Funny, how predictable our political scandals can be. Funny also, how predictable the response to them. Those at the receiving end have by now perfected a pattern of defence. First, they say the evidence is doctored. The next day, they say it is exaggerated, out of proportion. On the third day, they counter-attack by questioning the motives of the messenger and using legal loopholes, propaganda and innuendo to shoot him instead. Touching also, how they keep on trying this when this never really works. That is why a very special note of thanks is owed to Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani for acknowledging in Bhopal on Thursday that all this newspaper did was to publish a good story when it found one. Having been a journalist himself, he knows a thing or two about news-sense. He is also known to speak his mind. At the same time, you also know him as somebody with an entirely unblemished record in public life, somebody blessed with the kind of integrity and discipline that would never allow anybody to even imagine him getting caught up in a Bangaru/Judeo kind of mess. Why is he then compelled to join in the defence of Judeo? CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE EXCLUSIVE VIDEO Essentially, the defence, and all the holy outrage built around it in these cases, has two legs. First, that it was politically motivated, that “our” man was entrapped by political rivals and that the media happened to be in cahoots with them. Second, that this is no big deal, that all politicians need money, that unless we change the nature of our politics, even honest politicians will be forced to walk into traps like these. Or, as Judeo himself put it so stunningly, didn’t even Gandhi collect money from the Birlas? But my dispute is not so much with that second argument. Politics is dirty business and politicians will be cynical. You can’t expect all of them to have the integrity and track record of an Advani, Vajpayee or Manmohan Singh. So you expect them to say things like, so what, politics is like this only, even Gandhi did it and other such blah. What needs more serious questioning, instead, is the first argument, of motives, conspiracy theories, entrapment and so on. That our man was not a thief but a simpleton, innocent to the wiles of the big, bad world of politics. This is how this translates in simpler English: that the minister (and other such in the past) were well-meaning, innocent, if gullible, people trapped by their political opponents or sting operators who plied them with liquor, offered them money and more and meanwhile kept on asking leading questions. Now, even if that was true, aren’t we fortunate these were merely political rivals or journalists running sting operations? What if they were the ISI or the CIA? What if your ministers and party presidents are so stupid, so lacking in all moral fibre, intellect, presence of mind and sense of responsibility as to walk into a strange hotel room with all and sundry, discuss deals, drink themselves under the table and then accept bundles of money above it, and then hold it to their foreheads and compare it with God? Wouldn’t the ISI or the CIA and, why not, even the Bangladesh intelligence, love to trap our ministers on camera in compromising situations like these? And when they do so, they will not drop the evidence in this newspaper’s mail box. They will keep it, locked away safely in a vault. Then they will wait for a mere minister of state for environment to become the chief minister of his state and, who knows, if he — and they — got lucky, the defence minister or the home minister of India tomorrow. It is then that they will remind him of his shenanigans on camera. A scary thought, no, that your political leaders are so weak and vulnerable, anybody could trap them with a few lakh rupees, a bottle of Black Label and oodles of potato chips? Or, you can ask this question in a different way: what if whoever got this evidence on Judeo now took it instead to the embassy of a hostile power for a deal rather than merely reach it to a newspaper for the relatively smaller pleasure of an expose? It is of vital importance, therefore, for our political class — at least for the senior, responsible ones — to appreciate the value of a watchdog media. On the economy and controls, this government has been the most liberal in our history so far. But the essence of reform, deregulation, the abandoning of discretionary, corrupting powers by the state, is oversight by institutions, impartial regulators, courts, vigilance commissioners and, indeed, the media. A leadership involved in economic reform and deregulation must see a vigilant and independent media as an ally, a force multiplier, and not a pain in the butt just because it causes you a few problems every now and then in that week’s politics, or in an election campaign. There is yet another way of looking at this. Is this repeated defence of politicians caught red-handed some kind of a reverse hypocrisy? Let me explain this. If you look at the seniormost BJP ministers in this cabinet, none of them is ever likely to compromise himself like this. Vajpayee, Advani, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Murli Manohar Joshi, Ram Naik, Jagmohan, Arun Shourie, Arun Jaitley, B.C. Khanduri, Sushma Swaraj, the First Eleven of the BJP in this cabinet would never, at any stage in their careers, have got into a jam like this: drinking themselves silly with a favour-seeker or an operator of some kind in a strange hotel room. They know the value of discretion, discipline and integrity and have therefore come such a long way. Why would the same party, then, in fact many of the same leaders then, rise so strongly to the defence of those of their colleagues who live by more flexible rules? Hypocrisy, normally, is when you set higher standards for others but feel free yourselves to live and prosper below them. In this case, you yourself live by the highest of standards but somehow do not believe you are setting these for your followers as well. If you won’t call it reverse hypocrisy, give me a better definition. They may look at this less cynically after the heat and dust of the election campaign settles. You would expect a party of such clean veterans to eschew the temptation of falling into the old Indira/Rajiv Gandhi trap of defending every Gundu Rao, Antulay, Anjaiah or Satish Sharma (all laid bare by this newspaper at different points of time). For ordinary people like us, this cynicism can be disappointing. But at the Express, our legacy is not to allow ourselves to be fazed. This is the centenary year of our great founder Ram Nath Goenka and we can only firmly rededicate ourselves to honouring the legacy of courage, fairness and doggedness he personified. Anything less would be unfair to his memory of over 50 years of journalism of courage and to the standards our readers set for us every day and night. E-mail the Author • Excerpts from the transcript of the VCD
