The Indian media doesn’t question shibboleths before they themselves collapse under their own weight. This week two fantastic brand creations of the last decade --- “honest” Manmohan Singh and “cricket promoter” IPl --- ended up as eggs on the collective face of corporatised media
Watching the 24x7 bluster over Manmohan Singh’s fallibility and the shenanigans of the Sreesanth circle many could be persuaded this week that our media honchos are prophets getting overdue vindication. Actually, no. They were only performing customary 180-degree turns. The very people who till the other day were prefixing talk on the Indian Prime Minister with declarations of his essential purity had turned into bitterest critics. They cheered the brutalisation of the cricketing way of life like plebeians in a Roman circus.
When ‘revelations’ (whether from opinion polls or Delhi Police plants) poured in, they pretended as if they had always promoted a culture of diffidence and rationality which has only now dawned on the gullible masses. From 2004 in the case of Manmohan Singh and 2007 where IPl is concerned, the masses of Indians have been short-changed by the media, made to believe in the hocus-pocus. It was as if the top papers and channels functioned under a different kind of emergency; not one marked by threats of censorship and imprisonment, but by compulsions of the mandi. That’s right, those of us who asked difficult questions, recalled the basic rules of governance and sportsmanship, were coolly told: “Your morality is not good for business.”
Mockery
Manmohan Singh’s elevation to prime ministership was an act of undermining of the office of Prime Minister of India. He was placed there as a prop of a dynasty whose agenda suited keeping a weak, pliant, non-performer in the office of the chief executive of the government. The term “policy paralysis” which gained currency by the seventh year of this mockery was insufficient as an allegory. What was going on was far more serious - the nation was driven not by a will but a won’t. Satisfied that its vote banking technologies were in place, the rulers of India concentrated on deepening their selfish interests.
Singh, talking forever in whispers, never made any effort to dispel the notion that he was nothing more than a wound-up toy. Once he even blurted out in a meeting with TV anchors that “coalition compulsions” had forced him to tolerate A Raja in his cabinet despite howls of protests from civil society. Some innocents saw exceptionalism in his act of standing up to the deceitful Communists over the civilian nuclear deal in 2008, but that view ignores the awesome handle he had by then given George W Bush in India’s governance. Remember Singh’s preposterous claim that for all his mass murders in Iraq and Afganistan, the most hated American President in history was a “good friend of IndiaIJ” (October 30, 2009) The inescapable fact is that the powerful interest groups that Singh owed his position to had made up their minds to convert India into a vassal state of the United States. In 2012, he tried to do a weak repeat of his braveheart act when he threw open the Indian multi-brand retail sector. Thankfully its ramifications were less abstract and the outcry against it came from within the UPA.
Meanwhile, defying evidence of his silent connivance to the loot of public resources, the media worked ceaselessly to promote a fanciful theory that somehow “maunam” is not “samhati”. Singh’s became a sleeping partner of Corruption Inc., even contributed valuable sweat equity in the form of unwavering resolve to lend his “clean” mask as a front. There was a time when almost every discussion on Manmohan Singh had necessarily to be paroxysm over his “honesty” and “uprightness”. But, as it turned out, our media honchos have not only been rejected as “opinion builders” but actually mocked by the common man.
No problem for our talkative class. Within milliseconds, they performed the same old intellectual somersaults that have sustained their careers and began to outshout each other in their nightly appearances in condemning the Prime Minister’s complicity in all those king-sized scams. The same mastery was displayed in the aftermath of the Sreesanth arrests.
Cheerleaders them all
The Indian media was the most prominent cheerleader of the IPl system. Unlike those poor floozies hired to do jigs in minimalist attire outside the boundary line, our journalists actually became part of the great pagan festivities which centered around the exploitation of the game of cricket.
One can understand the compulsions of former test players in joining the IPl branding process. After all they are paid off by BCCI to function as its parrots. But where did the media draw its energies from in devoting thousands of miles of newsprint and millions of man hours in TV timeIJ One problem, of course, was the oldest fault line in Indian sports journalism. The guys (and increasingly babes) who report on cricket games haven’t, with notable exception, held a bat in their lives. If they did, then they would surely have understood how impossible it is for a batsman to so elegantly and haughtily despatch deliveries coming at upwards of 120Kmph all over the stands. This goes to the heart of one of the oldest truths about journalism, which is, it’s impossible to get the right answers without asking the right questions.
No respectable media establishment ever gives more than incidental reference to sporting spectacles that attack the very notion of a game. Just as IPl matches are full of impossible sixes and run-outs, so too are WWF encounters in the United States marked by out-of-the-world body throws and stomach stomping. For this reason, WWF matches are shunned by the New York Times and its peers. There was a time when the Indian media too made a distinction between news that’s fit to print and what is not. In this connection, its useful to recall that Vindoo Dara Singh, who is in the news for his role in the spot-fixing affair, is the son of the original sporting fraud, the late Dara Singh, who called himself “world champion” without having participated in a single Olympic Games or any recognised wrestling competition. In Indian cities back in the 1970s, large billboards used to announce the staging of “World Cup Wrestling” in which the “defender of the title” was always Dara Singh. The “championship” used to be spread over three months and the matches held only on Sunday evenings. Dara Singh and his brother, “Asian champion” Randhawa would be challenged by “champions” from “Australia”, “Europe”, “West Indies” and what have you. Curiously, nobody ever got to see the faces of these supposed visitors — they all wore masks.
From its very first session, IPl smacked of anti-cricket. They were held in the height of the Indian summer and the players were made to perform super-human feats at temperatures higher than 40 degrees Centigrade. The role of women as playthings of men was reinforced through the deployment of East European cheerleaders, the drawing of fashion models, WAGS and trophy wives to complete the circle of extravagance. The media, far from treating these as non-events, explained away this pernicious system in terms of modernity clashing with tradition. Anybody who questioned this outrageous departure from cricket as we knew it was made a fool of. Women journalists happily contributed to the depiction of women as glamorous appendages.
Talk of “conflict of interest” has gained currency over BCCI president N Srinivasan’s role as owner of one of the teams. Much the same was the case with most of the media houses. At least three of the leading TV news channels are owned in part by the industrialist whose wife owns one of the IPl teams. It’s therefore hardly surprising that notwithstanding the hullabaloo over Sreesanth and Dawood Ibrahim, the media did not roll back its enthusiastic coverage of the IPl matches. The “three bad eggs” theory, which the BCCI is trying to impose on the nation, is actually mirroring the media’s own double standards. Incidentally, even while sponsoring debates on whether IPl should be scrapped, the lead TV channels continued to devote half-hour sessions to late night analysis of the day’s matches.
Now, who was it that first said “You can’t throw the baby with the bathwaterIJ”
(The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer)