George goes off the air

In normal times, one just had to wave a television microphone before the minister8217;s nose and stand back and watch the transformation. No matter how exhausted he was, how wrapped up he may have been in matters of statecraft, a TV camera was all that was needed to visibly revive him.

He required no prompting,no cues, he didn8217;t even require questions, to expound for the next half hour on some matter of state that had been secreted from the time of Chandragupta Maurya and which would have remained confined in the womb of silence if it were not for this one man. What8217;s more, he could perform under all conditions, in a variety of languages, be it Bhojpuri or Tulu, Marathi or Bengali, Sanskritised Hindi or Hindiised Urdu, as the case may be.

Today, alas, that old trick doesn8217;t work any longer. The limelight seems to beckon no more. Press conferences, once the occasion for spirited diatribes against all and sundry, are today tame affairs with the Defence Minister inhabiting a shy corner. Wave a microphone before the minister and he declines to even glance at it. The old sparkle in the eye has disappeared, that perky curl that once sat atop his forehead like a cockatoo8217;s now looks as if it belongs to a rather mournful cockatoo.

The full import of this tragedy, this sudden silencing of George has, I believe, notquite been gauged by the rest of the country8217;s citizenry. Have we forgotten the great times he provided us just by the simple expedient of exercising his freedom of speech and deepening our freedom of information?There was that occasion over a year ago when he 8212; newly crowned as Minister of Defence 8212; decided to beard the Chinese dragon in its den single-handed.

Just when things were flagging and the country seemed to be sinking under the weight of its own ennui he raised the rallying cry,8220;China is potential threat number one,8221; and it resounded all the way from Thiruvananthapuram to Tibet.

It served to stir up the old adrenalin all right. Suddenly, all of us were chasing dragons in our backyards and looking zealously for secret service agents in our chicken chowmein with soya sauce. When we tired of that, George Fernandes pulled out his next bogey boogie and there we were, examining surveillance equipment in the Coco Islands. Myanmar is conspiring against this country and spying on it, whispered theDefence Minister darkly before the camera8217;s gaze. When the threat perceptions of Myanmar faded, it was time to get on to the next project. And what a project that was.

Operation Sink Admiral Bhagwat8217; was a soap opera that had more sobs in it then Saans. It kept us transfixed before TV screens for well-nigh two months. There was a time when you couldn8217;t switch on a television set in the country at any time, day or night, without hearing the Defence Minister eloquently defending himself, sometimes on three different channels simultaneously. Just when public attention on the Bhagwat affair began to drift, it was time for the next rocket. This time by issuing a clean chit to the ISI over the Kargil affair with characteristic insouciance. By that single statement, the Defence Minister brought a war to his doorstep and succeeded in upstaging the action in Kargil.

Now that he sits in a maun vrat that would have done a Vinobha Bhave proud, no more will a China be threatened or a Nawaz Sharif defended. There is,I believe, an inherent danger to the national character in all this. Chat show hosts could run out of conversational topics to toss to their experts, editorial writers may have to direct their energies in some new, unfamiliar direction and the rest of us will sink into a boredom unrelieved by the exertions of a man for whom valour was always the better part of discretion.