Done reporting on the privacy case, in which the state had taken the bizarre stand that Indians have no right over their selves, the press is now going to have a lot of fun with the government’s affidavit in the Delhi High Court against the criminalisation of rape. The plea is that criminalisation “may destabilise the institution of marriage”, and the argument is that what appears to be marital rape to a wife may not appear so to others. Such a sophisticated and persuasive argument deserves wide application. Indeed, what appears to be dowry to a prospective bride may appear to innocent bystanders to be unconnected objects — an apartment, a car, a bicycle or a stack of gold biscuits. And who can deny that anti-dowry activism and legislation have attacked an unpleasant feature of the institution of marriage? Shouldn’t we re-legalise dowry to shore up a great institution? By the government’s reasoning, that should follow. Just days after elevating hearts and minds with the factually correct observation that the prime minister and chief ministers owe allegiance to the nation and to states, rather than their parties, a bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court protested that it was quoted out of context by the usual suspect — irresponsible media. Apparently, responsible media is supposed to limit its reporting to written orders, which provide the only true context. The legal fraternity has traditionally restricted itself to written texts, but it seems unreasonable to impose this curb on the media at a time when transparency is regarded as a magic bullet. Now, all but the most sensitive cases should be tried out in the open, not in camera but on camera. The case that stayed on camera for days was that of filmi baba Gurmeet Singh, whom TV channels consistently referred to by the frightfully dated socialist alias of Ram Rahim. No one seems to use the ‘Insan’ bit, maybe because it rings of humanism and the European Enlightenment, and reminds us of the years wasted trapped in schoolrooms and university lecture halls, learning about stuff we would rather not know. Encouragingly, the media stayed with the story despite the constant threat of physical violence. In fact, intimidation appeared to draw them like flies. And some of them did sober, informative stories examining how a dera operates. Saahil Menghani of CNN News18 did a series of interviews with people leaving the Dera Sacha Sauda’s premises through the police cordon, and they appeared to be regular village folk who got caught in the wrong place. Unlike the lathi-wielding mobs whose images dominated the coverage, they just wanted to go home. And Justin Rowlatt of the BBC entered the dera’s complex, the “city within a city”, to convey a spatial idea of the holdings of an Indian cult. Gurmeet Singh joins a long list of guru guys who lost everything because of a sexual misdemeanour. The fall of Asaram Bapu’s empire is fresh in the mind, but the biggest tumble ever was taken by Hot Yoga entrepreneur Bikram Choudhury, who rose like a meteor in the US in the decade after Woodstock with the simple stratagem of heating yoga rooms to the temperature of a Delhi kitchen in summer. Shirley Maclaine, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen, Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock, Maud Adams and John Saxon numbered among his pupils — and Raquel Welch, whom he went and sued for the theft of certain poses. And then a student sued Choudhury in turn in 2013, on roughly the same grounds as Ram Rahim, and that was the end of his fleet of Rolls Royces. In London, the news of Big Ben’s chimes being stopped last week — to prevent renovation workers from being deafened — was reported right up there with the third round of Brexit talks. Both marked the end of the world as the Brits know it. Meanwhile, James Graham’s play about the rise of the Sun under young, risk-taking and union-breaker Rupert Murdoch is moving next week from the Almeida Theatre in Islington to the Duke of York’s, which is much more accessible to visitors. It depicts a Murdoch we don’t know any more and has been getting excellent reviews, the most interesting of which is by Robert Shrimsley, editorial director of the Financial Times. Nephew of Bernard Shrimsley, first deputy editor and second editor of the Sun, he was an innocent bystander as a child of the events which would create tabloid journalism. He concludes that the depiction of his uncle was not true to life, but that the play is true to history. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would have said.
