PM as columnist

If Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s New Year greetings to the nation in the form of My musings from Kumarakoram can be compared to the State of the Union address made by heads of state in other democracies, the chosen medium leaves much to be desired. The appearance of the Musings as a two-part article only in some ‘‘selected’’ newspapers clearly goes to prove that either his spin doctors are clearly not doing their jobs efficiently, or they have decided to make the PM into a syndicated columnist. Transparency instead of patronage, all the prime minister’s men must realise, is the name of the game in this business. When heads of state normally want to address "all their fellow countrymen" — as the Musings claims to do in its opening lines — they appear on national television networks, generally during prime time, and additionally provide direct press briefings to all publications. In our country where less than half the population is literate it would be well nigh impossible for the PM to reach theeyes and ears of all his fellow countrymen, especially those that reside in the vast rural hinterland, unless his message was disseminated much more widely than through some selected newspapers. After all, the PM, is the head of the government for everyone, not only for those who agree with his party’s stand on the matter.

As far as the contents of the Musings are concerned, it is indeed commendable that it touches on the crucial issue of tolerance, thus reflecting the spirit of the new millennium. The PM’s assertions that "wrongs of the medieval past could not be rectified by a similar wrong in modern times" is reasonable and persuasive. It is only through such a spirit of committed tolerance that the legacy of the Ayodhya problem can be resolved. In this respect the implicit warning that any organisation attempting to disturb the status quo at the disputed site in Ayodhya will be dealt with by law should be a lesson for those comprising the lunatic fringe. His attempts to seek a "meaningful dialogue" with Pakistan and "a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem’’ has already won him international accolades.The Musings rather succinctly lays out the two fundamental questions on which a generation can be judged: One, how many legacy problems inherited from the past has been resolved? Two, how strong is the foundation that has been laid for the future development of the nation? What the PM’s advisers obviously chose to ignore was that the issue of transparency touches both these questions directly. For the Fourth Estate, which was muzzled during the Emergency, a patron-client relationship between the first two estates and a section of the fourth, is indeed a legacy problem of the past. The PM is absolutely right when he stressed on the fact that the agenda of reforms "must be depoliticised". But transparency is inbuilt into the logic of reforms. It is only by putting an end to the system of patron-client relationships, both in the economy and in the polity, including the media, that a "strong foundation can be laid for the future development of the nation" as Vajpayee fondly hopes in his Musings.