Every scoop’s a leak, Deep Throat has motives

The TV channels are on the rampage. And newspapers pick up what crumbs they can also to titillate readers with exciting tales of political in-fighting and collapse or personal scandals about political personalities. Both remind us that the “embedded journalist” was not born during the American invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq but in Jawaharlal Nehru’s India. He/she flourishes under Narendra Modi, bearing out the Vishwa Samwad Kendra’s claim that Narada, the peripatetic sage and storyteller who is also the epitome of mischief-making, is the most appropriate torchbearer and icon for the media. Since the VSK is an offshoot of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, it’s not difficult to understand the particular thrust of many of today’s TV programmes and newspaper campaigns or detect the official inspiration behind them.

The old Soviet Union buzzed with scandalous stories in its closing years. There was a common theme to all of them, whether in Moscow, Tbilisi, Kiev or Leningrad (as it was still called). The purpose was to discredit the Communist regime. As with the current spate of media disclosures in this country, that aim also pointed to the interplay of media and politics with more than a hint of highlevel guidance.

The eagerness with which the lead was taken up recalled the often-quoted old rhyme by Humbert Wolfe whose father was a German Jew and mother an Italian but who himself being born and brought up in Bradford in England, displayed the Yorkshireman’s legendary no-nonsense acuity. The verse runs: “You cannot hope/ To bribe or twist,/ Thank God! The/ British journalist./ But, seeing what/ The man will do/ Unbribed, there’s/No occasion to.” If Soviet journalists followed their British counterparts, so did Indians.

With several honourable exceptions, many still do. My colleagues will not be pleased as they go to town on allegations against Sonia or Rahul Gandhi, or await Rajya Sabha nomination, ministerial appointment, positions on committees or even for official accommodation or transport. It’s forgotten in the indignant debates over “paid journalism” that the private sector comes a poor second in influencing the media. The government is still the biggest dispenser of patronage in India as it was in the old Soviet Union. Editors there spoke proudly in the late Eighties of their bravery in exposing Communist repression and highlighting the defiance of unknown heroes and heroines. I was shown newspaper clippings and regaled with stories that were in turn chilling and exhilarating. Editors pulled out bulky files of documents that supported their stories. With no more Russian than the one comradely word “Na zdorovie” I couldn’t make head or tail of any of this but recognized from the summaries that the stories were explosive.

What were the official repercussions after publication? None, I was told. How did they get hold of such incriminating documents regarding arrests, secret trials, torture and imprisonment? Moscow sent them, they said, adding the one word Mikhail Gorbachev made famous, “Glasnost, openness.” The explanation confirmed my old-fashioned suspicion that there is no such thing as a journalistic scoop.

Every scoop is, in fact, a leak. There’s a Deep Throat with a motive behind every startling disclosure about a leading politician’s land speculation, black money or sex life. Older readers may recall Deep Throat was the pseudonym The Washington Post gave to the shadowy official who provided secret information to two Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, about Richard Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate scandal.

Only recently, when I happened to mention a Delhi newspaper’s detailed account of the so-called “surgical strike” across the line of control in Jammu and Kashmir, a well-known magazine editor scoffed, “That was a ministry plant!” It probably was, but almost all stories on terrorism and certainly all on cross-border operations – including everything his magazine publishes – are plants. They are based on official briefings. In the days when I occasionally dropped in at the official spokesman’s informal briefings I was always surprised at how much the media knew but didn’t publish because it hadn’t been told to. Given the pugnacious new spirit of patriotism that some sections of the media have imbibed from an ultra-nationalistic government, is often even more the willingly mouthpiece of authority. The pattern becomes clearer if the targets are considered.

Tales of Mayawati and her former aide Naseemudin Siddiqui accusing each other of corruption, and the latter being expelled from the party, don’t enhance the Bahujan Samaj Party’s image. The Aam Aadmi Party is permanently on the boil. Arvind Kejriwal had already sacked two luminaries before the former water and culture minister, Kapil Mishra, plunged it into a new scandal by claiming to have seen with his own eyes the health minister, Satyendra Jain, stuffing a bribe of more than Rs 2 crores into Kejriwal’s pocket. I wondered if Mishra counted the notes and how he knew it was a bribe. The prospect of a minister bribing his own boss is also intriguing. As for the AAP’s Kumar Vishwas, no one seems to know whether he is coming or going or only singing Koi Deewana Kehta Hai. Mamata Banerjee totters from one ponzi scam to another. Naveen Patnaik in Odisha just totters. An already battered Congress may be left reeling if Shashi Tharoor is brought low. With a saffron-draped monk in charge of Uttar Pradesh, the cow belt’s other bastion may also collapse if property speculation charges can be stuck on Lalu Prasad.

Down south, Tamil Nadu’s ruling AIADMK is torn between the jailed Sasikala and the former chief minister, O. Panneerselvam, with the late Jayalalithaa’s niece Deepa lurking hopefully in the wings. A Dalit student’s suicide and police excesses cast a shadow over Pinarayi Vijayan’s first anniversary in Kerala. Congress-ruled Karnataka’s euphemism for kickbacks is “diary politics.” Expectedly, the diary entries supposedly incriminate only top Congress leaders.

These are all separate stories. There is no evidence of newspapers and TV channels ganging up to wage a coordinated war to expose the BSP, destroy the AIADMK, malign Kejriwal, discredit Lalu, defame Banerjee or in any other way damage those political parties or personalities that are opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party. But it’s of interest that none of these exposes threatens the 12 states the BJP and its allies control. There are no rants, for instance, about the police looking the other way while cow vigilante groups run amuck and terrorise villagers in Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh. That’s why my mind turns to the Soviet twilight and the information that was leaked to the media under pretext of glasnost.

That’s why the VSK’s Ram Gopal is quite right to claim that, thanks to him, journalists have at last found their “margdarshak” or torchbearer in Narada Muni. Narada may have been the world’s first journalist, as Gopal claims, but his incarnations have always flourished in India. It’s just that they are doing better now than ever before.

The writer is the author of several books and a regular media columnist