardly be blamed for feeling like the Chief Minister - with the siren-blaring police vehicle at a distance and all the vehicles that followed it, including the real Chief Minister’s car, appearing to be part of his entourage!
It was certainly a welcome change for someone used to being stopped at frequent intervals to ensure the smooth passage of the Chief Minister from his residence to his workplace, both of which unfortunately fall on Spider’s daily route. For about 10 minutes, Spider felt like a king. It is another matter though that he was back to feeling like a commoner once past the secretariat!!

IPL Time

It is that time of the year again. A time when half the nation is glued to the television screen in the evenings; when the popular film channel Max turns a sports channel in the afternoons and evenings for nearly six weeks; when children fight with their fathers, mothers or siblings for the right to the remote; when boarders fight with other boarders (as it happened in Kendrapara recently) for the right to watch IPL and the sports pages of newspapers become IPL pages.
It is also a time when Spider, the self-appointed founder president of the ‘I Hate IPL’ club, scurries for cover for some respite from the damned thing called instant cricket. There is no getting away from IPL though. You are watching a news channel and suddenly the all-too-familiar trumpet playing the IPL signature tune pierces your ear drums. You walk into a shop for something and find the shopkeeper too engrossed in watching IPL (along with other customers) to spare any time for you. You stay resolutely away from the sports pages of newspapers and yet find that IPL has sneaked into the front page, even if only as a picture with a caption. You land at your khati in the evening only to find other khati members animatedly discussing the finer points of the evening’s match. If you think getting into a bar and having a quiet beer is the best way to stay away from IPL, you are hopelessly mistaken. If anything, it is the worst in a bar what with the giant television screen with its surround sound effect, coupled with the high-decibel tipsy talk of fellow drinkers, making it an earful.
It seems The Himalayas is the only place you can escape to for some badly needed respite from IPL!!

Poor Cousins

The new terminal of the Biju Patnaik airport, inaugurated with great fanfare by Union Civil Aviation minister appropriately enough on the legend’s birthday, may well be a delight for air passengers. But it is a real pain in – well, you know where - for those who come to drop or receive somebody, as Spider found out recently. It can get really tough if you have to receive somebody coming on a flight in the afternoon.
For one thing, the parking lot is too distant from the terminal, which means that you have to walk a fair distance under the fire-breathing sun with no respite by way of a roof overhead. For another, there is a hardly a place where you can sit if you feel tired standing on your feet while waiting for the flight to arrive. In the old terminal, one could at least lean on the steel bars. [Some people have even devised a way of ‘sitting’ between the bars.]
Spider does not know if one is allowed to get into the lounge and have a bird’s eye view of the tarmac from the first floor and watch your dear one board the airline bus if s/he is going and alighting from the makeshift stairs if s/he is coming for a fee of Rs 30 or so as was the case in the old terminal. But anxious mothers have a tough time keeping a watch over their departing sons or daughters through the glass panelled doors of the enormous new lounge. Spider could not even find a free drinking water tap.
While no one grudges the air passenger all the amenities and molly-coddling that they get from airport authorities, it is time some attention was paid to those who have the onerous responsibility of dropping or picking up someone. Interestingly, these people far outnumber the passengers in a phenomenon that is typically Indian.

[This city diary was first published in The Political and Business Daily]

