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Journalism of Courage
Some print journalists never grow tired of the written word, not even when they move to the Prime Minister’s Office and are forced to restrict their declamations in service of the PM. Why then was Sudheendra Kulkarni, who’s written drafts and speeches and musings for four years, asked to shift roles to the much more public ‘‘voicer’’ of the PM’s speech at the UN General Assembly? The PM was speaking in Hindi, making a voice-over in English necessary. Having maneuvered to speak a day after Musharraf on September 12, Vajpayee’s speechwriters in the PMO had done a great job answering the Pakistani general. The sentences were, for a change, short and direct.
But it was a disaster from the start. For some reason, Kulkarni was asked to do the voicing and he wasn’t up to the occasion. Old-timers pointed out how Yash Sinha, an IFS officer in the Indian mission who had voiced Vajpayee’s speech in the last couple of years, had done such a great job. And wondered why the PM’s aides had not thought of this in advance.
Minding His Bhasha
Vajpayee has clearly been in full flow in New York this past week, gently poking fun at his antagonists as well as cracking jokes at his own expense. His last interaction with the press in New York on Sunday evening was vintage Vajpayee. Asked by one journalist why he had accused General Musharraf of being a ‘‘liar’’ at a function in honour of Vivekananda (‘‘Musharraf ne jhoot ki har seema paar kar di hai,’’ he said), Vajpayee replied, somewhat indignantly, ‘‘I didn’t call him a liar. He should be taken for what he is. Why should I give him a new designation?’’ Then he added, ‘‘That is the problem when you speak in Hindi.’’
Parivar Pressures
One would think that the Overseas Friends of the BJP, the BJP’s US chapter, would join forces to unitedly spread the message of the Parivar in the world’s most powerful country. Turns out that the smell of power even in faraway New Delhi has had the opposite effect.
There are now various sub-chapters of the OFB all over the US, each one jockeying for position and privilege. Some of that disaffection came to light even at the PM’s public press conference on his last day in New York, when an NRI journalist asked the PM about the role and ‘‘future’’ of Ambassador-at-large for NRIs Bhishma Agnihotri. (Agnihotri was later seen ‘‘thanking’’ him for his question.) External Affairs minister Yashwant Sinha was then forced to give Agnihotri a clean chit, saying he had a ‘‘beautiful future’’.
But later in the evening, when the OFB actually met the PM face to face and began to complain loudly about each other—the Washington chapter against the New York chapter against the Agnihotri’s coterie—the PM, quite disgusted at the whole show, is said to have given them the diplomatic version of a dressing-down.
