Column

It’s the saddest thing to admit to but I’m suffering from what can only be described as ‘beat envy’. You see I am a political reporter assigned to the Congress, in particular to covering Rahul Gandhi.

And while I’ve been doing that for at least the last four years, and I am, pardon my apparent immodesty here, a reasonably satisfactory reporter, I’ve failed to achieve much on this beat. After all these years, I have no interview with him, I have never met the subject of my beat, and the closest I’ve come to actually getting an insight into his mind is when I happened to be dining at a table near him at the Swagath restaurant in Delhi, and I spent the evening trying to overhear what he was telling a follically challenged gentleman. Even then I totally failed.

This particular bout of beat envy has been brought on by an exchange of notes with my colleague Anant Zanane. This past week, my newsfeed on Facebook was splashed with pictures of Rahul’s sister. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, while campaigning in UP, had taken time off to do a photo shoot with individual journalists. So there was my friend, Anant, flashing his pearly whites and Priyanka being all indulgent with him. There was no SPG, no hangers on, nothing— just Anant and Priyanka looking like any two Facebook friends — no wonder the picture at last count had a 120 likes and more than 50 comments. “I told her I was going to put our picture on Facebook,” Anant told me later. “So she said, you know Robert and I were once coming back from holiday and I was coming out of the loo when the flight attendant took my picture. I got to know only when Robert told me my dishevelled look was all over Facebook.”

Yes, that intimate anecdote was dished out by Ms Vadra to a journalist and to me it explains just why the Congresswallahs have always loved Priyanka. After all, who else would manage to sustain media interest week after week — the issues and targets stay the same, and the speech tends to get repetitive. So after a while you realise that however much buzz Akhilesh Yadav has around him, you can only follow him around and listen to his speech that many times. I followed Rahul Gandhi on his Bundelkhand tour and after the third rally, I knew his scripted jokes and could utter his punchline before they came. That’s where Priyanka’s natural abilities kick in. When the media has had enough of Mayawati bashing, and the endless criticism of how the UP sarkar has sabotaged central funds for schemes, just when there were far more important things happening in the rest of the country to pay attention to some rally in Rae Bareli, Priyanka simply leans across and pulls her mother’s cheeks.

That public display of affection seems so extraordinary in the dry, dusty setting of elections and takes on such proportions during Valentine’s week that the frame latches on to prime time slots and front pages. With a single move of her hand, that may not have even been noticed by the villagers who were waiting to see her, an amateur politician manages to elicit a very testy response from the veteran Sushma Swaraj who dismisses it as bad Bollywood script.

But these coochie coo moments aren’t the real ones that induce beat envy in me. I’m thinking how is it that I’m the one that follows Rahul Gandhi, the general secretary of the party, the one that handled it while Sonia Gandhi was away, how is that I have no story and the reporter following Priyanka is going crazy filing story after story? How is it that Priyanka can and does express her opinion about everything? She may have been in the boondocks campaigning, but when the trial court gives relief to home minister P Chidambaram, she comes out in his support the very same day.

The Election Commission versus Salman Khurshid may have been a legally tricky territory but Priyanka goes there too, saying in a democracy everyone had the right to express their opinion.

All this, in the course of just regular campaigning, no press conference is required. In contrast, very often after a Rahul Gandhi press conference, you’re left with the feeling of deja vu — the stated position on the regular issues. Maybe, that’s the reason he’s meant to be a politician. He’s done hundreds of public speeches, spoken in parliament, and yet we don’t know what he feels on so many things — the 2G scam, the EC standoff and Anna Hazare. Question is, in the long run, does the Priyanka strategy work best or Rahul’s? Or are they working out a package deal?

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News