A Winner All The Way

The Great Reformer has won the day - and lives to fight another day. Despite his all too obvious lack of leadership qualities, Manmohan Singh has been a winner all the way: first as a techno-bureaucrat, then as Finance minister and now as the Prime Minister of the country. As Finance Minister in the minority PV Narasimha Rao government in the early nineties, the good doctor administered the tottering Indian economy perhaps its bitterest ever shock therapy by ushering in the most sweeping reforms imaginable and – wonder of wonders – not only got away with it but has actually been feted for it ever since. While there was never any doubt about the fact that the former Governor of Reserve Bank knew his economics, he was certainly a political greenhorn when Rao pulled him out of nowhere to make him the Finance minister of the country. But Manmohan was nothing if not a quick learner – even in a field which had never been his domain. And he put the lessons in realpolitik that he learnt under the tutelage of perhaps the most underrated Prime Minister of the country to good effect when he became Prime Minister himself. Having seen from close quarters how the wily Rao weathered the very real threat to his minority government in 1993 by scripting the infamous JMM bribery case, Manmohan did a Rao in August 2008 to save his crippled government which had just lost its crutch in the shape of the Left. More than four years after the event, I still remember every single detail of the dramatic happenings on that eventful day. In my mind’s eye, I can still see him coming out of Parliament, V Narayansami and others in tow, beaming from ear to ear and flashing the ‘V’ sign from various angles for the benefit of the camerapersons in attendance. [The visual has actually become a bit of a signature tune for MMS given the zillion times that it has been aired on television as a ‘File Shot’ ever since. If you are a little attentive, you can watch it on TV even now, generally with the headlines.] Television channels, on their part, kept beaming the bearded winner all day long with the contemporary hit ‘Singhh is Kingg’ playing loudly on the background. It was the day Singh won his first real political battle. But it was also the day he lost his innocence. Asked by an enterprising reporter about allegations of crores of rupees changing hands to save his government, the just anointed Kingg asked a counter-question by way of an answer, “But where is the proof?”, knowing fully well that no power on earth can unearth the ‘proof’ now that he had weathered the challenge to his Prime Ministership. How true he was!! He has a Teflon-like quality that no other politician living or dead has/had. Nothing sticks to him. He may preside over the most brazen act of bribery to save his government, but nobody has so much as pointed a finger at him. It has all been duly blamed on the dirty-tricks department of the Congress. He may acquiesce in the massive loot of the exchequer in the form of the spectacular spectrum scam, but nobody is ready to believe that he facilitated it knowingly. Even now when it has been proved beyond any shade of doubt that the systematic selling (it was not even selling, but pure and simple gifting away) of the family silver, nay coal, happened right under his watch as the Coal minister, the commentariat is busy singing homilies to his ‘personal integrity’. Pray, what use is it if the man with this precious attribute has no compunction whatsoever in putting up with people utterly devoid of this precious attribute all around him. Years ago, when the Harshad Mehta scam blew on the face of an unsuspecting nation still recovering from the after effects of Dr Singh’s shock therapy, Manmohan had said he was ‘not going to lose any sleep over it.’ May be we should have paid greater attention to the import of what he had said back in 1993. May be we should have known that the good doctor could sail through the longest-ever procession of the most brazen scandals without losing any sleep over it. The only thing over which Manmohan loses sleep, it would appear, is when the natives do not understand the ‘economics’ behind the hike in fuel prices/cap on the number of subsidized LPG cylinders, when the courts tell the government to distribute rice rotting in the open due to lack of storage space free to the hungry or when the’ The Washington Post’ dubs him a ‘tragic figure’. For all his benign visage, Manmohan Singh has a vicious side to him which bursts through the carefully cultivated exterior every now and then. Odias who watched his televised address to the nation on Friday could not have missed a phrase that he used during his address: ‘Paisa ped par nahin ugta.’ [‘Money does not grow on trees’]. It was a phrase he was using publicly for the second time. The first time was when MPs from Odisha had gone to request him to for a special package for the state. When the PM’s insensitive and below-the-belt comment became a raging controversy in the state, he clarified that he was ‘just joking’. I wonder which one is more offensive; the original comment or the ‘joke’ part!! Just as Narasimha Rao needs to be complimented for spotting the man for the moment at a time of great economic crisis, the Empress of Congress needs to be given 10 out of 10 for spotting the politician in Manmohan. Just as his mentor kept Sonia Gandhi at bay for as long as he was at the helm of the party and the government, Manmohan has kept the perennial crown-prince waiting in the wings for as long as he is at the helm. Bravo Manmohan! [This column was first published in The Political and Business Daily.]

