Will the forest departments of Maharashtra and Jammu & Kashmir be flooded with angry protests — 2,000 if not 20,000 — over the gut-wrenching communal slaughter of two leopards in the two states? The slaughter was on TV. On Times Now, the conservationist called in to comment was almost incoherent with anger and grief. He was real for me. Because a part of me couldn’t process the Kashmir village mob’s collective joyfulness of a job well done after a boulder was brought down on the bludgeoned and cowering animal. I am writing about the slaughter with the abiding sense of being a hypocrite, in that the distance between what those images did to me and what I am saying is so vast that my own words seem to mock what I feel.You may find some or most or all of the above somewhat or completely over-the-top. You are different from me in that case. Most of us differ frequently over what wrenches our gut or outrages us. Perhaps Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi was too busy in his youth being one of the key practitioners of S.S. Ray’s not-so-gentle Congress politics in Bengal to have learnt this simple truth. Perhaps his earlier experience — before he found prominence in Delhi — as a non-communist commissar of Bengali culture had taught him the value of blunt instruments. Who knows, perhaps Dasmunshi wept for India as he saw Shilpa Shetty weep? Might he have shuddered on our behalf when he saw a comic’s interpretation of Gandhi on two TV channels? Did he desperately want to protect every child in every home from the moral paralysis that inexorably followed the viewing of AXN’s take on advertising?I don’t know. But I know two things. First, in Dasmunshi we have a politician displaying extravagant signs of ministerial hubris. Second, he is getting away lightly, at least so far, precisely where he should be getting a very hard time — on TV.True, TV news channels did the what’s-the-minister-up-to stories. I saw NDTV’s and CNN-IBN’s reports. Nothing wrong with them — except they lacked the remorseless logic and reasoned anger that surely is called for when TV news is looking at a minister who has tasted the power of being the nation’s sermoniser-in-chief, and wants more.I know it is easy for me to say this but I don’t think it is wrong — IBN 7 and Sahara should not have apologised for having carried the Gandhi clip. Who demanded the apology? The people of India? Dasmunshi, TV news please note, is blithely dropping chapter and verse of the cable law to build a bridge between the people and his prescriptive and proscriptive excesses.I would be perfectly content and would not nitpick if every television news channel carries an interview with Dasmunshi, puts his policy through the wringer, and claim an exclusive. I was of course perfectly unsurprised when almost every channel claimed an exclusive on the Marriage-to-be that has — who doesn’t know now? — a Manglik twist. But Headlines Today still managed a surprise — repeat shots of a car outside the Bachchan home, a zoom on the number plate, and the channel beside itself with excitement at having brought to us live images of an automobile moving back and forward.
