A short, short half life

Hammer and tongs

ALOKE THAKORE

The half life of the Tehelka Gujarat sting is almost over. The usual quantum of anger, angst, approbation, concern, despair, disbelief, dismissal, incredulity, outrage, opprobrium, questioning, ridicule, remorse, surprise, satisfaction, and more, not in any alphabetical order, have been expressed.

In one case, at least, the publisher of a news magazine (Outlook) has questioned the editorial judgement of his team about inviting a BJP MP to write a column on the reportage. Mr Maheshwar Peri might not think he has done so, but considering his reaction to Mr Chandan Mitra¿s piece in his magazine, it would be schizophrenic were he to suggest that the column was deserving of space. From Mr Shankarsinh Vaghela¿s assertion that it was Mr Narendra Modi who was responsible for the sting to Mr Modi finally declaring that Tehelka has boomeranged, it would be a grave error for the "most important story of our times" (as the email sent out by Tehelka noted) to go unnoticed in these columns.

Let me suggest five reasons for the operation¿s relatively short and ultimately ineffectual half life.    

Stings, however well-executed, are a weak and ineffective reporting tool. Stings to some extent rely on deception, and when sources are responding under conditions of deception they speak what is not necessarily verifiable. Journalism, whatever else it may be, is finally a veridical discipline. Its power comes from the fact that were another set of reporters to go and look around for the same facts, they would find the same staring at them. Researchers also call this idea reliability. Stings are always a questionable tool and do not lend themselves to the canons of verifiability or reliability. Without such evidentiary standards, the data becomes questionable. Further, the after-taste of ends justifying means and motivations is difficult to spit away from such reportage.

The job of the media can only be that of the media and not of the opposition. What Tehelka did was to bring to the centre issues about state complicity in perpetrating violence on its constituting citizens, which had been marginalized over the last five years. The magazine did what it could. It was now for the opposition parties to take it further. The job was not that of supporting Tehelka¿s reporting, but of taking the miscarriage of justice to the court of public opinion. This could only be done by Congress. But it has chosen not to do so. Whether it is political calculation or reading of the electoral situation in Gujarat, the issue of justice is not the big ticket item on its electoral agenda. To expect a news magazine to play the part of the opposition is foolish. It tried to make us think of an issue, the political parties have for all practical purposes marginalized it.

The substance of the reportage is not new. A sting works, as the word itself conveys, by shock. Even poisons work by stunning parts of the systems into inaction. The unhappy truth about the Tehelka stories is that there isn¿t anything new there. The brazenness of the people interviewed, their stories, their callous bravado: what is new, what is shocking. One has to be living in some Peter Pan world to think that there is anything new or surprising about these things. Let there be no doubt that some of it should have been shocking, sickening and distressing. But humans as animals are creatures of conditioning and when you have lived in one of most criminalized political system with beacons of such behaviour in every other ministerial car, it would require amnesia to be shocked. And the people have known it. This is a methodological sting, but unfortunately not a substantive one.

Our relationship to the past is not the same as that of people who live in other parts of the world. Historians of all hues have had a lot to say on this subject from no sense of history to puranas as history. But look at the way in which we deal with the past. We like to move on, to kind of bury the past. We do not have notions of retribution (and justice is a form of retribution, of making even) built on some ideas and memories of the past. For all the horror of the Partition, we do not have any museum to it. Or worse look at the museums that we do have. Except for school children for whom it is a day out, we do not much care for them. What is gone is gone. That should not be the way we treat law, but the jury is out on whether that is the way to treat the past. Forgetting may be more life enhancing than remembering. Keeping the final word on that discussion aside, the Tehelka reportage is not something that would have our unconscious support even if it has our rational heft behind it.

From the civilizational to the here and now. The circulation of Tehelka is a problem. One could not find a copy of the magazine on Howrah Station a few days after the story came out. It would have been understandable if one was told that the copies sold out, but the answer from the vendors was that it does not come. If this was Howrah Station (incidentally the station serving Kolkata and one of the main print distribution centres), one can well imagine what it must have been in other parts of the country. Considering the Internet penetration in the country, one wonders how many people got the story. It might also be enlightening to know how Aaj Tak fared that evening if the competition was showing some Hindi film fare. Adapting the idiom, it could well be a case of dilli me mor nacha, kisne dekha.

Somewhere at the interstices of these lies the explanation for that short half life.