By ​Ranjona Banerji​
I start with an apology to The Times of India. I had put out a tweet a couple of days ago saying that the Doon edition of the newspaper had not carried any news on the current imbroglio over the Art of Living’s event on the banks of the Yamuna river in Delhi. The Art of Living has an old and long relationship with Bennett Coleman which does sometimes affect news choices. However, the paper has in fact given the subject front and inside page coverage since so perhaps the lack of may have been an oversight and not deliberate.
News channels meanwhile gathered all their self-righteous zeal to the menu du jour. There was Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and the destruction of the Yamuna on one side and the “King of Good Times†Vijay Mallya’s exodus to the UK even as he owes banks over Rs 7000 crore on the other. What joy!
Karan Thapar on India Today TV was very watchable, especially as he now loudly instructs the producer to lower the volume when someone misbehaves by screaming and trying to hijack the debate. This is the absolute best schoolmaster behaviour I have seen and quite frankly, TV guests usually deserve this sort of humiliation. A couple of weeks ago, the BJP’s Nalin Kohli apparently left because he was so offended but the Congress’s Sharmishtha Mukherjee did not bold when it was done to her during the Art of Living discussion.
The BJP’s GVL Narasimha Rao was most amusing when he accused everyone opposing the Art of Living cultural event on environmental grounds of being anti Hindu, anti-national and even further, all objections being a giant plot by Congress president Sonia Gandhi to defame India’s image abroad. Thapar was so amazed and amused that he did not bother to turn down the volume. The guests, including evil environmentalists and Mukherjee also looked amused. A good journalist perhaps knows when to use the mute button and when to let someone’s grandstanding expose their quirks and beliefs. Bizarre was the word Thapar used and one cannot disagree.
Then there’s the Mallya case. What outrage! How dare he leave! How dare he lead a lavish lifestyle! How dare he endlessly. In fact, Mallya is not the first businessperson to behave like this and he will not be the last. The same questions about how banks treat the poor and middle class compared to how they treat the rich and influential have been asked before.
​​TV journalists though need to do a little more bread-and-butter investigative journalism without any help to match their hysteria and they also need to read up a little history.
For my money, the best investigation into stock market manipulation and bank and financial institution fraud was done by journalists like Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu into the Harshad Mehta scam of the 1990s. Neither TV nor the internet had been invented in those days. Okay, I’m kidding. But TV was mainly Doordarshan, so… Business journalists since then, sadly, have largely become press release rewriters.
**
The most idiotic thing for TV debates and TV anchors to do however is to allow the Mallya issue to become into a BJP versus Congress fight. Because once we get into that trap, nothing is achieved. Though of course, sometimes that is the point.
**
Meanwhile, to provide comic relief, a reporter for an Indian news channel stood outside Mallya’s bolthole in Tewin, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom and told us that Mallya is also famous in Tewin for his lavish lifestyle. Not only do people ride around in Lamborghinis – lavish, I grant you – but they also go to pubs! Can you imagine? Pubs? Shocking!