While reading newspaper accounts of the opening of the Winter Session of Parliament, a throwaway line caught my eye: “Before the start of the session, the PM addressed the media.” That is what the media has become: a pliant receptacle for “addresses” from on-high.
On that same day, the Press Club of India — an organisation so outdated that on its home page, under “Important Announcements”, item number one is a demand for a speedy investigation into the murder of Gauri Lankesh, addressed to “Chief Minister Siddaramaiah” whose tenure ended in 2018 — moaned on its Twitter account that for the fifth straight session, the media had been kept out of Parliament’s press gallery.
The term “Fourth Estate” has many fathers, but its patrimony is most commonly attributed to the British Parliamentarian Edmund Burke, who in course of a debate on the floor of the House of Commons is supposed to have cautioned the members in these words:
There are three estates in Parliament but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder there sits a Fourth Estate more important by far than us all
In the British context, the three estates are the monarchy, the Commons and the Lords; in democratic republics they are the legislative, the executive and the judiciary. Parliament is where the legislative and executive functions meet — and the deliberate exclusion of the media from Parliament is extreme censorship, an attempt to ensure that legislative proceedings are reported not as is, but as the spin doctors post facto say it is.
Example: We know that 12 MPs have been suspended from the Rajya Sabha. (We also know that they have been suspended for alleged misbehaviour during the previous session — an action taken in contravention of the rules governing Parliamentary procedure).
We are told, by pliant members of the media, that this is in the interests of maintaining the decorum of the House. One of the suspended members says, in an interview given to my former colleague and friend at Rediff.com, that this is totally untrue. And we now have a he-said she-said situation — precisely because no member of the media was allowed to be present to record exactly what went down. (Note:
Having registered their anguish at this exclusion, the honourable members of the Press Club presumably drowned their angst with an extra round of rum and coke, which they get at prices heavily subsidised by the government.
Flashback to November 16, 2020, when Narendra Modi celebrated National Press Day with a written statement that the media “has been doing exception service… and has acted as a valuable stakeholder in helping the government in its initiatives”. And his enforcer-in-chief Amit Shah said, with the straightest of faces, that the “Modi government is committed towards the freedom of press and strongly oppose (sic) those who throttle it.” (Coda: Neither one of the first couple of Indian politics has felt the need to pay even lip service to the media on its allotted day, since).
Newspapers unblushingly quoted Modi as saying:
Be it positive criticism or highlighting success stories, the media has been continuously adding strength to India’s democratic ethos, the prime minister added in his written message on the day
That is the Modi model in a nutshell — whom they would stab in the back, they embrace; whom they would destroy, they first damn with faint praise. Compared with these guys, Judas Iscariot was a rank amateur.
Ironically, November 16 has this year been repurposed as Audit Divas. And Modi “celebrated” the supposedly independent institution of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India with the usual platitudes. Inter alia, he said: “But we presented the reality of the previous governments, the actual situation, honestly before the nation. We will be able to find out a solution only if we identify the problems.”
My sister, who works in a senior position in the AG’s Office in Chennai, sent me the quote, with a smirk icon attached. “Nailed it, albeit unwittingly,” she said. “The trouble has always been that the government in power has always used the audit reports of past governments to play politics, while refusing to table reports on its own performance.”
Previous governments may have resorted to burying inconvenient reports by the central audit authority — but audits, like murder, will out sooner than later. And the Modi government knows this. Solution: Prevent the CAG from producing reports, even as you pay lip service to the institution’s heritage. Here, read:
The total number of CAG reports relating to central government ministries and departments came down from 55 in 2015 to just 14 in 2020, a fall of nearly 75%
Not to put ideas in anyone’s head, but why not label November 16 as ‘Kiss of Death’ day and each year, pick one institution you want to finish off?
Harking back to the Winter Session that sparked this train of thought: On November 30, shortly after Modi “addressed the media” — not, note, held a press conference, but “addressed” — his government rushed through the repeal of the three farm laws, brushing aside the combined Opposition’s demand for a debate. Just as, on September 21 of the previous year, it had pushed through those selfsame laws in the teeth of the Opposition’s demand for discussion and debate.
“The government is ready to discuss all issues in Parliament,” Modi had said in the run up to this session. That should have warned us of what was to come. Always pays to listen to Modi, to read his statements — because they are clues to what he intends to do.
Which brings me to the media, a member of which was heard asking Rahul Gandhi (at a well-attended, but under-reported, press conference): “The PM has apologised to the nation (Fact check: He has not), and the farm laws have been repealed, so why is there a demand for a debate?”
That is symptomatic of the state the media has been reduced to. It does not demand that the head of the government answer questions; instead, it listens to his speeches — and asks tough questions of the Opposition. Rahul Gandhi nailed it in his response: “If the PM is going to make laws when it pleases him and repeal laws when it suits him, then why have Parliament at all?”
Indeed. Then again, this was foreshadowed when Modi, entering Parliament for the first time to take oath of office, back in 2014, knelt to kiss the steps of the building in a show of respect — the stifling praise, the the Judas kiss are his trademarks. And his contempt for Parliament is reflected in the behaviour of his party members.
July 2, 2019: Modi pulls up BJP MPs for poor attendance in Parliament.
