What does Bob Woodward have to do with Bihar? Nothing much, on the surface, except that both coincidentally relate to two impending elections—and thus figure in a larger story about democracy. Especially about one aspect that has come to supervene on everything else that passed before it: something that can only be defined in negation, a seed of anti-democracy operating now in the heart of the process. Bihar? The accumulated force of stereotypes is such that most readers will have no problem readily granting their assent to its inclusion in such a narrative.
But Bob Woodward? He’s one of the two star reporters of Watergate, the very acme of investigative journalism! Could there have been a higher instance of speaking truth to power than one which, ultimately, brought down an American president? So why him? Well, as you read this, the American media landscape is roiled by debate on an acute ethical question. Woodward has just outed with a book titled Rage, based on conversations with US president Donald Trump, which contains an extraordinary revelation. Not very extraordinary if you always assume the worst about Trump, which is a common enough reflex, but still a shocker.
So it turns out that Trump had confided in Woodward back in February itself that he knew exactly how deadly the Covid-19 virus was and what devastation it could wreak. Recall that this was a time when, instead of shoring up his country’s battle-readiness for a pandemic, Trump was making light of the threat in the most cavalier manner—an attitude that most agree directly led to thousands and thousands of preventable deaths. (America is the world’s worst-hit country, with over 1.93 lakh fatalities.)
One could of course question Trump’s ethics; one could perhaps, with equal profit, interrogate the virus itself. An amoral cipher will stare back at us. So that’s not it. Point is, why did Woodward wait seven months before making this revelation in a book released just before elections? Was it not part of his bounden duty to inform the American public that their President was taking them for a spin on a rollercoaster to hell—and save lives when he could? Woodward’s defence—that he didn’t know then Trump was not lying (!), didn’t know the President’s sources till May, wished to offer context and not just information, and wanted to “hold him accountable” before election—wear a bit thin.
Now let’s leave the election that’s being watched keenly by the international community, and come to the one unfolding in the Indian backyard. What are the narratives driving it? Few other states would have been pushed so wholesale into human distress by Covid season: for a good proportion of the penniless migrants you saw walking hundreds of miles in the Indian summer just to get back home, Bihar would have been home. Not that it would have brought succour: it’s deprivation that impelled them outward in the first place.
On top of that, there were devastating floods. Unlike Bombay or Gurgaon, floods in Bihar aren’t ‘sexy’, in newsroom parlance. So you wouldn’t know any of this if you followed this robust democracy’s robust media. What’s playing there is something that need not be repeated. A jungle of hashtags and screams on TV. Sushant Singh Rajput and Rhea Chakraborty are not people in themselves—dead or alive, though bleeding in either case. They are voodoo dolls into which the media can stick pins so as to produce an effect elsewhere.
The coming Bihar election, even in the less than ideal world we had, could have become an occasion to state a political choice: for solid political reasons. Those who prefer the Nitish Kumar administration, or even a solo run by its major coalition partner, the BJP, could have been given the choice to do so on positive grounds—if they deemed that such grounds exist. Instead, we have the spectacle of an election that is sought to be swayed on an issue that has only the thinnest symbolic connection to the life and economy of Bihar. Or to its complex politics and the way in which it seeks to articulate the very real needs of the people of Bihar—or fails to do so.
The lifeblood of a democracy is informed consent, and the unimpeded flow of good, valuable, credible and relevant information is a prerequisite for that. To take on the onus of offering that to the people is the media’s sole job—that is why it’s seen as the very circulatory system in which oxygenated blood flows to all parts of the body politic. The tragic farce that we see these days, in its essence, is built on an inversion of that function.
How not to disseminate news—or how to divert attention to trivialities or extraneous thrills—is the media’s real function today. This may have once been called a distortion, but has by now hardened to become a template in itself. Voting behaviour is a complex phenomenon, unduly impacted by issues of identity, social kinships and political affiliations—the final act is one that defies predictions. And yet, a vote is not an end in itself. It’s only a means to secure the widest possible well-being. If Woodward’s error lay in delay of vital information, our media short-circuits democracy in advance.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Resident Editor, Karnataka, The New Indian Express
(santwana@newindianexpress.com)