Is the media part of the problem?
What provokes the media to pounce upon itself, however, points to an omerta, least expected in this profession.
Journalists, not politicians, now question the timing and the motives behind any revelation, says CHITRA SUBRAMANIAM DUELLA. Pix: Indian Express
Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan of India Against Corruption (IAC) have accused Indian businessman Robert Vadra of misusing his personal relationship with the Gandhi family to amass wealth. The businessman accused of bestowing favours in the form of penthouses is K.P. Singh who heads India’s largest real estate company Delhi Land and Finance (DLF)
Both Vadra and Singh have denied any wrong doing. Vadra has said the very fact that the allegations are based on publicly available information about his companies is proof that he has nothing to hide. That is what the erstwhile Team Anna repeated when questions about who funds their campaign arose – it’s all on our website. The Congress party has mobilized its best brains to say if a quid pro quo cannot be established, there is no case. It is common knowledge that websites are fig leaves, as real as people’s internet identities.
While denials and allegations can be expected to keep us entertained for a while, the bigger, more dangerous trend is the constant failure of journalists to keep their eye on the story without becoming the ultimate distraction and destroyer. “How should the Gandhis React,” “Where is the evidence” “What is the quid pro quo” are some of the questions they seek from Kejriwal and Bhushan.
www.firstpost.com has been a notable exception bringing spot news, information, analysis and comment on the story from all angles. They have reported on why the BJP turned coy on upping the ante in early 2011 when information about sweetheart deals including the one under scrutiny were discussed, how boards function citing examples from Satyam and ONGC and why nobody wants to speak about the bigger picture about real estate and politics in India leaving the stage to an “interloper” like Kejriwal.
At the time of writing, they have interviewed board members and are digging out information from company registries and other sources.
We don’t know if there was any wrong-doing in the transactions between Singh and Vadra. If there was one, there will be no paper trail. Even the mafia has its omerta. What provoked the media to pounce upon itself, however, points to an omerta, least expected in a profession whose job it is to ferret out information however long it takes and however difficult the task.
The media has unquestioningly reported that Kejriwal and Bhushan want to save India in 15 days with their Lokpal Bill. We know what India’s former top-cop and current anti-corruption activist Kiran Bedi thinks about “small” rape and why she thinks Congress corruption is worse than BJP corruption. Anna Hazare, dying to be relevant continues to wag his finger when the media focus is on him. In the feeding frenzy, we do not know if the allegations against Bhushan’s family acquiring property through some active arm-twisting is true and if not, why has he not sued people who have levelled the charges?
Why has BJP President Nitin Gadkari not sued IAC member Anjali Damania who told Times Now that he asked her to stay away from the Maharashtra irrigation scandal because he has professional links with NCP leader Sharad Pawar? Is Sharad Pawar linked to the scandal in Maharashtra? Does Sharad Pawar own illegal land? Do people in the media know something the rest of India doesn’t? If, as Gadkari alleges, the UPA keeps people in tow by flashing CBI files, what did the NDA do during its tenure? There are people in the media who have made careers by flashing real and fictitious files. Kejriwal and Bhushan have also been distributing files. What do they contain?
We know very little about Vadra and Singh. We see photographs of Vadra jogging, working out, playing golf and more recently campaigning for his brother-in-law Rahul Gandhi in Uttar Pradesh where he did say that one day he could follow the family into politics.
We know a little more about Singh, thanks to a Walk-The-Talk interview with Shekhar Gupta, the editor-in-chief of the Indian Express on November 22, 2011. “Earlier it was all about thinking small, managing shortages. Now you have to think big, create surpluses” Singh said as shared his views on bribing, how he purchased every bit of land he owns because of his army and rural background, his views on ethics and what he learnt from the legendary Jack Welch of GE.
SG – But will all the constraints, you built this wonder in Gurgaon, the most expensive apartment buildings in India – Aralias, Magnolia. So the system is not so bad, you can get around it?
Singh – But it has taken a lot out of us. The same thing could have been done at ten times the speed and perhaps more economically. It took us a long time to get approvals, but my way of working always has been: two wrongs don’t make a right.
SG – Can you run a property business without bribing?
Singh – In my terminology, what I call bribing, is in two parts: One, where you give money to somebody to facilitate quicker disposal. Second, you give money, if somebody asks you, to do a wrong job. Now in my terminology, bribing is to do a wrong job, which I have never done in my life.
It is difficult to understand why Gupta, one of India’s most seasoned media personalities did not ask anything about the dangers of what we call “speed money” or transmission loss. Perhaps he wanted the interview to speak for itself which it does.
Karan Thapar’s Devil’s Advocate interview with Kejriwal asked if the allegations against Vadra were politically justified or morally improper, both rather odd questions given the fact that Kejriwal is a politician in a country where propriety in public life is the subject of tedious drawing-room conversations. Perhaps here too, Thapar wanted the interview to speak for itself. A few days later on The Last Word, in a bizarre flurry of questions to Shalini Singh of The Hindu – one of the few if not the only journalist to have examined balance sheets and other relevant documents to conclude that the Vadra-Singh business model raised a host of questions – Thapar asked if she planned to continue with her investigation.
Journalists, not politicians, now question the timing and the motives behind any revelation. Journalists now quibble about what corruption means, what is conflict of interest, what is lobbying and what is theft. A letter from a Congressman to the Prime Minister that says “kindly intervene” is not lobbying, Gadkari says he will write not one but 15 letters to hasten payments to contractors building dams in Maharashtra because farmers are dying, Yeddyurappa has gone into a national sulk and the secular media is calculating whether Mulayam Singh Yadav will make overtures to him to secure lingayat-muslim-dalit votes in the coming elections. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav tells the media he cannot comment on the Vadra-Singh charges and the media doesn’t deem it fit to follow up with questions on why he wishes to remain silent on what could potentially be an issue of land-grabbing.
If our media has decided to be part of the problem, they should take some lessons from the tobacco industry, by far the smoothest operators in the business. They sell the only freely available consumer product that kills one in two regular users. With impunity, they marketed death as life and disease as health for 50 years. When their lies were exposed through a class action suit in Minessota, USA in mid 1990’s and international and national legislation required them to say “Tobacco Kills” on every cigarette packet, they shifted the debate on tobacco control to one of informed choice and freedom of information and have taken many journalists along with them. Like they had earlier, except that there is no excuse today to not know what a cigarette actually contains. Like there is no excuse today for journalists to shy away from asking the obvious questions. When Lalu Prasad Yadav recently told journalists to smoke bidis not cigarettes, he was breaking a law and advocating death. No journalist deemed it fit to follow up.
It would be a shame if we now have to guard ourselves against the media.
Chitra Subramaniam Duella is a former journalist who now heads a company in Switzerland.