Beware the churning process

The prime minister dwelt on the subject of the media. 8216;8216;Increasingly it is being said that society and the polity are becoming more and more media- driven.8217;8217; After one of his studied pauses, he added,8216;8216;But the question that arises is who will drive the media?8217;8217; If the market and profits are the sole driving forces behind the media, then society will be ill served.

A few days later, the cabinet cleared for the first time direct foreign investment in the newspaper industry. This, against the backdrop of a series of draconian actions against Outlook, Tehelka, Alex Perry, Geelani, among others. Considering that on each one of the issues, I have known BJP ministers hold different views, what is the dominant Sangh Parivar line? I was trying to make sense of all this, when I received a call from a senior RSS functionary. He said he wished to share with me the latest thinking within the Parivar on the Hindu-Muslim issue.

The situation, he said, was getting out of control. The kind of instability that events like Gujarat threaten to perpetuate was cause for concern. 8216;8216;We have to put our heads together to see how ordinary Hindus and Muslim can resume normal lives alongside each other and not in segregation,8217;8217; he said. I replied it was encouraging that the Sangh Parivar, or at least a wing of it, was addressing itself to the general disharmony enveloping the nation, but the spokesmen of the Parivar would carry conviction if there was one coherent line on various issues.

When the prime minister talked of the media in a developing society not driven exclusively by market forces, I thought he was hinting at the need for a vibrant public services media to set some standards. It was not an off-the-cuff remark; it was a prepared speech. How do you square the speech with the move on FDI in print, I asked. The prime minister8217;s speech and the foreign investment policy issue form two different strands, my RSS interlocutor pointed out. One had nothing to do with the other.

But how did he square the theory of the inevitability of a civilisational clash with the current search for some sort of working harmony between Hindus and Muslims, I asked. Pat came the reply, 8216;8216;A civilisational clash is academic speculation; a framework for harmonious co-existence is the need of the hour.8217;8217; He then switched to the war on terror and how this was creating distances by a gradual demonisation of the Muslim. I could not believe my ears that a senior member of the RSS was saying this. 8216;8216;Remember the image of the terrorist in 1982-84?8217;8217; he continued, 8216;8216;The terrorist then wore a turban and he was a Sikh. Today the Muslim is being cast as a terrorist and this kind of stereotyping is going to recoil on the nation.8217;8217;

All of this was as new to me as was much else that followed. For instance, he confirmed what I had heard from some of his colleagues at the Nachiketa award function. The manner in which the war against terrorism was being led by the US was, in the Parivar8217;s perception, raising question marks over the general western gameplan.

I then posed a simple question to my interlocutor: how does one establish any coherence between the positive statements being made by the RSS leader and the appointment of Vinay Katiyar as the BJP leader in UP? My interlocutor was stumped. 8216;8216;Look,8217;8217; he said emphatically, 8216;8216;A churning process is on from which in the initial stages we must expect some good, some bad, even some confusion.8217;8217;