By Ranjona Banerji
What makes a great headline story?
There are so many swirling around that it’s had to choose.
Like the Khalistan supporter Amritpal Singh who is on the loose?
Or the conman from Gujarat who pretended to be from the PMO and got all sorts of official benefits including Z plus security and five-star luxury in Kashmir.
Or the newly-made national highways which have consistently cracked under the pressure of grand inaugurations?
Or how the wife of a former CM of Maharashtra and current deputy CM of Maharashtra claimed to have been cheated by a designer friend who she let into official homes for many years?
Or the Invest India CEO who had to resign because of supposed financial hanky-panky?
Don’t get me wrong. These have been in the news, or else how do we know about them. But they haven’t been THE news.
Take the Invest India story. This is a government agency, set up to help those who want to invest in India. Its managing director and CEO Deepak Bagla is accused of, well, not doing any work. An audit was begun by the Commerce Ministry a year ago. Bagla has resigned for “personal reasons”, after he and his team apparently had a first class party at the recent World Economic Forum at Davos.
But please note, the lack of outrage or even leaking of salacious details or even investigation of what went wrong, apart from in the business pages and websites.
How about Kiran Patel? What courage and cool thinking! Used the PM’s name and officials all over our most sensitive areas opened their hearts and minds and our pockets to him. Patel made three trips to Kashmir, met officials and made them give him reports, until a local district magistrate flagged something as suspicious. Patel was arrested from a five-star hotel.
This is a story but not THE story.
Because, how can we?
THE story could be that the Prime Minister inaugurated a road. THE story is not that the Bengaluru-Mysore expressway got flooded soon after because once Modi has come and gone, the story is over. Some locals just have to deal with it. THE story is now that the PM and the Japanese PM, Fumio Kishida ate “gol-gappe” together. Personally, I’d have given him real Gujarati khandvi and explained it as Indian veg sushi. Tastes much better than Delhi gol-gappe anyway, but that’s just me.
Anyway. These are our stories. They have within them depths and layers and fun and excitement and shock and horror, all of which would have kept us journalists busy for days.
We know that we are not going to do the real stories in the mainstream media, about poverty and social hatred and Central incompetence. Now it looks like we cannot even do the scandal-scam stories in case some muck falls on the Great One and subsidiaries around.
And we know why. This is a tweet from Aroon Purie, once the person who set the gold standard of Indian journalism by his group’s own admission. I have worked with the group and in the old days, it did set a standard.
But like most of the Indian media which was brave in the past as long as it could oppose a Congress-led government and wear all attacks with pride, we now have a set of groupies sucking up to the Supreme Leader.
Like the owner of India Today makes clear, all you have to do is connect the dots…
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal.