Tapeworm

The din ricocheting around the Niira Radia tapes reminds me of the way we drive on our roads. All the honking, tail-gating, lane straddling, near-misses and mayhem only delay our journey to our destination and leave us tired, irritable and stressed out. So also the titillation over the Radia phone calls. What is the real point of all the noise?


The scandal has gone viral on the internet, but not many seem to recall the suspense and cynicism that surrounded last year’s government formation and the drama around the DMK’s men in Delhi. (For a refresher, read my June 6, 2009 post "Writhing On The Wall"). The coalition nearly fell apart over just one ministry – telecoms – that the DMK wanted so desperately. Everybody is so fixated on Delhi and its muck that few are asking why the DMK wanted to keep that gold mine for itself. For that answer, you have to look at Muthuvel Karunanidhi’s sons and nephews and the insurance policy his third wife and her daughter needed to take out, their premium an upstart politician called A. Raja.


Exactly how did the journalists on the tapes influence the prime minister’s allocation of portfolios in his cabinet after last year’s general election? Is there a smoking gun? Were the journalists plied with wine and money and worse? So far there is a lot of speculation and much discomfiture but not much of incriminating evidence. How many more conversations would the authorities have to tape to trace every sticky strand in this huge web of false friendliness, deception, and influence peddling?


Journalists as a class are narcissistic. In India they believe they are so powerful that many are delusional. They are delusional because they have moved around for far too long in a psychedelic whirl of tip-offs and “off the record” conversations to recognise that they have gone beyond observing and reporting to being players themselves in the power game. It is a dark and dank world where PR agencies erupt like toadstools and younger journalists quickly learn that you do not need to be a specialist in any subject to report on it because somebody is going to spoon-feed you with the story and the script. All you have to do is ingratiate and regurgitate.


At a broader level, very few Indians seem to worry, or care, about the implications of the Radia tapes for privacy and the government’s over-arching power to burrow silently and deeply into your life without your knowledge or say-so. A senior official in the intelligence community told me that the government can intercept and tap up to 6,000 phone conversations a day. The Home Secretary or the Chief Secretary has to authorise wire-tapping in the interests of national security. Earlier this year Parliament was briefly agitated about allegations of interception of opposition politicians’ phone calls, but the row quickly blew over. The Radia wire-taps were apparently triggered by complaints of income-tax and foreign-exchange violations. The selective leaking of the tapes and the feeding frenzy it has triggered should worry any Indian who cares about individual liberty.


Watching the endlessly talking heads on television, I was reminded that the use of lobbyists, the courting of senior journalists and the recognition of television as a powerful medium first emerged as a legitimate tool during John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, so we are only honing a half-century of use and abuse. And for those of us who despair of the bad news that sprawls across our screens and newspapers, it is worth recalling media guru Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the rise of advertising and the cheering good news that it throws relentlessly at you. “Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news. In order to balance off the effect and to sell good news, it is necessary to have a lot of bad news,” McLuhan wrote, adding at another place: “Real news is bad news – bad news about somebody, or bad news for somebody.” Most certainly for Niira Radia.

Writhing on The Wall (24 May 2009)

It felt very strange indeed, as if all the gawkers at the zoo were inside the cages, looking expectantly at the monkeys prancing outside. It did not take very long for the chemical rush to the brains of millions of Indian voters after the election results came in on the 16th to subside. Yes, the Congress party had won its best victory since 1991, and yes, it could finally cock a snook at the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav. And yes, it really rubbed the Communists’ noses in the dust kicked up by the nuclear deal with the U.S.

How edifying it was to watch endless footage of India’s first truly Breaking News government’s birth pangs. What prolonged agony – you almost felt like planting a foot on the table, plunging in your forceps, and yanking out the creature -- deformities be damned. Despite those impressive numbers, Congress still needed the tripod of Mamata Banerjee, Sharad Pawar and Muthuvel Karunanidhi to get it to the magic majority figure. How interesting, that both the forever feisty Banerjee, who quit the Congress in 1997 to form Trinamool Congress, and Pawar, who quit the Congress in 1999 because of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin, should now happily sup at the same table as the Gandhis because they want more than anything else to keep the red and saffron hordes at bay.

