Rajdeep Sardesai’s book—2014: The Election That Changed India—would seem the ideal match of a writer to his subject. No other election in India has depended so much on successfully using the media to project an image, as was the case with Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal, or on failing to do so, as was clearly the case with Rahul Gandhi. And no one would seem better placed to relate this story than one of India’s most prominent news anchors, witness to most of the major events of the campaign either in the field or in the studio.
But he has attempted a difficult feat. Because of the importance of the visual media in this election and the excitement generated by Modi’s campaign, most readers of the book in this country have also closely watched the same images and followed the same events. For the book to really have worked it would have either needed to provide a so far untold view of campaigns from the inside, or it would have provided the kind of analysis and insight that was missing from the frenetic nature of coverage during the campaign. It does neither. Ultimately, it fails the test that every book by a celebrity must be subjected to—would this book have really merited our attention if it had not been written by Sardesai? The short answer is, no.
For me one of the big drawbacks is that Sardesai makes so little of his long years of journalism. He has followed the political career of many of the main protagonists from the time it would have been difficult to predict their future political trajectory and he has had the kind of access to major political personalities that is available to very few other journalists in the country. He would have been well placed to provide a better understanding of someone like Modi, instead the book is peppered with brief conversations with Modi over the phone or in person that would have been good then for a news flash on TV but now add up to nothing.
The first chapter of the book relates the story of phone call returned by Modi late on the night of January 12, 2012, after Modi’s third victory in the Gujarat elections, “A little after midnight, he returned the call. ‘Congratulation on your victory,’ I said. His response was in Hindi, ‘Dhanyawaad, bhaiya!’I asked him whether his decision to deliver his victory speech in Hindi was the clearest sign yet that he wanted to make a pitch for prime minister. ‘Rajdeep, jab aap reporter editor ban sakte ho, toh kya chief minister, pradhan mantra nahi ban sakta kya?’” (If a reporter like you can become an editor, why can’t a chief minister become a prime minister?)
The last chapter of the book ends with another phone call. On May 16 “I was ready for an Old Monk with coke. But one more call remained to be made. I telephoned Modi’s residence in Gujarat to congratulate him. The operator who picked up the phone said Modiji was in a meeting and would call back. At midnight, I tried my luck one last time. The operator was apologetic. ‘Sorry, Saheb sowa chali gaya’ (Saheb has gone to sleep) … Narendra Modi deserved a good night’s rest.”
Today, apart from the knowledge that Modi occasionally returns Sardesai’s calls, the difference between the two events amounts to nothing; it doesn’t seem to matter whether Modi did or did not speak to Sardesai. This is perhaps emblematic of the larger problem with television today, while it is of great help to a politician in constructing an image it is of very little help to a viewer in deconstructing the image.
The book follows much the same trajectory. Wherever interpretation, analysis or judgment is called for, Sardesai sidesteps the issue. On the 2002 riots he says, “With the benefit of hindsight, and more than decade later, I have tried to rationalize the events of the 2002 riots. Was chief minister Modi really trying to stop the riots? ... I shall not hasten to judgment, but I do believe the truth, as is often the case, lies in shades of grey.” After examining these various shades, again with no more insight than is available to any informed reader, he makes a claim that he fails to substantiate, “What is probably true is that in February 2002, the real boss of Gujarat was not Modi, but the VHP general secretary Praveen Togadia.” From the anodyne to the unsubstantiated, this amounts to a very unsatisfactory examination of one of the key events that shaped Modi and the country, an event that will continue to serve as a backdrop to Modi’s tenure as it did to the entire 2014 campaign.
Examining Amit Shah’s role in the encounter killings in Gujarat between 2003 and 2007, he writes, “So, was Shah really the ‘most dangerous man in Gujarat’, as one police officer once described him to me? ... Or was he, as his supporters insisted, ‘One of the most honest and straightforward persons you could wish to meet, an ace political mind’? The verdict was evenly split, depending on who you spoke to.”
