By Ranjona Banerji
Rahul Gandhi held a press conference.
And what a palaver resulted within the press.
Let’s write this without context.
Those present at the press conference – members of the press and of TV channels – were eager to question Gandhi. Most of the questions asked were asking him to respond to BJP allegations. Gandhi reacted sharply. He accused one person from TV of being part of the BJP and after he shut him down, said in Hindi that the questioner had been deflated like a bust balloon. Several people present – whether members of press, or of TV or bystanders – laughed.
Gandhi asked another questioner, a prominent TV person, to wait until he had answered the question and then added that the person was known for speaking for him, implying that words were put into his mouth.
Now, the context.
Gandhi had just been sentenced to two years in jail after he lost a criminal defamation case. The two-year sentence meant that he was disqualified as a Lok Sabha MP.
The press conference was a response to these two consequential events.
How rude was Gandhi here?
Quite rude, you might say. The “hawa nikal gayi” response was uncalled for.
But the rest was par for the course, to me anyway.
It is the job of journalists to ask tough and provocative questions. It is acceptable to try and rile the person you are questioning as much as possible, in order to get more spice to your copy. As long as there is no personal abuse or insults, you would prefer the questioned to get riled. This means that the response is likely to be unpleasant. If you’re aiming to get someone to lose control, how personally should you take it if the person loses control?
Let’s add more context.
There is no doubt, even in the minds of those who are extremely upset at the insults piled on the poor unsuspecting members of the press and TV people who are only trying to do an honest day’s job and take home a measly wage to feed their families, even in these minds we know that the media in India is deeply polarised.
The RSS/BJP combine and the Modi government has made sure that it is almost never questioned except by a small handful of journalists and almost no TV people. The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has famously not held a press conference in years and thus is never directly questioned by members of the press, and definitely not by TV people.
As Dhanya Rajendran of NewsMinute pointed out recently in her Chameli Devi award acceptance speech, it is the digital media which questions governments more than the mainstream media.
The extent of outrage from the media over these few comments by Rahul Gandhi is laughable, to be honest. As other journalists have pointed out, we as a community have not been as angered when members of the BJP called us “presstitutes”. In fact journalist Swati Chaturvedi has listed several of the compliments which the BJP has paid us: “presstitutes, bazaaru media, piddi, paid media, sickular, anti-national”.
I would add to that urban naxals, Lutyens gang, and my personal favourite: being untrustworthy because my surname is Banerji. Going by the logic of the Surat court which sentenced Gandhi to two years, I could have a good portion of the BJP’s supporters in jail if I filed a case claiming criminal defamation of all Banerjis!
The point made by those of us in the media who’re calling the outrage an overreaction is simple: we are under worse threat from the BJP than we have ever been from any other political dispensation. We know this. We know why we fall down press and freedom rankings year after year. Journalists are jailed on flimsy pretexts, stopped from travelling abroad, abused constantly on social media and by BJP worthies. Some have even died in the pursuit of showing truth to power.
The bulk of the mainstream media is party to this and is a major part of the larger societal silence on attacks on media persons.
At the end, though, what Rahul Gandhi said at the press conference was largely ignored.
And this is the media’s biggest failure, insulted and sulking or otherwise.
His main point was that he would continue to question the Adani Group and its financing via alleged shell companies. And no one wanted to take him up on that.
Hmmm. I wonder why.
Hawa..?
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal.