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Journalism of Courage
Whenever union defence minister runs out of excuses, he resorts to the oldest trick in the book 8212; blame the media. So it was no surprise that in his response to the demand from outraged women activists that he apologise for the observations he made in Parliament last Wednesday, Fernandes played true to script. He was, he said, 8216;8216;deeply pained8217;8217; 8212; no, not it seems by the effect his words had on people, but the manner the media reported his speech. The ploy may have worked in a pre-television era but even the few scraps of television footage of the May 1 debate on Gujarat that Doordarshan threw at us sufficed to prove that Fernandes8217; words were shocking, appalling, sickening 8212; the precise terms that angry women activists had used to describe their response to the speech. In any case, even the Union home minister found it difficult to agree with the defence minister on this occasion. As L.K. Advani observed on the floor of the House: 8216;8216;Jo raksha mantri ne kaha, atpata sa laga8217;8217; I found what the defence minister said awkward.
Rarely, in fact, has a parliamentary intervention elicited such widespread condemnation, right across the social spectrum. The reason for this is not far to seek. In his desperation to defend the BJP government and its protege in Gujarat, Fernandes rendered acts of extreme barbarism as unexceptional, almost ordinary, everyday events. In his attempt to make the Congress squirm over the 1984 riots, as well as its record in Gujarat, he ended up glossing over events that required urgent redressal. This was not a school debating exercise, where scoring points over one8217;s opponent is the only objective, this was the nation talking to itself on a crisis of gargantuan proportions. Fernandes, more than most others in the NDA government, had even less reason to whitewash the terror, having visited the state when bestiality was unbound during the very early stages of the pogrom. He had faced violent mobs and seen for himself the desperation of people being systematically hunted down, tortured and butchered. So when he does not have a word of condemnation for a dispensation that presided over this catastrophe, when he goes out of his way to render the crimes perpetrated in this interregnum as almost palatable, it indicates either extreme physical blindness or, more plausibly, a very high degree of cynicism created by vaulting political ambition 8216;which o8217;erleaps itself8217;.
