Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
What’s so special about this MR. VAIDIK -Ved Pratap Vaidik to give him his full name -the man who wants us to believe that he, a journalistic has-been, has the license to travel anywhere he wishes, meet anyone, including universally proclaimed terrorists and suggest solutions to vexed issues like Kashmir. As an exercise unexceptional but only if you don’t transgress into forbidden territory. Try as they might, any number of TV anchors, who sought his head for his brazen defence of his meeting with Hafez Saeed, the head of the Pakistani terror outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba and its parent organization, the obscenely rich Dawa-ul-Irshad, Mr. Vaidik wasn’t the one to yield.
Vaidik remained adamant. There was nothing wrong in his meeting Saeed. He refused to accept any guilt on this score. He seemed little bothered that Saeed has been cited by India as the prime mover behind the Pak terror attack on Mumbai which cost over 200 lives and very nearly destroyed the iconic Taj Hotel, Mumbai’s pride and joy.
Mr. Vaidik believes he had the journalistic license to have a friendly one-on-one banter with Saeed who has a ten million dollar prize put on his head by the US, who is a wanted criminal in India. And why on God’s earth would anyone deny Vaidik his professional high by questioning the legitimacy of his effort. But it’s not as simple as that.
Certainly things are not the way Vaidik wishes to see them. For one thing there is the question who does Vaidik write for. True, he was once connected with the Navbharat Times (so I am told) and with Bhasha, the Hindi version of PTI. I saw Mr. Vaidik refusing to answer the question repeated several times over by a TV anchor : “Mr. Vaidik, who do you write for ?” Parrot-like the answer was “I have been a journalist for 55 years”. Which compels one to ask Mr. Vaidik : So what.
“I have been a journalist for more years than you have been,” he boasts. That though does not give him immunity against any or all indiscretions he may be accused of. Call it arrogance or what you will. To go by his own account Mr. Vaidik has interviewed a virtual who’s who of national and international personalities which is a good thing. And why not? The problem arises when he puts himself above the law of the land or considers himself beyond reproach because of his political connections; because he is a close crony of Baba Ram Dev, the yoga expert, or that he has had links with an outfit which until very recently boasted of having a former IB director and currently the National Security Adviser to the Prime Minister, as its “marg darshak”. Yes, this outfit, the Swami Vivekananda trust, is known to have had a certain ideological bent (am not talking in a pejorative sense) which he shared and had led him to participate in many programmes sponsored by it.
And the egotist that Mr. Vaidik must be, he flaunted his proximity to the Prime Minister Modi with rare vulgarity in a TV interview in Pakistan. Isn’t it a fact that in his interview with the Dawn, Karachi TV he admitted to being in touch with the Prime Minister and that whenever he meets him next he would mention some of the propositions discussed in the same TV chat. Didn’t he say had he (Vaidik) been the Prime Minister he would have invited Saeed to India. Did he or did he not say in the same interview that POK and our Kashmir should be granted freedom, allowed to exist as a separate unit, like there is an India, a Pakistan, a Myanmar. He even suggested the formation of a confederation comprising India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar and even Mauritius, which after all was heavily populated by people of Indian and Pakistani origin. A true visionary, if there ever was one, this, our Mr. Vaidik!
The man who by his own admission has the license to shoot his mouth whichever way he chooses to – must remember he is a very, very senior journalist by his own reckoning -that he should have avoided a reference to a most wanted criminal a Mujahiud-e-Awal, the prime mujahid. His stature as a senior journalist surely give him the freedom to say if it were in his power he would personally invite Saeed to come over to India for a pow wow.
Let’s forget for a moment the “greatness” of Vaidik as a journalist -he is convinced that he must be the best the country has ever produced – what would you make of it if a Kashmiri leader was to suggest the merger of the two Kashmirs, the one with Pakistan and the other with India, letting them unify and granting them Azadi. Anyone in his place would have been picked up and sent behind bars. Sheikh Abdullah, the man who steered Kashmir’s accession to India spent 11 years in friend Jawaharlal Nehru’s jails when he mentioned the word “raishumari” or plebiscite. Mr. Vaidik, the self-appointed messiah of the sub-continent, has gone one better. Mind you, there are serious political writers in India who have plugged a sub-continental confederation idea but it has remained just an idea, one of the many thrown up in the past by the expert as much as a layman. Mr. Vaidik obviously is a man in his own class and that’s why he may have chosen to bring on to the table the confederation idea in his Karachi interview. Maybe he was thinking in terms of Akhand Bharat which appears to be more in tune with his antecedents and in tune as well with the core thinking of the saffron brigade.
I for one was amazed by the Government’s response the first day the l’affaire Vaidik hit Parliament House. The Government that day suddenly demonstrated its commitment to upholding the freedom of the Press, forgetting the specified constitutional constraints. Ms. Sushma Swaraj has since need amends. Mr. Vaidik, a journalist, is of course free to meet anyone he chooses to. But that doesn’t give him the freedom to subvert the nation’s clearly stated positions on issues such as the territorial integrity of the nation and matters concerning national security. The Government’s obvious attempt to rethink its position on the issues raised by Mr. Vaidik’s misadventure is evening of the second day there was some rethinking which is all to the good . It doesn’t have to be the devil’s advocate however tempting that may seem. It does not have to be so protective of Shri Vaidik. For his part Vaidik continued to ride the high horse. After 55 years in journalism how could one expect him to seek the Indian High Commission’s blessings? He apparently is too senior for all that.
I have in my time travelled quite a bit, sometimes with Prime Ministers, other times with Foreign Ministers, I have covered international meets and I have routinely sought meetings with our High Commissioners, Ambassadors, simply to understand a given situation from their standpoint. I didn’t have to buy what they offered; it was essentially to upgrade your background. Mr. Vaidik, when asked about this aspect was angry. With all his years of experience how dare one expect him to involve the High Commission in Islamabad? It’s another matter though that Mr. Vaidik had gone with an Indian delegation to Islamabad for one of those much tom-tommed peace initiatives and was a guest at the dinner hosted by the mission. The delegation returned to India within three days, Mr. Vaidik choosing to stay back for another two weeks to pursue his own agenda including talking to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who, I can vouch from personal experience, is the very best of hosts and of course the breath-taking (Vaidik’s breath, to be sure) meeting with the terror Chief Hafez Saeed. I will opt not to be judgmental nor elude motives to the Government but the Vaidik bit is too thick indeed to swallow.
Follow our WhatsApp channel