Leak? Just get it out and be damned!

I am all for a leak. ‘Get it out; don’t hold it back’ is my motto; right from when I was knee-high to no one in particular. And it has always worked. Those days, it was easier. You stood facing the wall and aimed for it. Better still, you and four other ‘knee-high to no one in particular’ stood in a row and aimed for the wall — while reading the fine print ‘Dekho Donkey... — and the one who aimed the highest with the leak was pronounced winner. No one shouted at you for taking the leak and publishing it all over walls, and nobody threatened you with ‘there the writing’s on the wall for you boy, you’re gonna get it’.

Come to think of it there wasn’t any private television also, those days, and, therefore, no Arnab Goswami or Rajdeep Sardesai or Barkha Dutt to question you on why you took the leak and published it all over the wall; that you’ve breached national security with that leak. In the Gulf countries, with the desert consumed by concrete and glass, it isn’t easy to take a leak, and publish it. As the story goes, not 50 years ago, the Bedouins wouldn’t even get off their high camels.

They would hike up the Kandura, and take a leak from camelback. But petro-dollars and prosperity changed that. Today, anybody caught in the open wanting to take a leak in gulf cities would be hard put to take it because for some reason there are a just a handful of public facilities in most of these cities. You have to either find a handy hotel at hand or hold it back till you’re home safe. It’s excruciating, the pain and the pleasure thereafter. If you’re a scribe in the gulf, and want to take a leak and publish it, think again. There is no trust deficit between the ruler and the general because the ruler is the general and vice versa. There’s no age row also because the general can be general-in-chief for as long as he’s not unseated in a palace coup, which, these days, is rare. As for publishing leaks, no scribe worth his labour card would dare do that if it concerns anything to do with a gulf state’s military preparedness, whether its soldiers were armed with ancient single-shot muskets or whether its border roads were paved with camel dung while the neighbouring gulf state had roads so broad that no camel would step on it because trudging across such a swathe of tar would be an insult to camel-hood. O! No, publishing such state secrets pinched from a letter written by the general to the ruler (one and the same) could result in a public flogging of the journalist and if he happens to be an expatriate, a public flogging and then quick deportation after a period spent in jail on a diet of chicken biriyani. Chickening out and not publishing the leak is better part of the valour in such states.

Compared to that, in India, journalists get off very easy. But then India is a democracy, not a banana republic or a gulf state ruled by a ruler with the divine right to rule and the Bedouin might to enforce that divine right. What’s more, in a democracy, freedom of the press is sacrosanct, written on stone. The fourth pillar can take as many leaks, on a daily basis, and stand up for truth and freedom to publish the truth, the truth as brought out by/in the leak.

In India, it has become common practice for journalists to wonder what the prime minister was up to, sitting on a letter written to him by the army chief? Whether the defence minister was pissed off with the army chief because the chief chose to assert that he was not born when the defence minister told him when he was born but on a different date? In India, journalists can ask as many and any simple and fundamental question. In India, journalists routinely source confidential letters and documents and lay them bare all over print. In India, journalists are a privileged lot. Journalists have the right to take a leak whenever they want. And, if that results in trust deficit between journalists and everybody else in the country, so be it.

sushil.kutty@dnaindia.net