After Arnab coup AAP in form, others dozing

BY JYOTI MALHOTRA| IN Opinion | 29/06/2016

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Jyoti Malhotra

It’s impossible to follow Ghulam Nabi Azad on Twitter. The senior Congress leader who also leads the Opposition charge in the Rajya Sabha has a touch-me-not attitude on this social media platform, which reflects the somewhat disdainful attitude of the party since it lost power. Click ‘Follow’ on @ghulamnazad and you get a prehistoric message which says his tweets are protected and only confirmed followers have access. My request has been ‘pending’ for a full day. 

Really ? 

In this age of instant communication, where political battles have been lost and won on the attack and parry of 140 characters, the Congress party sounds both fatigued and bewildered. Forget about the aggressive onslaught that has become a byword for @ArvindKejriwal, a bulldog study on how-to-treat-the-Opposition, the Congress party regretfully fails to light up the Twitter universe with either piercing wit or excoriating banter.

Just look at the #PMSpeakstoArnab hashtag, for example (and I’m not talking about the inadvertent three-letter acronym with which the hashtag starts), which on June 29 morning had broken all Twitter records (at least in India) with more than 304 million impressions. Love him or hate him,  @ArnobGoswami certainly pulled off a coup by being the first to interview prime minister @narendramodi.

Certainly, the interview was a cheesecake in parts and the original Gaylord Softy ice-cream in others (available only in Delhi, next to Regal Cinema), with Mr Goswami refusing to ask the tough questions, refusing to follow up other answers and simply refusing to take the names of those in question (Subramaniam Swamy or Voldemort?). But the inescapable fact is, at least @TimesNow got an interview, @RajatSharmaLive didn’t. By any stretch, that’s a journalistic coup. 

And how did the chief political parties and their key political leaders react to the biggest story in the last 48 hours? Predictably, that’s how.

Rahul Gandhi’s @OfficeOfRG simply went to sleep. He had forewarned us on June 20, the day after his birthday, that he was travelling out of the country for a few days. Guess everyone’s entitled to take a holiday (I’ve just returned from Kasauli myself). But does that mean that the man who want to be Congress president should simply absentee himself from the most important story in the last few days? 

RG’s argument must have been – let the Congress party handle it, why should I get involved. Well, the aforesaid @ghulamnazad bravely held a press conference about 24 hours after the interview broke, which was telecast live over the net – certainly a great leap forward for the Congress – and parts of which were twittercast on the Internet. 

The party’s official Twitter account @INCIndia tweeted some parts of Mr Azad’s defence of the Congress as well as the country. For example,  

Then there was the mystifying remark below. For all those who came late to the interview, the press conference or the party, they would be forgiven for wondering : What on earth was the respected Congress leader talking about?

The party was taking for granted that all those reading its timeline had watched Mr Goswami’s interview. That, in any book, is a self-goal.

At least on @INCIndia,  a few exceptions like Abhishek Manu Singhvi, were taking notice and had questioned Modi’s comments in the interview. Perhaps the rest were taking a cue from @OfficeOfRG. Or as they say in ‘Udta Punjab,’ “Saanoon ki.” What goes of me and my family. Shrug.

 Like I said, @DrAMSinghvi was the only one.

Digvijay Singh used the ‘Business Standard’ shoulder to fire a gun. On how India had slipped 5 notches to hit 105 out of 125 countries on the Human Capital Index, surveyed by the World Economic Forum. Singh tweeted and retweeted lots of criticism on his timeline, predictably focused primarily on his home state, Madhya Pradesh. 

Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary, Ahmed Patel, was the only Congress leader to remember former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao on his birth anniversary on June 28 – on the INC website, there’s not a single photo of PVNR, but that’s another story – but nary a word on the Arnab Goswami interview.

Kapil Sibal’s own timeline is as old as June 14, when he thanks several supporters who have wished him Happy Birthday. Just one comment , "Modi ji, have a press conf. Let our journalists ask you questions. This is better than an interview with one person” is posted on the Congress party’s Twitter account, but not updated on his own. Mr Sibal has a website, but most of it is old and outdated.

