The accelerating speed with which the popularity of the Congress-led UPA-II government ruling in New Delhi since 2004 is plunging, is evident to all except members of the charmed circle of Union ministers who live in the make-believe world of the Delhi durbar. In particular public disenchantment with prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh is fast reaching its nadir.
The scales are rapidly falling from the nation’s eyes about the over-hyped reformist credentials of the country’s avuncular prime minister who was neither born great, nor achieved greatness but had greatness thrust upon him when Sonia Gandhi, who led the Congress party to unexpected victory in the general election of 2004, declined prime ministership and nominated Singh instead. At the time this renunciatory appointment was widely welcomed by the intelligentsia and urban middle class, because Manmohan Singh was revered as the finance minister who ideated the historic Union budget of July 1991 which substantially ended post-independence India’s notorious licence-permit-quota regime, and launched the moribund Indian economy into the high 8 percent-plus per annum growth orbit.
But now reports that Budget 1991-92 was actually the idea of the then prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao rather than his finance minister, are acquiring new currency. According to well-known defence analyst and political commentator Bharat Karnad, Singh’s reputation as the Great Economic Reformer is unmerited. Writing in The New Indian Express (June 15), Karnad says Narasimha Rao ordered Singh, who had presented a socialist budget as usual, to rewrite it and “configure a scheme to dismantle licence-permit raj...” Ditto economic guru Swaminathan Aiyar in The Times of India (June 26).
With his main claim to fame now being increasingly questioned, the sun of this “nominated PM without a political base and constituency” is fast setting, and with it the fortunes of the Congress-led UPA-II government mired in double-digit inflation and pervasive corruption.
Endangered species
Once a respected, perhaps even glamourised tribe, print medium journalists have now become an endangered species. The social respect they comm-anded seems to have been transferred to television anchors and reporters, despite the shallow and ephemeral nature of the audio-visual medium. It’s a matter of amazement how professedly ultra-busy ministers obediently trot off like Mary’s little lambs to television studios to deliver inane homilies.
Meanwhile, the broad daylight assassination of Mumbai-based crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey on June 11 and the tepid public reaction to it, is further proof that the glory days of print journalism are over. Sad but true, we have lost caste and are regarded with incremental contempt by politicians, egoistic proprietors and lumpen elements who these days don’t stop at intimidation.
Perhaps the most unkindest cut inflicted upon this endangered tribe is by overweening proprietors who have emerged from the shadows to dictate the ideology and even content, of contemporary dailies and periodicals. Once upon a time, even if not quite the ideology, editors determined the content without deferring to publishers. But ever since the early 1990s when The Times of India proprietor Sameer Jain fired editor Dileep Padgaonkar (reportedly for opining that his was the second most important job in India after the prime minister’s), the primacy of the editor in print media has suffered continuous erosion.
In the good ole days all antagonists of the print media knew their limits. Way back in 1994 when your editor filed a writ petition in the Mumbai high court for issuance of an order to the state government to prosecute Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray under s.153 IPC for igniting communal disharmony, Thackeray stopped short of setting Sena goons loose upon me. Now the J. Dey assassination indicates that the unwritten social contract between politicians, corporates and proprietors on the one side, and editors and journalists on the other, has lapsed. Hard days ahead for our hitherto respected tribe. But let’s carry on regardless.
Talent graveyard
The death in exile on June 9 of Maqbool Fida Hussain, arguably India’s most original if not most admired artist, was a national tragedy. Not because this master of the canvas in oils, water colours and any other medium, and showman par excellence died — he lived a full life to the age of 94 — but because he died in exile, far away from friends and relations and the syncretic culture and environment of India which stimulated his creative genius.
The feeble-minded regressives who forced Hussain into exile are well-known — failed Mumbai-based cartoonist and Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray and other fanatics of the Hindu right who interpreted some of his paintings inspired by the Ramayana and Mahabharata as an insult to Hinduism because they depicted Sita and Draupadi in some stages of undress. Given the harrowing predicament (forcible abduction and public disrobement) of these brave and rightfully venerated ladies, it’s pre-eminently arguable that the context demanded some degree of déshabillément. But to expect unlettered lumpens of the Shiv Sena, RSS and VHP who vandalised Hussain’s exhibitions and threatened his life, to appreciate the context would be asking too much.
Inevitably neither the complicit BJP-led NDA government nor the pusillanimous Congress-led UPA-I and UPA-II governments offered serious protection to the artist. What a contrast to the commitment to the rule of law of several British governments which spent millions of pounds providing round-the-clock security to author Salman Rushdie when a fatwa was declared upon him by the equally benighted Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran!
While your editor can’t claim friendship with Hussain, when I emceed the Calcutta Tercentenary Great Sons of Bengal art auction in 1990, although Hussain didn’t have any canvases ready for auction, he readily autographed some limited edition prints of his work for bidding, and donated the proceeds for the construction of the Tercentenary Square (still to be built). Like all great artists Hussain was above pecuniary considerations and believed money should — and would — automatically flow to those committed and passionate about their work. But unfortunately he had to live and work in this graveyard-of-talent nation which forsook him and sentenced him to a lonely death in a foreign land.