Politically, it’s been a buzzing week. The commies made the people of Delhi see red first thing in the morning with a jacket ad in all the best papers showing a picture of Kerala’s new chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan looking like a triumph of dentistry. The CPI(M) has been soundly ticked off for conspicuous depiction but for the press, there’s nothing like victorious chief ministers trying to register the feat on the popular mind. And the prime minister is celebrating his government’s second birthday, too. Was the foundation for yet another third front laid yesterday on Red Road? Kolkata’s fastest stretch of tarmac has seen action before. Hurricanes and Spitfires made emergency landings on it, after being shot to pieces over Burma and Indochina during the Japanese advance in World War II. Even so, Mamata Banerjee’s swearing-in ceremony took it by storm. The show featured a phalanx of non-aligned chief ministers and leaders, tycoons capable of footing the bill, PR people deeply embedded in Delhi’s power circuits and scads of film stars, local and from Mumbai, including Amitabh Bachchan, without whom the picture is never complete these days. Both the DMK and the AIADMK had sent representatives to the show — a fine instance of hedging. The BJP was geographically split, with central ministers Arun Jaitley and Babul Supriyo attending the event and the state unit boycotting it, preferring to gherao police stations which had presided impassively over post-poll violence. It’s impossible not to see this swearing-in as a live demonstration of national capability. Banerjee was soundly diddled by Mulayam Singh Yadav on her last national foray, but she could be ready to give it another spin. Why not? She’s completely secure in her home state. The Bengali channel 24 Ghanta reports that a confectioner has even made a foot-high kheer doll in her image. In local terms, that’s serious endorsement. Earlier in the week in Tamil Nadu, the mass swearing-in of the AIADMK government was extraordinary, too. It was uplifting to see so many ministers and legislators pulling together like a church choir, instead of yelling at each other. And how thoughtful of them, to telescope the proceedings on account of Jayalalithaa’s health by singing out the oath of office in unison, like the national anthem. In a bow to her opposite number in Tamil Nadu, Banerjee had her ministers take the oath in batches of four and five. It was supposed to be 10 per batch, according to the Bengali news channels, but with 42 ministers including the chief minister, that would have left one person conspicuously taking the oath alone, apart from Banerjee. Windfall prominence was avoided by staggering the numbers. Television news serves as national curator of the bizarre, so one would have expected the channels to leap incontinently upon the story of Devidas Parbhane, the onion farmer who claims to have sold a ton of produce and brought home only Rs 1. The PTI story travelled well on websites run by print media and those with a South Asian clientele, but did not exactly flourish on TV. Now, this sounds a bit ghoulish but never mind — more opportunities lie ahead. Our learned agriculture correspondent, who truly knows his onions, has been predicting hard times for weeks, and Parbhane could be the first mover. Rising onion prices get tremendous media attention, apparently because onions ended the BJP’s prospects in Delhi. But one suspects that it is really because urban, middle class home economics are affected. It will be interesting to see if the other side of the story, farmer distress in an onion crash, gets similar coverage. TV was over the moon with the launch of ISRO’s prototype reusable launch vehicle, the RLV-TD, quite forgetting that the last two characters stand for “Technology Demonstration”. Especially on the Hindi channels, it sounded like India suddenly had a full-fledged space shuttle and would give Elon Musk a run for his money by next Tuesday. Some foreign publications like the UK Telegraph were more balanced, highlighting the very preliminary nature of the launch from Sriharikota. Indeed, it will take a bare minimum of five years to develop a production model, and that is being seriously optimistic. But the Telegraph had to go and blow it in the end, pointing out that the Indian space programme costs £570 million per year, that three-quarters of Indians earn less than £54 per month, and that in 2015-2016, when the UK Department of International Development ended financial assistance to India, it gave us £20 million. It reminds you of those late 20th century cartoons in which Indians rode moon rockets with a begging bowl in hand. Didn’t DFID close the tap precisely because India had developed to the extent that it has, among other nice things, a £570 million space programme?