March 11, 2021: Modi calls for regular attendance in Parliament
August 10, 2021: Modi seeks list of absentee BJP MPs
Clearly, the fact that this is a repetitive trope underlines that nobody in his party takes Modi seriously when it comes to attending Parliament — “do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work.
(Update, December 8: Here we go again with Modi pulling up his MPs for skipping Parliament. “Aap log apne vyavahar mein parivartan laiye, nahin toh parivartan toh ho jaata hai (bring change in your behaviour, otherwise change will happen)… I don’t like to say this over and over again,” the PM was quoted as saying.
The irony? Modi is yet to attend a single day of the winter session of Parliament; he even skipped day one, when the BJP with its brute majority in the LS, and some skulduggery in the RS, rammed through the repeal of the farm laws while ignoring the Opposition demands for a debate.)
Ironically, while Modi and his henchmen are busy preventing Parliament from doing its duty, his government is busy expending scant resources on a spanking new Central Vista with all the mod-cons — including a tunnel connecting Modi’s home with Parliament so that, rodent-like, he can scurry in when it choses him to harangue the members, and scurry out again before anyone can hold him to account for his sins of omission and commission.
I’ll end this segment on a note of apology: Having re-started this blog with the good intention of being regular (or at least, more regular), I found that life overtook me in unforeseen ways. First, there was the shifting of my home and the business of settling in to a new place; then a trip to Delhi for the final round of judging for the JCB Prize for Literature; then a bad cold and fever caused presumably by a combination of Delhi’s toxic air quality and Bangalore’s erratic weather patterns.
For now, things seem settled and I am back where I can be regular again (and I am crossing my fingers while saying that), so stay tuned. Meanwhile:
In her book of essays titled Call Them By Their True Names, Rebecca Solnit makes an impassioned case for rethinking our use of language to describe the zeitgeist. Using the right, well considered word for what is happening to us and around us, she argues, is the first diagnostic step to curing what ails us as a country, as a society. “Once you name a disorder,” she writes in her preface, “you may be able to connect to the community afflicted with it, or build one. And sometimes what is diagnosed can be cured.”
The converse is equally true. By using the wrong terminology, you delegitimise sections of polity and society. Protesting farmers, for example, are “misled”, they are “Khalistanis”. Activists fighting for justice are the “tukde tukde gang”; the shrinking section of the media that tries to hold the government to account is a “Left/Lutyens lobby”, the “Khan Market gang”.
There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion or disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are “hanging out” but the Black kids are “loitering” or “lurking”. Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them”
Call Them By their names — Rebecca Solnit
So what is the right word, or phrase, to define Modi — because as Solnit argues, to name him, to define him, is to know him for what he is, rather than for what he wants us to think he is? Here is a checklist of clinical symptoms for the condition known as narcissistic sociopathy. See if you recognise someone this hat fits as if it had been bespoke:
- Preoccupied with fantasies about beauty, brilliance, success, and power
- Unable to handle criticism
- Tendency to lash out if they feel slighted
- Likely to take advantage of others to get what they want
- Overly concerned about their appearance
- The expectation of being treated as superior
- Lack of empathy for others
- Inflated sense of self and inability to self-regulate
- Having no remorse for hurting others and no interest in apologising unless it benefits them
- Having an attitude of deserving the best of everything
- Tendency to monopolise conversations and/or mistreat those who they perceive as inferior
- Hidden insecurity and a weak sense of self
- Tendency to blame others for their own bad behaviour
In an essay from 2002, written shortly after the carnage in Gujarat, Ashis Nandy called out Modi as an authoritarian. Fascist, even.
I came out of the interview shaken and told (Achyut) Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.
Sounds extreme, when set down in cold type — but read the essay, and you will see what symptoms Nandy is drawing on for his diagnosis.
Another person who knows Modi from up-close summed him up in terms of the dark triad: insecurity, Machiavellian manipulation and sociopathy. “Narcissist” was a term Arun Shourie applied to Modi, in this interview with Karan Thapar.
“He,” Nandy wrote of Modi, “had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence – all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits.”
The words “fascist”, “authoritarian”, “demagogue” and suchlike are regularly twinned with Modi, at least on the left-extreme side of social media. The trouble is that such terms are used without explanation, and thereby become easy to dismiss as mere name-calling. That is why Nandy’s essay, and Shourie’s interview, are important — because they not only give us terms to clinically diagnose Modi, but also explain the reasons for the diagnosis.
Maybe it is time we learned to call things by their right names. Maybe it is time to cut through the tissues of lies and obfuscation, and look with clear eyes on what is being done to this country, and who it is being done by. That is one of the things I hope to do with this blog, going forward.
I’ll end this overlong post by quoting from Solnit’s preface once more:
“There are so many ways to tell a lie,” Solnit writes in the opening of her book Call Them by Their True Names. “You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are “hanging out” but the Black kids are “loitering” or “lurking.” Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.”
And that, Solnit argues, is why we should stop being mealy-mouthed; why we should be careful about the language we use; why we should call things by their right names:
Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality
Rebecca Solnit, Call Them By Their Right Names
Back soon; meanwhile, comments welcome as always.
