What happened in December 1992 should never have happened. It hurt me tremendously.L. K. Advani is reported to have said this to BBC’s ‘Asia Today’. This is an important admission by a top ranking member of the BJP, the deputy prime minister, no less. But is it true? I, for one, believe it is. I recall images of Advani on television at the time of the Babri Masjid demolition; and he looked visibly shaken. But and this is a more significant qualification: Does it matter if it’s true?Yes and no. Let’s start with no. While I recall Advani seemingly shocked by what had taken place in Ayodhya, I also remember him being interviewed by the BBC soon after, spewing fire and brimstone about temples being razed in Kashmir, which one might say is not exactly indicative of remorse. So which “truth” does one believe?Neither, one should think. It is something we know now: That the truth is a shifting commodity. That confessions have to be seen as part of a strategy in altering perceptions and that strategies are aimed at short term gains and can change with new demands.Yes, today; no, tomorrow; yes, the day after; maybe, the week after that — so on and so forth. We have seen it in Vajpayee’s flip flops on Gujarat; and we are aware that Advani is attempting to melt his ‘hardliner’ image so a bit of emotion can only help.It is tempting to single out the BJP for blame — with reason — but the fact is that doublespeak and manipulation have become the language of politics the world over. Clinton did it with his legalistic quibbling (“define sexual relations”) during the Monica Lewinsky affair. Supporters of the Bush policy managed to spread the impression that Saddam Hussein was behind 9 Tony Blair has been in the dock now for months on allegations that he “sexed up” the evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.Politicians have always been accused of manipulating the truth but never before has the manipulation been so blatant or the protest evoked by it so ineffective. Partly it is because with the media explosion speech has become cheap. Words don’t count for much. I remember watching an Indian actor turned politician criticising his opponent’s fickleness during a television interview and giving his word he would not contest the coming elections. Sure enough, he contested elections and even became a minister. So much for fickleness.But if manipulation seems easy today, it is perhaps because technology has helped create an ambience where everything, it appears, can be manipulated. Faces, whole bodies can be transformed; speech, even images can be altered. During the Gulf War, one of the stories circulated over the internet was the report of an Iraqi mob toppling Saddam’s statue in Baghdad. It was a hoax; the mob consisted of Iraqi dissidents flown in from America and their actual number was a fraction of what was actually claimed. There were photographs to support the theory and yet they did not create the sort of stir one could have expected.It could be because one does not know what to believe anymore. The other day, a Mumbai tabloid carried an April Fool’s day story about the stolen Tagore medal being found in a dustbin. It was hard to tell it was a joke. It could also be that we live in a world where values have completely changed. There was a time when it was considered wrong to tell a lie. Today, we are hugely influenced by advertising, an industry that thrives on, well, if not lying, then exaggerating, providing selective information, attacking the competition and linking products to dreams, true or false. In short doing what it takes to sell. Is it any surprise then that politicians have adopted the tactics the public has become used to?So can one ever know the truth? Possibly. Some weeks ago, a well respected judge after studying the matter strongly indicted the BBC for accusing the Blair government of misleading the public about Iraq’s WMDs. Did that convince anybody? Only 25 per cent of the British people, according to an opinion poll by ITV — 54 per cent believed that the government did “sex up” the dossier; 62 per cent even believed that Blair would not have resigned even if Judge Hutton had found fault with his conduct.In the end it all comes down to credibility and that’s why it matters whether Advani is telling the truth about his feelings in December 1992. For, in what Bryan Appleyard poetically described in The Sunday Times (February 1, 2004) as “the vertiginous strangeness of the world without truth that we have now entered”, we are forced to develop a nose for sincerity.
