Kejriwal has had enough publicity, good or bad
Mr Arvind Kejriwal has been for long lamenting that the media has been ignoring him and his party during the election campaign and latching on to every word that the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modi says. He has on many occasions, when faced with tough questions, lashed out at the Press for deliberately showing him in bad light. He and his other leaders have made it a habit to accuse the media of being bought (by Mr Modi). But how does all this square up with the recent findings of a study conducted by CMS Media labs, which has revealed that Mr Kejriwal had actually received the highest television coverage in the early days of electionIJ Clearly, Mr Kejriwal has been on one of his regular trips of falsehood. The wide coverage that the Aam Aadmi Party chief has received has come from across five major television news channels, and that busts another of his claim that a section of the media is heavily biased against him. The irony is that every such allegation he has made against the media got adequate coverage from the same Press he has castigated. Mr Kejriwal is to a large measure the creation of the media which gave him enormous publicity as he rose from being an activist during the Anna Hazare movement days to a politician after he severed links with mentor and branched out on his own. It is possible that sections of the media had failed to gauge the public support he and his party enjoyed in the run-up to the Assembly election in Delhi, and were, thus, taken aback by the party's good showing, including Mr Kejriwal's demolition of then Chief Minister and senior Congress leader Sheila Dikshit. However, even in those days he was never short of media attention. That attention continued during his days in Government. The problem, as Mr Kejriwal came to see it, was that the media was not content with friendly coverage. It began to focus on his fallibilities in governance and his misplaced support for his Ministers who were in the wrong. The media held him accountable for the promises he had made and gone back upon. Alongside, as the Modi juggernaut began to roll across the country, it became inevitable that the media would devote time and attention to that phenomenon as well.
Used by now to unstinted media support, Mr Kejriwal was clearly rattled by these developments. He began to hurl accusations for which he had no evidence, and adopted a negative strategy. But even that got him attention, as did the ink-throwing and slaps, of which he, unfortunately, was the recipient. So, it was a bouquet of the good and the bad that fetched him valuable media coverage, which, according to CMS Media labs, notched up to 429 minutes of television time between March 1 and 15. Mr Kejriwal should stop complaining after seeing this figure. He must know that any publicity is better than no publicity. In any case, if he is getting bad publicity, he has himself to blame for it.