Fourth Estate and selective silence

There was a nice irony when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and Sonia Gandhi, the governing coalition’s leader, went to the Old Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds to celebrate the Dussehra Festival. The festival, of course, marks the triumph of good over evil, so it was appropriate that the Ramlila Grounds were where Anna Hazare had earlier defeated the government on the issue of corruption. In the context of Dussehra, Hazare presumably was on the side of the “good” and the government symbolised “evil”. The appearance of Sonia Gandhi in good spirits was also significant because it was only the second public event that she had attended since returning on September 8th, from an operation believed to be for cancer in a New York hospital — her first public appearance had been two days earlier to mark Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary. These appearances were seized on by the Indian media to draw a line under questions about Mrs Gandhi’s health, and about why her illness had been kept officially secret from the beginning of August when she was reported to have gone abroad for a cancer operation and is still a secret, even now, in November. No one, of course, is questioning why Mrs Gandhi did not appear in public earlier, but there should be serious questioning about whether — and why — India’s top politician kept such an important illness and hospitalisation a secret. Alongside that, and maybe more significantly, why was the Indian media loathe to challenge that secrecy? Mrs Gandhi’s singular political importance is beyond doubt. If there was any doubt earlier, it was confirmed while she was away by the UPA government’s erratic behaviour on the Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement and on-going telecoms scandal. On both issues, Manmohan Singh failed to exert the authority that should go with his job, while Rahul Gandhi, Mrs Gandhi’s son and long seen as a future Prime Minister, failed to rise publicly to the challenge as heir apparent. Other key politicians such as Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram and Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal mishandled their briefs (and seriously damaged their reputations), while the four leading Congress Party figures Mrs Gandhi named as being in charge (including son Rahul) made no public impression. She was clearly missed. It did not take long after she returned for some sense of normalcy to appear to have returned to the running of the coalition. However, that begs a question: did the disarray while she was away develop because the government was missing her sure touch and gift of sensing what needed to be done politically, or because ministers and officials were scared to make decisions that might arouse her (or Mr Gandhi’s) wrath later? Or, as a political observer put it to me, was it because the Gandhi dynasty has taken over normal governmental channels of authority and decision making to such an extent that the cabinet and administration cannot work without its leader at the head? Whatever the answer — and maybe it was a mixture of all three — Mrs Gandhi has managed over the past 13 years that she has been engaged in active politics to build such an exclusive and untouchable aura of privacy and secrecy, combined with ultimate authority, that few people dare publicly question her role or criticise the supremacy of the dynasty that she heads. It could be argued that this displays a high level of dynastic insecurity and fear of being unseated, which in turn would explain why the illness was officially a secret. Mrs Gandhi has of course the legitimacy of an elected parliamentarian, though she owes her position of authority to her dynastic links, not to any proven ability as a politician. It would therefore be wrong, as well as unfair, to compare her with a dictator, but the general acceptance of her pre-eminent position and cloak of secrecy, and that of the dynasty, would be envied by many less democratically based rulers. So would her ability to rule with a minimum of public utterances — she appears in public relatively rarely, and never makes herself available for the sort of public questioning faced by national leaders elsewhere. Even Cuba’s ruler, Fidel Castro’s illnesses were publicly discussed in 2006. Politicians in the US are accustomed to public exposure, while Manmohan Singh’s heart bypass operation in 2009 was announced. Earlier, however, the illnesses of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former Prime Minister, were (and still are) largely kept private. However, even if one recognises that politicians will maintain as much privacy as they can muster, this still leaves the question of the Indian media’s largely hands-off response. It is true that the media here rarely reports on the private liaisons and even offspring of top politicians, but that is surely different from failing to explore the country’s top political leader leaving the country for a life threatening operation — Gandhi’s visit to the US was first reported by the international news media, and was then only lightly covered in India. There was a good debate on some of the issues on the CNN-IBN TV channel on August 12, and the Business Standard newspaper ran an editorial on the right to information, arguing the illness was a matter of public concern. There was a more recent article, The omertà on Sonia Gandhi’s illness, in The Hindu newspaper that mischievously, given Gandhi’s Italian origins, included omertà, the Italian word for a code of silence, in its headline. India Today magazine eventually ran a cover story, after she returned from hospital, asking how ill she was. This scattered newspaper and television coverage, however, scarcely amounts to a real attempt to discover — either through an official representative or other sources — the nature and seriousness of the illness. Such disregard by the media of its proper role in guarding the public interest is surely not healthy for a democracy, nor on the other hand, is the secrecy and aura that seems to have triggered that reaction. The views expressed in this column are of the author alone.