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September 1998, first issue
Nehru is Out, Nehru is In
Utterance of a President and media response to it
Amir Ali
Every year with unerring regularity and stifling boredom Presidents of our great Republic, some of whom have truly been great men or sons of the soil, have been holding forth on the eve of Independence Day on issues concerning the nation, the state, the world, the universe, etc. Over the years, these formal speeches and toothless pronouncements have made the long-suffering populace—the citizens—quite indifferent to the ritual. In this extraordinary year in the life of the Republic, President KR Narayanan decided to break the form, and turned his back on the ‘Address to the Nation’ tradition. He decided instead to speak to the left-leaning journalist and editor N. Ram in an interview, which was broadcast nationally over Doordarshan and Akashvani, the official television and radio networks.
Although the viewers and listeners were quite pleasantly surprised at this frank and somewhat ‘straight from the heart’ discourse, the Indian media sensationalized the matter the next day. Various newspapers found it astonishing that the President should speak so frankly and dare to defend the Nehruvian heritage in the days of Sangh Parivar. The papers also saw it as an assertion by the Office of the President against that of the Prime Minister. The general drift was that President has done something that he could have rather avoided. Herein lies the irony of the situation. That the political commentators, editors and other worthies of media should find a simple assertion of the basic values enshrined in the Indian Constitution an extraordinary deviation rather than a natural expression has gone unnoticed.
It is not for the first time that a President has given his own personal nuances to his utterance in relation to what he sees as government policy. In the heydays of Nehru, President Rajendra Prasad made Rashtrapati Bhavan (the Presidential residence and office) office as an oppositional pole to Teen Murti House (Nehru’s official residence). Rajendra Prasad was constantly sniping at Nehru and his policies and on more than one occasion went to the extent of threatening resignation. And it was accepted as part of political debate and normal in a functioning democracy. The present President was not expressing anything different from what Nehru or hundreds of political leaders and ‘national figures’ said or have been saying in the last half-century of India’s Independence. This expression of the ‘Nehruvian paradigm’ was regarded as the standard official line and the ‘consensus’ which the post-independence sociopolitical order reflected. Today the same expression by Narayanan is being shown by media heavyweights as ‘dissent’ and breaking the consensus.
This media reaction is an indication of how much the political space has shrunk today and the direction in which the Indian polity is moving—towards a ‘new consensus’ that the dominant media have played a great role in creating, which leaves the overwhelming majority of people out of reckoning in the formulation of policies.
Please click on the link below to read the text of the famous conversation:
K. R. NARAYANAN, President of India in conversation with N. Ram
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MEDIA
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