Bhakts on a rampage

Modi isn't the problem, the growing fanaticism of his supporters is.

Hours after he was heckled at New York’s Madison Square Gardens, Headlines Today Consulting Editor Rajdeep Sardesai tweeted: ‘Super speech by Modi; not so super behaviour by some bhakts. Guess some things won’t change.’ It is a statement that succinctly sums up the ugly tenor of the post-election political discourse in India. Modi isn’t the problem any longer. Even for those who didn’t vote him in. It is the growing fanaticism of his supporters at congregations like the one in MSG, on social media and on TV news networks that have taken it upon themselves to do the job of breathless cheerleading for the PM, that is.

 

 

Several things about the Sardesai incident are scary. Video footage seems to suggest that he did pull the first punch, a lapse of judgment certainly. But only after he was verbally assaulted, jeered at, and his children and family abused repeatedly by the overzealous crowds who did not like his line of questioning.

 

If you thought this kind of hostility towards a journalist doing his job would have met with screams of disapproval, there was only sadistic joy to be found among the mobs on cyberspace. Even journalists, and editors (laughably from a channel which faced the ignominy of being caught red handed on tape seeking bribes last year) hurled accusations at him, of being an anti-national and wanting to malign the image of the PM abroad. He deserved the befitting reply from proud NRIs they said. Why? Because he had the gall to persist with questions which several other ‘journalists’, busy embellishing favourable headlines about the visit, refused to.
 

Are we, in our jingoistic backing of a charismatic leader, making the principal journalistic act ( Rajdeep Sardesai's 5 questions) of asking a question a crime? Are we, with our fallacious ideas about national pride, forgetting that the premise of the relationship between a journalist and the government is meant to be adversarial in the first place, and not kindly? Are we saying we will tolerate only such reporting that says good things about the establishment, and muzzle every contrarian voice?

 

Much as their recent conduct has made us forget, the job of the media is not merely to disseminate positive sound bytes from supporters. Like it or not, it is equally to hunt for voices amid the crowd that may go against the grain, a hunt that the entire mainstream media abandoned in New York by not covering the anti-Modi protests that were happening alongside the jubilations(such protests have taken place in the past as well during former PM Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi's visit). And the one man who did make a vague attempt at it – Sardesai - is mauled and summarily declared a traitor, an anti-national, a rabble rouser, a party pooper who deserved the treatment he was meted out?

 

Patriotism for one’s country or love for one’s leader is not the equivalent of breast beating nationalism with a cultish reverence for elected representatives. It isn’t dozens committing suicide because J Jayalalithaa is convicted. That is sycophancy. Patriotism is the act of holding our leaders, and those that voted them to power accountable by asking questions that might often be unpalatable (and letting journalists do the same). Many of us in India, unable to contain our hyper excitement about the new PM, after suffering a dud government for 10 years, seem to have forgotten that.