The Sky Is The Limit

Aseem Trivedi’s take on the all pervasive corruption in the country is no great shakes as a cartoon. It lacks the understated humour of a RK Laxman or the subtlety of a Sudhir Dar. It is anything but imaginative in the depiction of the celebrated lions in the national symbol of Ashoka Stambha in the shape of wolves, the substitution of the Ashoka Chakra with the danger symbol of a skull and bones and the pun on the slogan ‘Satyameva Jayate’. It is almost child-like in the simplicity of its message and in the unpretentiousness of its expression. In fact, it appears more like the work of a student venting out his anger against a particularly stern teacher in the form of a badly drawn caricature of the teacher on the blackboard than the outpouring of a mature artiste pontificating on the alarming proportions that the epidemic called corruption has assumed in the country. But sedition??? The charge is laughable and needs to be dismissed with the contempt that it richly deserves. The Indian State, the Constitution and our National symbols must be on very shaky foundations if they are threatened by the work of a mediocre activist cartoonist. Our national symbol can’t possibly be so fragile as to break at the anguished cry of a young man disturbed by corruption all round him. But then what better can one expect in a country where the Prime Minister’s Office (not the Prime Minister, we are told) gets worked up over an article published in a foreign journal describing the presiding deity of that office as a ‘tragic figure’? While on the subject of sedition, I am reminded of the Laxman Choudhury case some two years back in which the Mohana-based journalist was booked under this relic of the British era and put behind bars for full 79 days for nothing more sinister than the fact that a packet containing some Maoist literature had been sent to him. He was not even caught in possession of the leaflets which had only been addressed to him. But that did not stop the police from booking him for sedition, among other charges, the lower courts from upholding the charge and the Chief Minister from refusing to do anything about it despite a delegation of senior journalists meeting him twice and urging him to intervene. [I remember wondering at the time whether, with the abundance of Maoist correspondence at my residence and the intermittent Maoist calls on my cell phone, I too was not a fit case to be charged with sedition!] For those who do not know, Laxman Choudhury was no closet Maoist or even a Maoist sympathizer. He had been pounced upon by the officer-in-charge of the local police station for his temerity in doing a story for his newspaper on the alleged nexus of the local police with ganja traders. It might be of interest to the readers of this column (I hope there are some) that, in a case of divine justice, the same officer was caught red-handed by vigilance personnel while accepting a bribe of Rs 10, 000 from a ganja trader!! But let us return to Aseem Trivedi and his cartoon. To those arguing that everything, including freedom of expression, has its limits, I would like to pose two questions. First, what use is the freedom of expression, supposedly a fundamental right guaranteed to every citizen of the country by the Constitution, if can’t even allow the innocent, albeit crude, expression of anguish over a phenomenon that is tormenting millions of Indians? Second, who fixes the ‘limits’? Those whose heckles are raised at the mere mention of the Gandhi family? Or those who howl at the Prime Minister being called a tragic hero? On second thoughts, why blame just the Congress variety of politicians? Our entire political class put on televised display a palpable ignorance of the concept called freedom of expression, a brazen disregard for a contrarian point of view and an unhealthy level of intolerance during the debate in Parliament over a cartoon in NCERT school books. Babasaheb and Panditji, the dramatis personae in the cartoon, must be turning violently in their graves!! The danger with keeping the bar low in the matter of such a precious thing as freedom of expression (not for nothing did Indira Gandhi feel the need to abrogate this fundamental right during the Emergency) is that it would keep coming progressively down till it reaches a point where any utterance that casts even a minor aspersion on a politician could land somebody in jail. It would be the freedom of expression of the mute. The litmus test for curbs, if any, on the freedom of expression of an individual or an organization has to be whether it incites violence, communal or otherwise. But curiously, no government has mustered the courage to put restrictions on the ‘freedom of expression’ of the Bal Thackerays and the Badruddin Ahmeds in the country even as the ‘long arms of law’ homes in on the Aseem Trivedis, the Binayak Sens and the Laxman Choudhurys. Nearer home, a Jagdish Tytler can get away with instigating a crowd of boisterous Congress supporters to go berserk and launch a murderous attack on a police woman. But all governments would move heaven and earth when someone lampoons their ‘honourable’ leaders as the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal showed a few months back. If such intolerant curbs on the freedom of speech are condoned, the day is not far off when the government machinery, with all the powers and gadgets at its disposal, would eavesdrop even on roadside, drawing room or office gossip (some of which could invite calls for death sentence, given the level of intolerance of our politicians) and haul up both the speakers and the listeners on the charge of ‘sedition’ or ‘waging war against the State.’ The sooner the sedition charge is banished from the IPC, the better it would be for Indian democracy. As for that most precious gift called ‘freedom of expression’ given by the Constitution of India to every citizen, THE SKY IS THE LIMIT.

