A deliberately twisted interpretation?
While Digvijaya Singh's "sou tanch khara maal" remark got sensational coverage in the media, there were no takers for his clarification on the same.
ANAND VARDHAN says the distortion suited the media~s purpose. PIX: Digvijaya Singh
In times when statement journalism is the staple diet for news media in general and TV news in particular, it’s natural that byte-happy Congress leader Digvijaya Singh would be one of the most reported leaders.
For reasons that could be more rooted in abrasive or combative nature of his statements than any substantive contribution to political discourse, he has been the flavour of headlines for quite some time now. Add to that, the news media’s need for supplying its anti-politician urban middle class viewership/readership the daily dose of verbal ‘excesses’ of political class. And you have Digvijaya Singh fitting the bill or, to use a cliché, playing a role that doctor ordered for the daily beast of news television. But, then what went so wrong (even by these mutually convenient standards) last Thursday (July 25, 2013) when media sexed-up his description of party MP Meenakshi Natarajan as sou tanch khara maal (100% pure material) at a public function in Madhya Pradesh?
The news channels lapped up the remark and played it throughout the next day (July 26, 2013) - as anything swinging from being raunchy to ‘sexist’. Predictably, opposition parties and women’s groups joined the bandwagon condemning the comment. The national press (for whatever the phrase means) was eager to report it too the next day (July 27, 2013). As a sample, having a look at these headlines from Delhi editions of four different dailies (3 English, one Hindi) shows how irresistible the TV spin on the comment was for these newspapers-
The Times of India (front page) - Diggy calls Natarajan ‘sau tunch maal’, rapped for sexist remark
The Hindu (front page) - Digvijay draws flak for ‘sexist’ remarks
The Indian Express (page 9, Political Pulse) - Digvijay makes ‘sexist’ remark on Natarajan
Dainik Bhaskar (front page) - Digvijay ki tippani par vivad (Controversy over Digvijay’s remarks)
Singh was late to realise how double-edged the statement courtship with media can be. And he did respond, and well at that, but for obvious reasons his response wasn’t considered equally newsworthy. Though giving legitimacy to a politician’s outrage or defence has almost become a sacrilege tantamount to playing devil’s advocate, it’s important to have a look at the following two tweets in which Singh sought to expose some fault lines in media reporting of his comment:
"In its race for TRP rating media is running amok. A commonly used phrase used for praising a person is being labelled Sexist! Deplorable." (July 27, 2013)
"100 Tanch means 100% Pure. And media calls it Sexist! For a change they should do some introspection instead of gunning for politicians” (July 27, 2013)
It’s important to note that his clarification and critical take on media reporting didn’t find air-time or space in major section of the media which somehow was either embarrassed by ‘lewd’ nature of his comment or offended by the tenor of female commodification in the ‘maal’ word that he used (an instance of consuming a word only in its distorted connotation). News channels didn’t find his clarification worth air-time, though a PTI report (July 27, 2013) said that Singh ‘threatened to take legal action against TV channels for wrongly reporting it’. As far as the press is concerned, space for his clarification was hard to find and except for The Indian Express none of the above mentioned dailies published Singh’s clarification and criticism of media reporting the following day (July 28, 2013). The Sunday Express (Sunday edition of The Indian Express) carried a box item (page 7) giving space to Digvijay’s version of the story through his tweets. For other dailies, the defence was perhaps too bland, and even if true, too banal to be newsworthy.
In this case, the media reporting on the statement certainly needs to be introspected (to use Mr Singh’s word) on at least three questions:
First, is there any scope for semantic misinterpretation of the phrase ‘sau tanch maal’ when the context in which it was used was as clear as the following words of non-physical praise that Digvijaya Singh used for Meenakshi Natrajan while addressing party workers at Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh?
“Our party MP, Meenakshi Natrajan is a Gandhian, simple and an honest leader. She keeps going from place to place in her constituency. I am a seasoned smith of politics. Meenakshi Sou Tanch Khara Maal Hai (totally pure)”.
Second, were media reports looking for that pseudo psychoanalytical Freudian slip- assigning subconscious meanings to a perceived ‘gaffe’ in Singh’s praise for a party colleague? Why couldn’t the media take the phrase in one of its more acceptable forms rather than its bawdy distortion? In doing so, wasn’t the media telling a thing or two about its own lingual imagination and intentions of assigning convenient colours to words?
Third, did media reports (and the ‘offended’ women’s groups) bother to ask whether Meenakshi Natarajan, the woman who had primary entitlement to such ‘offence’, was offended at all? Except for a report in Dainik Bhaskar (July 27, 2013), none of the mainstream newspapers and news channels covered her categorical statement that she viewed Singh’s words as a colloquial way of praising her and there was nothing offensive about it. While Dainik Bhaskar (July 27, 2013) quoted her as saying that she was sharing the dais with Singh and is thankful to him for praising her, a PTI report the same day said: ‘Natarajan herself said there's nothing offensive in the comment and it was just a colloquial phase which should be seen in the context of what the leader had said’.
The episode certainly exposes some glaring fault lines in the practice of statement journalism in media reporting which often veers towards sensationalism. In this case, it wouldn’t be off-mark to say that media’s willful distortion of innocuous words of appreciation of one leader for another was one of media’s own moments of Freudian slip. Even if psychoanalysis has to be rubbished, the latest uproar over Digvijaya Singh’s remark reveals more about media narrative than about leader’s psyche.