Mamata has been implacable in her crusade against the Communists, who have fallen to a humiliating 24 nationally, and a crushing 16 in West Bengal from 35 in 2004; in Kerala, of course, the Communists have been wiped out. But is the CPI(M) fazed? Is there going to be a politburo purge? “Those anti-Communist quarters who have been rejoicing at the setbacks suffered by the Left and have written the epitaph of the CPI (M) will be proved completely wrong,” writes Prakash Karat. Indeed, so long as India continues to be home to one-third of our planet’s poor, Karat and his comrades will always see a glow on the horizon.

It will be interesting to watch how Banerjee and her motley crew of 18 MPs rub shoulders with the Treasury benches as economic reform is debated. She has already served notice that – railway minister or not – she will spend a lot of time in West Bengal targeting the Communists. She has said she wants rules for Special Economic Zones reviewed. And Tata Motors, which is fighting with its back to the wall on its ill-advised acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover, will certainly remember Mamatadi fondly for driving its Nano dreams out of Singur.

But to return to the zoo allegory, it is Karunanidhi’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam that did some wonderfully torturous wall-sitting after the election results. Last week in Chennai, the average Tamilian watched, subdued and disembodied, while television screens broadcast numbing and repeated shots of what was purported to be Velupillai Prabhakaran’s corpse on display, and numbing and repeated shots of Karunanidhi and his confidants haggling. It can’t be easy being the paterfamilias if you have three wives, numerous offspring, numerous grand-nephews, and numerous favourites of sundry wives jostling for a piece of the pie in a state that is the same size as Greece. Yes, sometimes you wonder why the Athenians invented democracy.

It was political drama at its most garish and vulgar, complete with endless marigold garlands, sirens, stormy entries and exits, early-morning flights – everything that Chennai’s cardboard cutout culture can teach Delhi.

Here are some facts:

- The DMK and Congress have together won 26 seats, exactly the same number in 2009 as in 2004
- Despite the final battle between the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam raging right through the Indian election, and despite Jayalalithaa playing a last-minute and desperate Eelam card, voters decisively turned their backs on Eelam as an issue. The Pattali Makkal Katchi, in particular, was obliterated.
- Driven by a political machine built over four decades by Kalaignar Karunanidhi, the DMK has put down very deep roots across Tamil Nadu’s countryside, something both the Congress and the AIADMK cannot match.
- Observers noted that the voting percentage shot up dramatically in the final hour of polling, when no-shows will very likely not show up at all. They also noted that the DMK was the only party to set up tables at every polling station to monitor voters. Why is this significant? The DMK knows which buttons to press (see above).
- Everybody – including Comrade Karat – agrees that the money spent on the elections this time was exponential, and unimaginable. Particularly in Tamil Nadu, a very observant foreign diplomat told me, it was a question of the DMK out-spending the AIADMK.
- Why is there such a to-do over the DMK bagging the Communications, IT and Surface Transport portfolios? Why was Manmohan Singh very reluctant at first to re-induct T.R. Baalu and A. Raja? Think mobile phones, think 3G licences, and think the Ram Sethu project where there are mammoth dredging contracts to be loaved and fished. Hopefully you will get your arithmetic right.

By now most of us know that Congress’s huge jump in seats occurred because of a very small two-percentage-point jump in its vote share. If it had not been for Uttar Pradesh, where the party made its most impressive new gains, or Rajasthan, where the Congress flipped the Bharatiya Janata Party on its back, or Andhra Pradesh, where its 33 seats trumped the 29 it won in 2004, there would have been a hung parliament. The BJP has also built on its grassroots success in Karnataka, rising to 19. The Congress numbers in Kerala could be put down to growing rage against the long-incumbent Left parties. It has a job on its hands in rebuilding credibility in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Indeed, Congress would have continued to be eclipsed even in the Hindi heartland -- it did very poorly in Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh, winning only 4 of 64 seats, and struggled to win 12 in Madhya Pradesh – if it had not been for Uttar Pradesh.

This is no consolation for poor Mulayam and Amar Singh, who barely got seats at the oath-taking ceremony at the presidential palace on the 22nd. The best thing that Mulayam, the Main Man from Mainpuri can do at this point is to be nice to the dozens of senior civil servants, police officers and other factotums who have been very rudely turfed out because Mayawati’s grandeur became truly delusional.
(This piece appeared in Covert magazine of June 1-14, 2009)