The Toughest Job in India

Guess who has the most difficult job in India today? No, it is not Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Nor is it UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. It is not the editor of the venerable Old Lady of Boribunder or the captain of Team India either. Hard to believe though it is, it is the Congress’ man for all seasons, Manish Tiwari. True, he was banished into the sidelines and barred from the television studios by the party high command for a while after his intemperate outburst against Anna Hazare at the height of the Anna wave last year. But after the erudite Abhishek Manu Sanghvi shot himself in the foot with his indiscretions with a lady lawyer, the grand old party had no choice but to fall back on the tried and trusted MP from Ferozepur. Since his reinstatement, he has been holding fort at TV studios every evening virtually single-handedly, performing the seemingly hopeless task of defending the indefensible with aplomb. [The portly Renuka Choudhury, a poor second choice, is good for comic relief with her inane comments and weird mannerisms. But when it comes to defending the party or the government against some serious, credible allegations of corruption or impropriety with meticulously dug out facts and carefully thought-out arguments, she is not a patch on Tiwari.] Being a lawyer has certainly helped Tiwari. But what has helped even more is his rare facility with the spoken word: the choice of words and phrases, the diction, the pitch, the subtle sense of humour, the gift of repartee, the ability to put on an expression .. you name it. More importantly, he shares all these attributes – and more - in the two most relevant languages for the spokesperson of a national party: English and Hindi. It is indeed rare for a person to be so good in two completely different languages. Tiwari’s is unquestionably the most unenviable job in the country right now. After all, not many would relish the prospect of being pounced upon by an increasingly combative media on a daily basis. A horde of blood-thirsty television reporters at the daily afternoon briefing and a no-holds barred television anchor in the evening – all in a day at the office! What makes the task particularly difficult is the fact that scams and scandal have tumbled out of the cupboards of the UPA government and the Congress party with a frequency that is too hot to handle for even the most stoic person. When he is not is answering a question on a corruption allegation against a minister, he is defending a leader accused of sexual misdemeanours. But Manish is rarely, if ever, fazed by the shrill, virulent nature of the questioning. He may lack the intellectual air of a Abhishek Manu Sanghvi. But make no mistake. He would do the defending just as efficiently - and often more effectively - because of his ability to become aggressive and shrill when the occasion demands – something that the balding senior lawyer clearly lacks. Watching Tiwari defend Union Tourism minister Subodh Kant Sahai on an English news channel the other day, I was amazed at his ability to turn the tables on the accuser – in this case the redoubtable Arnab Goswami. “Arnab Goswami”, he told the man feared by the highest and the mightiest in the land in a matter-of-fact voice, “cannot sit in judgment over something that has already been judicially adjudicated and by no less than the honourable High Court.” He was referring to the fact the Delhi High Court had thrown out a PIL against Sahai charging him with much the same malfeasance that has now led to a full-throttled cry for his resignation. ‘Does Arnab Goswami have any respect for the High Court?” he continued the harangue. Poor Arnab! He did not know where to hide and resorted to the easy option of leaving the floor open for Ravishankar Prasad, the BJP national spokesperson, to step in. Given the facts that had come to light since the Delhi High Court judgment - that Sahai had written to the Prime Minister recommending SKS Ispat’s case for coal block allocation, that the minister’s brother was not only a director in the company but was also present at the screening committee meeting that took the decision to allocate coal blocks to his company, the fact that the Prime Minister, who was then also the Coal minister, was in indecent hurry to accede to Sahai’s request and so on (all of which ‘Your Channel’ trumpeted all day long as its exclusive) – Tiwari’s bid to hide behind it would have been, in the hands of lesser mortals, an act of clutching at straws. But the wily lawyer turned the straw into a veritable handle to beat the anchor with. There are times when he can get exasperating. He can test your patience and – at times – make you feel like bashing him up black and blue. I personally know many people who just cannot stand the very sight of him. I have myself found his shrillness occasionally off-putting. But when I imagine the enormity of his task and the general aplomb with which he has been doing his unenviable job day after day, month after month, year after year and scandal after scandal, I often feel like doffing my hat to him. If you do not agree, just imagine yourself for a moment in his position and think about how you would have defended the blatant disregard for all cannons of fair play, the flagrant violation of all rules and norms and the rampant corruption that have marked the allocation of coal blocks – besides several other things - in the UPA regime and you would immediately understand what I mean. It is not easy defending the indefensible, is it? Well done, Manish!

