Columns: Fifth Column

Columns

India Today, February 1, 1999
Feb 1, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
In an Antique Land

Sack the BJP's media managers. They just don't understand TV.

By Tavleen Singh

Slowly, but with the cold certainty of the fog that has descended regularly upon Delhi this winter, realisation has begun to dawn on the BJP government. Not fully, but realisation nevertheless. That one of its biggest failings has been a complete inability to deal with politics in an age when the media is no longer just a handful of badly printed newspapers but a multi-headed creature of monstrous proportions and enormous reach.

So where a few years ago it would have been easily possible to suppress the burning of a few churches (and maybe even a few Christians) in a remote Gujarat district called Dangs, it now becomes international news almost before the churches catch fire. Television reporters invariably get there before slower print media hacks. And since television is superficial by nature, all anyone really remembers about the story are the images of bedraggled tribal women carrying broken crosses and the burning thatch roofs of small, sad churches.

By the time the print media arrives to try and provide a more investigative account, the images have etched themselves indelibly in the public mind. So hardly anyone has bothered to notice, for instance, that the problem in Dangs was intra-tribal rather than Hindu versus Christian.

Just as almost everyone has failed to notice a rather alarming figure that the Home Ministry released recently. It relates to foreign money that came into India between October and December 1998, nearly all of which (Rs 14.08 crore out of Rs 19.84 crore) went to Christian organisations. The money came mainly from western Europe and the US. Even if you are secular-minded, as this columnist certainly is, it does make you wonder a little about why our Christian organisations need quite so much money.

The figure is worrying not just because charity should not have a religious dimension. It is also worrying because when large amounts of foreign money have come in for Muslim organisations, it has nearly always promoted an ugly kind of fundamentalism. It is hard to forget that it was the proliferation of foreign-funded mosque schools run by the Jamaat-e-Islami that led to Islamic fundamentalism spreading in Kashmir -- which earlier had the most gentle Islam.

It was these schools that later became recruiting ground for the Islamic warriors who lead the fight for Kashmir's independence from India. This is not to imply that Christian organisations are being pumped full of foreign money to do the same sort of thing. But there is little doubt that what happened in Dangs has been blown more than slightly out of proportion.

As the home minister pointed out during a debate on minority insecurities in the previous session of Parliament, there have been almost no communal riots since the BJP-led coalition took office: "In the 28 years that I have been in Parliament, we have had debates like this at least once a year. And in each one of them we counted the number of dead. It makes me happy that this time there are no lists of the dead."

Which brings us back to the point I made at the beginning of this piece: Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Government has failed completely in understanding how to deal with the media. It wasn't just the price of onions that lost the BJP the recent assembly elections. It was also the fact that the Union Government was widely perceived to be incompetent and communal. The Government has only itself to blame. It has quite simply not comprehended the importance of television, though satellite channels are available in nearly every small town and even in villages.

The Congress, on the other hand, has understood the new media. So its spokespersons are nearly always young, articulate and easy on the eye. The BJP usually presents its case through doddering old fuddy-duddies who are inclined to be inarticulate in any known language. When I mentioned this to some senior BJP ministers, they said their main problem was many channels were against them, as were most newspapers. This is not just untrue but paranoia of the worst kind.

The truth is neither the prime minister nor any other minister has made a serious attempt to project the Government's case. It has taken decisions like opening insurance to private investment and repealing the Urban Land Ceiling Act. Politically it has not done too badly either, despite Jayalalitha and lately Mamata Banerjee. But on television, all we hear is the other side of the story. Mamata's demand that she be given the Railway Ministry was ludicrous. But she was constantly on television trying to sound reasonable. From the BJP we heard nothing. Not even on Doordarshan, which despite Prasar Bharti is still mainly state-controlled.

It has been the same with the Christians, who since the rape of nuns in Jhabua have been extremely vocal in highlighting "atrocities". In Jhabua, the rapists were Christians. But for weeks this ugly incident was made into a Hindu-Christian thing. Even the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, with its unsound views, misses no opportunity to propound them on television; but our economic ministers remain silent.

Instead, the Government continues to nurture the army of petty officials who constitute the Press Information Bureau and other anachronisms such as the Department of Audio-Visual Publicity. They have been useless for years. They are even more useless now, at a time when the media has become another creature altogether.

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