On The spot
Tavleen Singh
Chanchal Chauhan
In all my years of covering politics and governance in Delhi I have never known a political leader to have had as long a honeymoon with the media as Arvind Kejriwal. It is true that Rajiv Gandhi was much loved and forgiven everything for a very long time but the media in those days was not what it is today. It consisted in the eighties of a handful of national newspapers in English and Hindi and a handful of powerful regional newspapers whose boundaries were limited by language. Literacy levels were much lower than they are today and if you traveled in rural India the sight of one man reading a newspaper to a group in a chai shop was a common sight. Sometimes it was only schoolmaster who could read in a whole village. I can remember villages in the vicinity of Delhi where nobody had ever seen a newspaper So the Indian media did not have the capacity that it has today to influence people into believing in a leader. The first time I noticed the power that the Indian media now has to influence public opinion in a significant way was when Anna Hazare was hailed as India’s savior by TV anchors who made him out to be a new mahatma when he came to Jantar Mantar to begin his fast against corruption. They brought their studios to Jantar Mantar and reported his every move. Please remember that although Kejriwal was by his side all the time and although he himself fasted for many days afterwards in Jantar Mantar he was not treated with the same kind of reverence and so he went almost unnoticed except as Anna’s constant companion.
Kejriwal’s own honeymoon with the media began later. Much after he formed his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). He tried grabbing headlines on a daily basis by one antic or other but it was only when he exposed the financial dealings and mysterious wealth of Robert Vadra that he became a media star. When he continued to take on people that the media rarely dares to he became a really big hero and TV reporters took to following him around and slavishly reporting all the things he did and said.
When his first foray into electoral politics last December won him the Government in Delhi most political commentators reported the event as a ‘game changer’. We knew that his decision to take a metro to his swearing in ceremony was really just a gimmick but this is not how we reported it. Not until the new government’s Law Minister conducted his midnight raid on a supposed house of ill repute did some of the gloss start to peel. But, even then the Government of Mr. Kejriwal was given more grace points than most and Kejriwal himself was portrayed as a rare kind of new leader despite not being able to come up with anything resembling governance while he was chief minister. Not even when he pulled his own Government down to concentrate his attention on AAP contesting the Lok Sabha elections did he get any flack for betraying the people of Delhi.
When he went on his tour of Gujarat two weeks ago with the clear intention of maligning Narendra Modi a huge contingent of TV reporters followed his every move. It is possible in the best governed states to find disgruntled people and Kejriwal sought them out assiduously. He announced before TV cameras that the farmers of Gujarat hated Modi and that the only ‘development’ in the state had benefited billionaires like Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani but somehow the TV reporters who traveled with him did not think it worth asking how Modi could have won three elections if he was so unpopular.
It is only in recent days that Kejriwal has started to get bad publicity. It started with his decision to take a private plane from Jaipur to Delhi to attend the India Today conclave. He tried to explain this away by saying there were no commercial flights that could have brought him here in time but his story was mocked in the media and then before we knew it he announced that if he became prime minister he would throw inconvenient journalists into jail. That comment ended the long honeymoon and as someone who has seen through his antics and his wiles from day one I admit to being very pleased that the honeymoon is over.
It is wrong to treat political leaders like messiahs even if they themselves believe they are. Kejriwal has indicated more than once that he is convinced that he is a real messiah and not just a politician. Notice the way in which he said he started believing in God because his party had done so well in the Delhi elections. Notice how he talks about himself always in the third person. Notice how he says, ad nauseum, that he is ‘nobody’ and that whether he wins or loses the credit for victory and the blame for defeat will rest on the shoulders of the ‘janata’. Notice how he speaks of himself as someone who has come to rid India of corruption. If these are not signs of megalomania it is hard to think what are. It is the responsibility of political journalists to draw attention to them but this has not happened so far because we have been so mesmerized by Kejriwal.
It would not be wrong to say that we helped create the messianic image that Kejriwal has. So if today he is threatening to jail journalists we in the media have only ourselves to blame.
Kejriwal is an extremely clever politician who has succeeded in building a political party in a remarkably short time. He has drawn attention to some of the most glaring flaws in Indian political parties and he must be given full credit for this. He has brought hope to millions of urban, middle class Indians who had become cynical about elections and political leaders in general and for this he must be given fullest credit.
What he is not is a messiah and it was very wrong of us in the media for having portrayed him as one. Now that he has shown his disdain for the media we must hope that there will be some real political reporting about Kejriwal and his political career.
Follow our WhatsApp channel