No Odia Please, We Are Odias

Naveen Patnaik has many distinctions, but at least one of them is of the dubious variety. Even 12 years after becoming Chief Minister of Odisha, he still can’t speak more than a smattering of Odia - “Apana mananku samastanku mora namaskar” being the most frequently heard. I do not know of any Chief Minister in the history of independent India who became one without knowing the language of the state - forget about staying on in the hot seat for 12 long years. It looks as if Naveen is DETERMINED not to learn Odia! How else does one explain his steadfast refusal to speak even a rudimentary level of Odia a full 12 years after becoming Chief Minister? After all, IAS and IPS officers in the state are apparently given no more than six months to learn class VII level Odia. In fact, many of them speak enviable Odia if the bytes they give on television news are anything to go by. In contrast, our popular Chief Minister revels in his ‘native’ tongue of English! Every time he tries speaking in Odia, he unwittingly provides comic relief to those around or watching him on the tele. The ultimate irony (and shame, for me) came at an NDA (of which Naveen’s party was part then) public meeting at the PMG Square in Bhubaneswar a few years ago – in 2006, if memory serves me right. The then and current Chief Minister of Jharkhand Arjun Munda – who, by the way, is the MLA from the place this columnist belongs to – spoke extempore for about 12 minutes in Odia! When our Chief Minister’s turn came, he unsheathed his paper and then started reading out a speech in English. It was a mixed feeling. I was ashamed that my Chief Minister was not shamed enough by his previous speaker to abandon his prepared English text for once and start speaking extempore in Odia. At the same time, I felt not a little elated that my MLA had cocked a snook at the Chief Minister in his den. If Arjun Munda can do it, I told myself, Naveen certainly can do it. Arjun Munda had to learn Odia because a section of the electorate in Kharswan – his Assembly constituency - speaks Odia. And here was our Chief Minister whose whole electorate is Odia and he still stubbornly refuses to speak even an acceptable level of Odia. That is when I stumbled upon this discovery that Naveen is determined not to learn Odia. Having arrived at the hypothesis, I then groped around for the possible motivation. After long and careful deliberations, I now think I have zeroed in on it. Somebody has apparently drilled it into Naveen’s mind that his three successive election wins had a lot do with his inability (or is it unwillingness?) to speak Odia. In fact, it has been his USP! The moment he starts speaking in Odia like you and me, he becomes part of the hoi polloi. I remember asking a senior BJD leader in the run up to the last elections about how Naveen communicates with the people in the rural areas. “Naveen Babu logon ki maan ki bhasha padh lete hain (Naveen Babu can read the language of the people’s minds),” answered the suitably fawning leader. [The interview was in Hindi.] What I did not ask him then (it didn’t go with the interview that I was doing) was: but how would the people read their leader’s maan ki bhashawhen they can’t understand the language he speaks? After all, they can’t be expected to have the super natural gifts of the supreme leader to read other people’s minds without speaking or understanding their language, can they? If my hypothesis has a rational basis, it can be safely assumed that Naveen Babu will never really make a serious effort at learning Odia till he bites the dust in an election – a possibility that looks extremely remote in the foreseeable future. So, we Odias have to suffer his heavily accented English, his pedestrian Hindi and his atrocious Odia at least till 2014, if not beyond that. Let us leave aside his Odia for a moment and speak about the language that he is most comfortable with: English. Under the spell that he has cast on us Odias with his Doon-honed accent , one thing has gone almost unnoticed: the fact that Naveen is not only reluctant but also terribly uncomfortable about speaking extempore even in the language of his choice. When was the last time he spoke extempore in English – on any subject - for five minutes at a stretch? When he does have to speak extempore - mostly before the cameras of news channels – he comes across as a person who is not in command of his words, notwithstanding his ear-to-ear grin. Public speaking is certainly not one of Naveen’s strengths. That is why he always keeps it short (God bless him for that) unlike most of our leaders. This fear of being caught off-guard is perhaps also the reason for another dubious distinction of his: not having a proper press conference in his 12 years as Chief Minister! [This feat will certainly take some beating.] People from the television biradari tell me that when they go for their customary daily dose of the CM’s byte, his office asks them to give the questions in writing first. The Chief Minister apparently ticks off the questions that he does not want to answer and asks his officers to prepare the answers for the rest. Now that he has been rudely jolted out of his stupor by the midnight coup bid by his erstwhile mentor Pyari Mohan Mohapatra (who recently admitted that all his efforts to make Naveen learn Odia came to nought), Naveen should realize that speaking the language of the people will take him closer to them. It will enhance his appeal, not diminish it. He now has an additional reason to learn to communicate in Odia soon: the need to interact with the grassroots level workers and leaders of his party to keep tabs on the pulse of party men and to smell any possible revolt brewing in the party. Go for it, Naveen Babu. You will be a winner all the way. [PS: How I wish Prof. RK Mishra would someday write in some detail about his experience of ‘teaching’ Odia to his illustrious pupil! ] [This piece was first published in The Political and Business Daily.]

