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ShareIt was a newspaper interview that set off the nuclear crisis whose shadow has dogged the Manmohan Singh government for the past ten months. You would have thought the PM wouldn't go down that slippery slope again.
Yet, as the nuclear face-off with the Left peaked last week and negotiations with the Samajwadi Partywere delicately poised, PMO aides let in a newspaper team again for an interview. This time, it was a paper from the south that got the call and the proprietor-editor dutifully went, accompanied by two staffers, one with deep connections in the PMO.
According to reports that filtered through later, the PM was crabby and aggressive, apparently tense about the outcome of the end-game being played out over his showpiece legacy for the history books. We'll never know if his comments would have altered the course of events, like they did last year, when he challenged the Leftists to withdraw support to his government, if they dared. We won't know because as the Congress-SP deal was sown up, the PMO suddenly backtracked. An aide called up the proprietor-editor and informed him that the entire conversation was off-the-record.
It was just an informal chat, he was told, not for publication. The interview was hurriedly withdrawn from the pages and the newspaper is in a blue funk, having circulated teasers about the "bombshell" coming up in the weekend issue.
Spare us from such spin-doctors! The sudden decision to disown the interview came on a day when another newspaper splashed a huge plug for the PM as the country's leading anti-Red bulwark. The article was based on extensive quotes from PMO sources, which clearly wanted to cast the PM in a new mould, a sort of 21st century David to the Left's Goliath. It didn't go down too well with the Congress top brass whose interlocutors were locked in tortuous negotiations to disengage with the Left without toppling the government before the SP comes on board.
Groan! Not another Manmohan Singh-Prakash Karat head-on collision, like last year's! That's when frantic inquiries started about the interview. What had the PM said about Karat & Co? Kill, kill, kill! A clampdown was ordered on all image-building exercises at this critical juncture when a strategic shift in political alignments was being attempted. Surely there's a lesson in this for the media. True, journos and politicos are destined to feed off each other but the terms of engagement must be more transparent so that credibility doesn't become a casualty. The concept of spin-doctors for personal image-building was a creation of the previous BJP-led government. The saffron party had in-house specialists for this who had perfected the art of producing rabbits out of every hat. Tragically, the current regime continues the practice, forgetting perhaps that the BJP fell flat on its face in the last, most crucial lap -- it lost the elections in 2004.
TAILPIECE
The spectacle of the year is to watch SP leaders choke on their words. Not too long ago, when they were on the other side of the fence and fighting the Congress, SP leaders happily stoked fears about a Muslim backlash to the nuclear deal. Rajya Sabha MP Shahid Siddiqi even obliged by publishing a survey in his Delhi-based Urdu paper that claimed as many as 70 percent of Muslims were opposed to the deal. Now Siddiqi is having trouble living it down. You know how these surveys are, he told disbelieving friends. They can be interpreted any way. According to him, the same survey also found that 53 per cent of Muslims knew very little about the deal. So, what does this prove? That a silver tongue is the most important tool, both for a journalist and for a politician!
Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net