Predictably, @ArvindKejriwal was in his pugnacious element, asking, "Is Arnab Goswami a journalist or Modi propagandist?" he tweeted.

The AAP leader’s comment was a clear indication that his stakes in Delhi and Punjab and Goa are higher than ever. Delhi is increasingly a battlefield between AAP and the BJP, via Lt-Governor Najeeb Jung. Punjab seems to be going AAP’s way, with the Congress party’s Amarinder Singh unable to mount the charge of any kind of brigade. Even Goa, where Kejriwal risked being accused of everything from silliness to hypocrisy by sporting a flower tiara only the other day, is a plain signal that @AamAadmiParty is determined and ambitious to take city by city, urbanizing state by state.

Even the CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury refused to take any real cognizance of The Interview. He tweeted,

PM alleges Opposition blocks bills. Why no all-party meet on GST in 2 yrs? Why as Guj CM did PM oppose it for 6 yrs?

The party account @cpimspeak retweeted Yechury’s tweet, but not much else. Former general secretary, the erudite Prakash Karat’s last tweet on his account is dated April 26, when he retweeted a Yechury story on how Left comrades in West Bengal have defied alleged Trinamool goons to go out and vote in the Assembly elections. Mr Karat has 524 followers on Twitter. Perhaps he’s living under a rock. 

Only Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda, the versatile and articulate BJD leader, was complimentary of the Arnab interview (not counting the adulation of BJP leaders here). Perhaps an interesting indication of the direction of the wind?

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, meanwhile, seemed preoccupied. Over the last few days, @yadavakhilesh has tweeted on events as diverse as Hindon river rejuvenation project launch and the Lucknow Jagran forum where he presented several successful government schemes as well as an Iftar party.

Not a word on PM and Arnab, not even on the official @samajwadiparty account. Only Gaurav Bhatia, SP spokesperson retweeting a @TimesNow sliver from an Arnab Goswami panel discussion on the PM interview, pointed out --

 For PM to assume every party is against good moves of govt is presumptuous & unfair: Gaurav Bhatia #PMSpeaksToArnab

Perhaps the Samajwadi Party is signalling to Mr Modi on the eve of the coming monsoon session of Parliament ? With elections in Uttar Pradesh coming up next year, and the SP and BJP ranged against each other, something is clearly black in the lentils.

Regional parties -- whether Trinamool Congress’ @MamataOfficial or Bahujan Samaj Party’s @BSP4India or Nationalist Congress Party’s Sharad Pawar @PawarSpeaks – have all blanked out the interview. They have clearly other more pressing matters at hand, whether the upcoming UP elections or marking the anniversary of the Bengali national and statistician P C Mahalanobis or the promotion of private colleges in Maharashtra.

 And so it was left to @aajtak, the Hindi TV channel from @aroonpurie’s India Today stable to inadvertently get the back of the BJP trolls really up. By the morning of June 29, @ShameAajTak had been transformed to @BlockAajTak, with self-styled BJP supporters step-by-step helpfully advising the ignorant on how to wage war on the TV remote (First, point your remote on the TV…).

Seems, some Aaj Tak employee had mistakenly used the channel’s official Twitter account to crack a joke against Mr Goswami. This person posted the official picture of the Goswami-Modi interview and headlined it, “When interviewed by chamchas.’ That picture was followed by three snapshots of the PM drinking water and one in which he is shown with Karan Thapar – an earlier interview on CNN-IBN in which the former PM walked out, although that is not seen in the picture – which was titled, ‘When interviewed by journalist.’

@aajtak soon deleted the tweet, but the BJP’s Hindutva brigade had by now pulled out its weaponry. ‘U people not journo's U r high class pimps’ shrieked one man.

Said another :

A third was bewildered, but he followed the lead anyway :

At least this man was honest about his intentions :

And that’s how it went this week…More, next week ! 

@jomalhotra

Jyoti Malhotra is a senior journalist based in Delhi