By Anirudh Prakash
Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Rajya Sabha member and senior leader of the Congress party featured in a CD depicting him in a compromising position with a woman lawyer in his handkerchief- sized chamber in the Delhi High Court. After the CD surfaced in the legal and media circles, he had cleverly secured a most questionable order from a Delhi High Court judge. The judge had been rather kind to him. Even then the injunction was against a couple of persons named in the petition. However, Singhvi succeeded in bamboozling the entire media by claiming that there was a blanket ban on any mention about the impugned CD. Meanwhile, he seemed to have enlisted the services of the Delhi Police to “persuade” his former driver to strike a compromise. It was Singhvi’s claim that the former driver had morphed the CD since he bore a grudge against him. Of course, anyone who has seen the contents of the CD — and there are by now several thousand who have — are left with not an iota of doubt about its authenticity.
Assuming that it was a fake CD, as Singhvi would like us to believe, in that case wasn’t it easy for him to fix his former driver by simply complaining to the police. The same police which showed an extraordinary zeal in apprehending the driver and then making him submit to a deal by Singhvi could well have proceeded against the offending driver for seeking to blackmail and extort money out of his former employer. Singhvi’s actions before and after the settlement with the said driver lent credence to the contents of the CD which showed him in flagrante delicto with the said woman lawyer in his High Court chamber. But being a smart lawyer, Singhvi has tried to play a victim of blackmail, a claim which universally elicited snickers of disbelief. He blamed the media for over playing the entire episode.
The question is why did the Singhvi’s video got so much play in social media while the mainstream news media closed the chapter quickly? The dichotomy makes one wonder if India is acquiring yet another spin on the two- nation theory. First it was a religious divide between two communities which created new borders in the freshly liberated subcontinent.
Then there was an economic divide between the rich and the poor, which remains unbridgeable. Then there was the lifestyle divide between towns when the powerful lived and the villages where, to recall Mahatma Gandhi, India lives. This, at least, is being blurred by rapid urbanisation. But now we have this new information age divide, between traditionalists who think that private lives are irrelevant to public issues, and modernists who seek to give a new spin to the old feminist slogan — the personal is the political. They believe that public figures are fair game for exposure and trial by media, even if their sins have no obvious public relevance.
All that the Singhvi video has achieved is to mortify the two people who figure in it and to embarrass those close to them. The charge raised to justify sharing the video on YouTube was that a sexual favour had been granted in exchange for high judicial office. However, the audio is too poor to validate the charge and anyway, as a lawyer who knows one of the parties tweeted, it isn’t so very easy to secure a judicial office.
But that was a small, still voice drowned out by the uproar in social media. Part of the noise proceeded from a sort of ritualised stoning of the devil. Since our worst suspicions about our leaders have been realised in more than a year of scams, failures and embarrassments, we now believe in shooting on sight. But some of the noise had nothing to do with the political class. It was provoked by the traditional media’s handling of the incident. It was a growing chorus of voices asking why the mainstream media was not going at Singhvi with guns blazing.
Just when we’d got used to regarding trial by media and lynching by television anchor as normal, here was the media going delicate all over. But as a journalist, I was most relieved. After a string of excesses and embarrassments, starting with the judgemental frenzy over the Aarushi murder case and culminating with Radiagate, the media had behaved responsibly and checked itself.
In the absence of proof of corruption in the Singhvi’s video, excessive coverage could only have been speculative, invasive and salacious.
Indian media has lived in a culture where the private lives of politicians were joked about in the newsroom but tacitly regarded to be their business. If they had an impact on state policy, that was news. If not, they were kept off the pages, apart from those entertaining pictures of Pandit Nehru with Lady Mountbatten which routinely appear in every Indian newspaper. Nehru is one of at least three Indian prime ministers who have had non- standard family lives, but their stories have never been told in print because they were regarded as irrelevant to the polity.
Perhaps this culture owes something to Indian voters, who also regard these stories as entertaining gossip and do not allow them to sway their electoral decisions. They are very different from their cousins in Western democracies, to whom these matters are of earth- shaking importance. No one except a man who wears his family values on his sleeve can hope to be president of the United States. Even if he were a noted thinker, economist, political scientist, jurist or activist, he would be disqualified if the morality and ethics of the family was not his first skill.
A woman cannot be a serious presidential candidate over there, since she is the repository of those family values, which her man must wear on his sleeve. Or on his arm, to be more anatomically correct. Across the pond from the US, it’s more or less the same story. Dennis Thatcher was cruelly pilloried by the British media only because his wife was prime minister, an unnatural state of affairs.
Our media has generally steered clear of this area. In fact, perhaps it is because we do not focus on private lives or behavioural standards that women rise so frequently to positions of power in India.
And perhaps they don’t succeed as frequently in the Western democracies because women are more susceptible than men to ad hominem attacks — or ad mulieri attacks, to be grammatically correct — which abound over there.
But now, social media wants the mainstream Indian media to follow suit, which suggests that some intrinsic feature of the population has changed — at least of that vocal minority which uses social media. INAV