TALES OF TRAVESTY
DR. JITENDRA SINGH
Long many years ago, Television or TV debates were unheard of but there still were occasions when bitterest of the bitter foes did get to confront each other in full public view. On one such occasion, Dr Shyama Prasad Mookherjee had, irked by Jawaharlal Nehru’s remark that Jan Sangh was an evil on India’s political scene, retorted back ‘‘Mr Nehru, the problem with you is that you see an evil in everything except yourself”! And, imagine, what was the sequael to this ! No more rejoinders or refrains but a simple apology next day from Nehru with a humble confession that he should not have lost his temper and made that remark which had provoked Mookherjee.
We have come a long way since then. Much water has flown down the Indian capital’s river Yamuna in the last 60 years. Wisdom has yielded place to arrogance, intellect to conceit, humility to pride, positivity to prejudice. Would anyone today so easily believe that while introducing the Members of Parliament to visiting Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev, the then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had introduced opposition Jan Sangh’s young MP Atal Behari Vajpayee as a potential Prime Minister material. Or, would anyone believe that years later, Opposition leader Atal Behari Vajpayee had described the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as incarnation of Goddess Durga while hailing India’s victory in Bangladesh war.
A visible change in the level and phrase of public debate could perhaps be explained in the context of contemprary era of TRP when loud-mouth invective and spicy abuse are known to get the better of logic or reason. And, maximum attention as well media coverage is received by a newly emerging style inspired by what can be described as ‘‘Digvijay Singh school of debate’’.
Thanks to TV ! Most of the politicians today are constantly at pains to appear younger and attractively decked up….something which would have never occurred to them while granting a print interview to a newspaper twenty years ago. But, there are side-effects too… to put it precisely, side effects of regular daily basis TV debate on instant issues. Cosmetics sometimes get the better of content. Graphics sometimes get the better of grammar. And finally, the urge to score a point gets the better of civility. In the high TRP melee that follows, sometimes encouraged by the anchor himself, the issue under discussion gets inadvertantly pushed aside for another debate, another day, hogging another TRP.
Francis Bacon once said, the greatest harm to the cause of literature is done by the teachers of literature. The cue is to guard against the possibility of the cause of public debate suffering harm from the debator himself with the common man, in disgust, turning off from the debate itself and Umapathy lamenting the sight of repulsion resulting not from what was said but what was unsaid, a La Faiz, ‘‘Woh Baat Saare Fasaane Mein Jiska Zikr Na Tha, Woh Baat Unpe Barhi Na-gavaar Guzri Hai!’’
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