Want to make a statement? — Try TV

So when Sharad Yadav gets up on the floor of the House, as he did during the confidence motion last week, and tells BJP’s Atal Behari Vajpayee that he (Yadav) will get only five lines in newspapers as compared to the print favourite’s several column inches, he knows fully well that he is going out live to the entire country. That he is a lot more recognised now, thanks to TV. He is also making the political point that television is a lot more democratic than print. With typewriter guerrillas being replaced by television foot-soldiers, suddenly, even Press Club regulars like Wasim Ahmed and backroom deal-makers such as Amar Singh have gained political respectability. As also public visibility, with the B-team of politicians, such as Tariq Anwar, Maninder Singh Bitta and Ghulam Nabi Azad, realising that television is easier to woo than the electorate.

But while the A-teams of all political parties still play hard to get, the Left is very savvy. Harkishan Singh Surjeet’s Punjabi accent and direct manner has become quite a favourite with all networks and his able lieutenant Sitaram Yechuri has obviously shed all his Jawaharlal Nehru University hang-ups about tele-democracy. They are not ones to dodge mikes when they are thrust in their faces or shy away from TV lights when they are shone in their eyes.

But then they are also the ones who have suffered most at the hands of the print media, which they believe is still very much Delhi-centric and either BJP or Congress-obsessed. The biggies, who can even now count on the print media’s support, still play hard to get. Catch P. V. Narasimha Rao, L. K. Advani, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Mulayam Singh Yadav or G. K. Moopanar confessing all to camera — you’ll have to wait a long time for that.

Part of the reason is also that they are of the old school. Rao and Vajpayee have pauses in their speech where entire Parliament sessions could be fitted. In a long interview, Advani invariably sounds like a retired school-teacher. And Mulayam and Moopanar prefer to act rather than talk. In any case, they’d rather use trusted journalists to do their talking. That used to be V. P. Singh’s policy too, before he discovered that television was useful even when he didn’t speak — lying on a hospital bed with a dialysis machine for company makes for great television. Try it in print and you lose three-quarters of the drama.

So politicians have become our latest entertainment, as good as countdown shows or cricket matches. With the Hindi film industry in a slump and the Indian cricket team displaying suicidal tendencies, surely touched by the Caribbean sun, it is left to our netas to provide us with our daily quota of laughs.

So when you see BBC World (with 50 million global homes) and CNN (with 113 million homes) slugging it out for the world’s news viewers, don’t be too surprised when the war comes right into your living rooms, in your own language. And don’t even wonder why broadcasters want 24-hour news networks in India. If, after 17 years, Ted Turner can make a profit of $250 million on a channel that was derisively called the Chicken Noodle Network and is even now said to be a “mile wide and an inch deep”, any news is good news.