Much Ado About Nothing!

The media seems to have lapped up Natwar Singh’s so-called revelations with an eagerness that makes one suspect it has nothing better to report these days. What the disgruntled former Congressman and one-time close associate of Congress President Sonia Gandhi has “revealed” is old hat. I am referring specifically to his “disclosure” that Rahul was dead against Sonia becoming prime minister, as he feared for her life. Well, this is not news at all. The proverbial “short public memory” that politicians bank on and the media relentlessly exploits, seems to have infected the fourth estate itself, or at least large parts of it seem to be guilty of selective amnesia that seems to be willfully self-infected.

When the NDA was defeated despite its much-touted ‘India Shining’ campaign and the United Progressive Alliance came into being, with Sonia Gandhi as its chairperson, it was assumed then that the Italian-born bahu of Indira Gandhi would succeed Atal Behari Vajpayee as India’s next prime minister. With the Left parties more than willing to prop up a coalition of convenience headed by the Congress, merely to settle an old ideological score with the BJP, crossing the mandatory halfway mark in the Lok Sabha had become a foregone conclusion.

Readers would recall the reactions of a section of the political class to the prospect of a prime minister of foreign origin which was anathema. The current external affairs minister had even threatened to shave her head and lead the life of an ascetic, if it ever came to pass. This dark drama was being played out even as the victors were busy celebrating their unexpected victory at the polls. It was at such a time, when uncertainty loomed large over who would become India’s next prime minister, that former chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, had first spilt the beans. 

Basu had revealed to sections of the media in Kolkata that Sonia’s children were strongly opposed to her ascending the prime minister’s throne as they feared “she would be killed, much like her mother-in-law and husband”. This was even reported widely in the print media at that time. Therefore, whatever Natwar Singh has ‘revealed’ is not really news. It is merely confirming what has been known all along. So then, what has evoked such a response from the Indian media, with the electronic media especially going to town over these so-called revelations?

Has the electronic media become so preoccupied with TRPs that it has lost all sense of proportion and timing? Or, is it merely symptomatic of a dearth of tell-all political memoirs in India that makes even the public lap up anything and everything that is on offer, every now and then? Or, did the fact that the so-called revelations were contained in the autobiography of Natwar Singh, who was a close confidante of the Gandhi family for close to three decades, and had worked with Indira, Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, have something to do with the way it was received? Did it whet the appetite of the public making the media feed it with regurgitated news? You decide...