Making a Mutalik of a molehill

BY K RAKA SUDHAKAR RAO| IN Media Practice | 17/02/2009

Thanks to the fifteen minutes of fame that the television gifted him, Mutalik and his sapped-out Ram Sena are today household names.

The media should come up with a policy prescription for itself to ensure that its coverage does not achieve the exact opposite of what it intends to establish, says K RAKA SUDHAKAR RAO.

Before the Mangalore pub incident, Pramod Mutalik was just a forced-out former RSS Pracharak and his ragtag Ram Sena, which contested the last elections in Karnataka with Hindu protectionist agenda, polled no more than a thousand votes in most constituencies. So much for the support it enjoyed in its supposed strongholds of Belgaum and Mangalore. At best of times, Mutalik¿s men comprised of a small bunch of desperate people, whose avowed aim was to outshine the Sangh Parivar, with whom they had a score to settle.His Ram Sena bunch was desperately trying to gain a foothold in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh and its exploratory tours to Hyderabad drew a zilch.

Thanks to the fifteen minutes of fame that the television gifted him, Mutalik today is a household name and his sapped-out Ram Sena managed to get the much-needed booster dose to sustain itself. Today Ram Sena is finding ready reception in the districts of Andhra Pradesh that share their borders with Karnataka.

All those phone-ins and lives that the TRP-chasers dished out have only served to cosmetize Mutalik. On the TV screen, Mutalik came across as a peripatetic, gentle, smiling, Tilak-sporting neighbourhood uncle. Hands folded in a Namaste, he was shown speaking in soft and affable tone as if trying to wean away indolent youths from their wayward ways - the exact opposite of what the media sought to portray him.

Thanks to the media carpet-bombing, there was enough time for the TV viewers to get over their initial revulsion of Mutalik and his men for their bashing up of hapless girls and the drawing room discussions began to swerve towards the rights and wrongs of pub culture. Worse still, the footage showed women applying Tilak on Mutalik¿s forehead and offering aarathis to him. The efforts of the pink chuddie buddies did no good either to the cause. This only served to raise eyebrows in middleclass Indian households.

L¿affire Mutalik brings us to the issue of how much coverage for incidents like this. Also, is the media willingly or unwittingly turning into a PR wing of such ragtag vigilante groups? Is media¿s over-enthusiasm proving totally counter-productive? The media, in all sincerity, should come up with a policy prescription for itself to ensure that its coverage does not achieve the exact opposite of what it intends to establish. After all, this year¿s Valentine¿s Day was the least colourful in recent times and strangely, the media ensured that it was so. Ironically, the media outdid Mutalik in this endeavour.

There is another deeper media issue involved in the Mangalore pub attack-coverage. Why was the media, the more sedate and supposedly more balanced print media included, utterly disinclined to inform the readers about Ram Sena¿s antecedents and its running battle with the Sangh Pariwar? Also, the media chose to ignore the fact that there were some local Congressmen among the Ramsena funders. Questions like whether Mutalik was deliberately being modelled into a Hindu Bhindranwale to embarras an unfriendly dispensation at Bengaluru, just as a similar exercise is on to establish Raj Thackeray as the real representative of Maharashtra pride, have never been probed by the media. Ram Sena¿s run-ins with RSS are only too well-known even to the general public in Mangalore. Why did the media fail to see the obvious? Is there a deeper and hidden agenda?

Recently, a high-profile editor of an English weekly, on a visit to Hyderabad, gloated that however much the BJP and its allied organisations may deny that it has no links with Ram Sena, the youth of metros like Delhi and their parents would invariably rub the pub attacks on the BJP. "The BJP in Delhi is already worried that it would lose the young voters over the pub issue," was what he said at a media seminar.

One only hopes that this wasn¿t a proverbial Freudian slip.

The author works with the electronic media and is based at Hyderabad.