Does 'public opinion' matter?

The Japanese call them 'uncrowned emperors' of their country because they are seen as being above the law. In the UK, they are despised as low life. In Singapore they are kept on a tight leash. In Russia they are sometimes bumped off if they become too nosey and inconvenient. In India they are seen as being entirely purchasable, sometimes with no more than a few glasses of whiskey. The US, being a country of extremes, puts them on pedestals of varying heights when not reviling them as the scum of the earth, which is most of the time.

This social view of journalists and the approach to them stems from one thing alone: their ability to influence public opinion. To have read it in a newspaper, to have heard it on the radio or, most potently, to have seen it on TV, gives things such an imprimatur of authority and truth that even the mightiest tremble at the prospect of being labelled as blackguards. A journalist of low credibility, working for a media organisation with the lowest credibility, can report something which is only 1 per cent true. It is that true part that will influence public opinion, not the 99 per cent that is either untrue or so exaggerated as to be almost untrue. Clearly, public opinion matters.

That perhaps explains why the CPI(M) has suddenly softened its opposition to the nuclear deal. The week that has just gone by saw it being portrayed by a wide variety of non-partisan commentators as, if not as an agent of China, then certainly as a party that did not hesitate to act in a manner that would help it and Pakistan. Public opinion was becoming overwhelming on this issue and the CPI(M) has apparently bowed to it. It has sought to wriggle out of the embarrassment by taking up all kinds of issues such as minority rights so that public attention can be deflected from what has been its most major gaffe in the last 40 years. In 1962 it had refused to condemn China and even accepted a split in the party.

It would be nice to believe that this organisational sensitivity to public opinion extends to the bureaucracy, the police and the citizen. But that is not the case. The sins of the bureaucracy and the police have been documented often enough but the citizen is not pure as driven snow either. He is the public, yet his opinion can be easily influenced by factors such as identity. Ask him to choose between a convicted murderer or rapist from his own caste and a man of impeccable integrity and credentials from another and nine times of ten, he will choose the former. As the poet A K Ramanujam once explained in an essay entitled 'Is there an Indian way of thinking?', Indians don't seem to have a sense of absolute morality. They place everything in some context or another. And, depending on the context, what the rest of the world would regard as being wrong in an absolute sense, becomes quite all right in India. Most Indians also seem to be highly distrustful of the State which, in their experience, is often predatory and biased against them. They prefer to trust customary sources of authority. This tends to render the media toothless, as we have seen so often when it comes to things like inter-caste marriages or communal riots.