This need to hedge bets extends even to his conduct. He writes of his failure to air the 2008 cash-for-vote scam, where the BJP had tied up with his channel to film and telecast what they claimed were votes being bought for the passage of the nuclear deal in Parliament, “Did I get the cash-for-votes sting horribly wrong? Should we have simply aired what we had right away without any journalistic check? It’s a tough one to answer.”
This tendency is at its most unfortunate where his appraisal of the media is concerned. Sardesai is uniquely placed to write about the kind of decisions that were taken in television studios of the coverage of the campaign, of the role of journalists themselves and how their political affiliations shaped the news that was eventually aired.
Well before Modi’s media blitz, the case of Kejriwal and his AAP had been played out through the media in Delhi. Sardesai’s channel CNN-IBN was among those who most prominently took up Kejriwal’s cause, “Kejriwal was conscious of using the media as an ally. Like Modi, Kejriwal was at ease in front of the camera and never short of a strong sound bite. Some of the AAP leader’s closest advisors were journalists. One of my own colleagues, Ashutosh, who edited our Hindi channel IBN 7, joined AAP.”
It is impossible not to ask what effect role Ashutosh would have played in ensuring the kind of coverage Kejriwal got on IBN 7. Was this ever questioned within the channel? Was there no subsequent examination of how far journalists could go in their political enthusiasms without damaging their profession? The failure to engage with these questions in this book is only an illustration of how they were actually treated in the profession, by overlooking them.
What was true of Kejriwal’s case, became doubly true of Modi’s campaign. Sardesai does spend an entire chapter examining how the media had such a differing impact on the political fortunes of Modi and Rahul Gandhi. After a withering aside on the disturbingly chaotic and sensationalist style of the man he claims to have once mentored—Arnab Goswami—Sardesai writes of the Times Now interview with Rahul Gandhi, “Yes, Rahul had botched up big time. When he should have out looking firm, candid and wise, he ended up looking unsure and inexperienced.”
This was one of the turning points of the campaign and the contrast with Modi could not be starker. Modi’s first interview was given to Rajat Sharma of India TV, by no means a hostile interviewer. Sardesai notes, “Rajat had been an activist of the ABVP, the students’ wing of the BJP in the 1970s. … That’s where he got to know Modi who was then a young RSS pracharak.” Against this background “there was a question mark over whether the interview had been stage-managed.” It was a significant moment of the campaign, but Sardesai once again begs the question, “Whatever the truth, the fact is the interview was a blockbuster.”
If so much, by Sardesai’s own reckoning, could rest on the choice of the interviewer and the tone of the interview, the TV studios would seem to have played some part in how the campaign unfolded. Sardesai quotes an interview of Yogendra Yadav’s, “I would say that if the BJP had finished 5 per cent down, they would have lost around eighty seats. Roughly speaking, this is the effect you can attribute to the media.” It is a questionable figure, especially given that Yadav wasn’t complaining of similar media boost for AAP in the Delhi Assembly elections, but it does suggest that the role of the media and the decisions taken by editors have a significant role in our election process.
Sardesai’s response is typical of the tone of the book, “In the final analysis, neither sanctimoniousness or self-flagellation is necessary. To suggest the media ‘created’ the Modi wave is to give ourselves undeserved self-importance. And it is also disrespectful to the mandate given to Modi by millions of Indians who have reposed faith in him. … Ad whiz Piyush Pandey got it right—‘Media didn’t create the wave, it simply rode on it.’” If an ad whiz actually believed this simplification he would have no job left, what is more surprising is that Sardesai should. This is one case where he should have invoked some shades of grey, and he fails to do so.
This rather charitable absolution he grants to his profession seems to be rooted in a rather passive view of his medium, “The TV camera, I have always believed, is an amoral technology—it covers both good and bad, and it simply goes where the action is.” I would like to believe that a camera does not travel on its own, there are people who decide where it goes and what it points at, and that is a moral responsibility. Certainly, what Rajdeep doesn’t seem to have realized is that what he believes is true of a camera cannot be true of a book.
Republished with the permission of www.biblio-india.org