Writers as Editors

I have always been intrigued by the number of eminent litterateurs who have been – and continue to be – editors of frontline newspapers in Odisha. I can vouch for the fact that a prominent writer is the first choice of many entrepreneurs when it comes to handing out the editorship of the newspaper they are about to launch. It is as if being a writer, poet or a critic of repute is all that one needs to become an editor.
I have nothing against writers. In fact, I admire the writing of many of those who have turned editors, usually at a ripe old age when they have retired from whatever they were doing all their life. But I am afraid I don’t quite buy the theory that being a writer – even an outstanding one – is enough qualification for someone to don the garb of a newspaper editor. It may have been an eminent qualification at a particular historical juncture when the language – indeed the state itself – was struggling to carve an identity of its own. The history of the pre-independence era and the first two decades of the post-independence period is replete with stalwarts who excelled both as editors and writers.
But the world of newspapers has changed beyond recognition since then. A newspaper today has no place in it for somebody who writes his weekly column containing nuggets of wisdom and scholarship with an occasional write up thrown in between two columns, engages colleagues in profound pontifications on the matters of the world and stays scrupulously clear of the mundane business of hard news. [Most of these grey eminences are also great draws at literary or cultural functions.]
Today’s newspaper editor has to be a hands-on editor, somebody who does not detest the ‘dirty’ business of news but actually revels in it. He cannot afford to be like this editor who, when asked for his email id, asked his PA with the questioner listening loud and clear; “Gouranga! What is my email id?”
May be it is a generational thing because one is yet to see proprietors or promoters opting for a relatively younger writer as an editor. It is almost always a 60-plus veteran who is preferred for the job. The proprietor, if he or she is launching the newspaper, perhaps believes that an eminent writer brings some brand equity to a completely unknown commodity. If it is a case of hiring a writer as editor of an existing newspaper - which, by the way, is very rare – the thinking perhaps is: a well known writer will add some value to the product. [The choice of jargon from new economics is deliberate because that is what a newspaper today is at the end of the day – a ‘product’.]
With due apology to those who have graced the editor’s chair, most of them only have a passing acquaintance with the events happening around them and around the world. Very few of them have definite, well thought out views on the burning issues of the day. I cannot resist sharing here my own experience with a famous writer – and an outstanding one at that, I must say. Unfortunately, my experience with him was not at as a writer but as an editor. Hours before he arrived in the office, a bunch of stapled editorials neatly torn off from the day’s newspapers would be placed at his table by the office boy. The editor would come around 2 pm, run through the bunch of editorials and then settle down to write the day’s editorial. More often than not, the bunch of editorials that he has just gone through would determine not just the subject but also the content of the day’s editorial. The editorials would frequently be a mish-mash of the points already made in them.
I am not for a moment suggesting that every writer turned editor is like this gentleman. But I dare say many of them are a little too removed from the world of news – perhaps deliberately so. And a man who is not in the thick of news is a liability rather than an asset as an editor these days.
The propensity to hire writers as editors perhaps has its origins in a widely popular misconception peculiar to Odisha that somebody with a ‘literature background’ has a much better chance of excelling as a journalist, presumably because both involve the business of ‘writing’. But as someone who comes from precisely such a background, I can assure you that nothing can be farther from the truth. A man with a literary bent of mind, in fact, has to work twice harder to unlearn all that he has been taught in college and university and learn to write for a newspaper - or a news portal for that matter. There is very little scope for the flights of fancy that a man with a ‘literature background’ is highly susceptible to.
Returning to the subject of writers as editors, I cannot really find an explanation for the reluctance of proprietors to make a professional journalist the editor. Most of them would rather ensconce themselves in the editor’s chair and leave the discharge of editorial responsibilities to a professional journalist who is humble enough to work under a non-journalist as an editor and nice enough not to complain about it. I must confess I was really elated when the venerable ‘Samaj’, considered the most conservative media house in the state, appointed one and then another professional journalist as the editor.

[This column first appeared in The Political and Business Daily]