Opinion House is in Session
How it succeeds where news TV fails.
The greatest show on earth is back on TV this week,after what has seemed like forever. Weve been discussing it for so long,anticipating it,and now we get to see the real thing in action. No,not the World Cup. I meant Parliament. When its two Houses met again last Monday,after months in which politics became just spokesmen snarling at each other on TV channels,it was almost a relief to see the thing itself,practically unmediated. After all,dont many of us have the disturbing,persistent feeling that news TV isnt quite telling us the story,that it is being spun at us in a puzzling,frequently contradictory way? Well,this is television,and now and again,it doesnt just have overwrought interpretative blather,it has the raw material.
Remember being told by one news TV anchor after another that the prime minister wasnt defending himself adequately? Or that he was evasive about questions? Well,they obviously meant that he wasnt defending himself to them. Or that he didnt give them the answers they wanted at his TV-only press conference last week. News TV believes that it has made Parliament redundant. Our politicians should justify themselves to the nation,it will thunder and,if some of them dont appear on this show next week,theyre clearly shirking work.
Wake up,boys and girls in coats. Youre not The Nation,and MPs dont take an oath to keep you informed when theyre sworn in. Theyre supposed to talk in Parliament,not on TV. I understand you could get confused after all,some of the pols are,too. The Congress Jayanthi Natarajan forced an adjournment of the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday because she was talking to TV cameras outside about the Godhra verdict when she was supposed to be inside seconding the motion of thanks to the Presidents address.
So if you actually wanted to hear the PM subjected to tougher questions than news TV managed,you should have listened to Arun Jaitley in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday,in which he niggled away at what the PMO knew when. And perhaps,if youre concerned the PMs been too silent,you should have listened to the PMs defence of his actions on Thursday,in which he called Jaitley a great master of confounding techniques. But on TV,this enlightening exchange would never be played up difficult to attach an exclusive tag to a Rajya Sabha speech.
Meanwhile,on Tuesday,in the Lok Sabha,Sushma Swaraj took on Pranab Mukherjee,for comparing the Opposition to Maoists at a meeting in Siliguri and hugged him afterwards. Kapil Sibal,who got away at a press conference with statements on the presumptive loss from 2G licences that were widely derided as ridiculous once the presser was safely over,tried to make some of the same statements again,but got torn into by the Opposition this time. If you get a clearer picture of the debate by just watching it than by watching the commentators,the commentators arent doing their job.
So watch Doordarshans Parliament channels. Yes,theres much to be done for them. The sound off the House floor isnt great. The producers should be able to identify the MPs who stand up to interject. A rolling sidebar should tell us which bills are coming up for discussion when,and what the issues are. Discussions during the break should be on-point,not looking forward to debates a week hence. Translation would help,too. If Aaj Tak can translate Mamata Banerjees Hindi into Hindi during the railway budget (seriously,they did,infuriating everyone with a Bengali accent),cant DD-LS have a simultaneous translation option?
News TV needs to recover the understanding that its best moments come when it needs to spin the least. The highlight of the TV week was one hour of a senile dictator rambling in a rundown basement in Tripoli. No crazy people in studios are half as compelling.
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