The Supreme Court dismissed four PILs on Rafale on Friday, 14 December. Under Article 32 of the Constitution, the Hon’ble Court cited jurisdiction as the reason for not delving into this mega defence deal. The SC order on Rafale is a lesson to the Congress.
Hon’ble Court depended solely on the documents placed by the government before it – signed or unsigned – in a sealed cover.
The Congress party did not approach the Hon’ble Supreme Court and remains steadfast on its demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe. I will come to the Supreme Court verdict shortly, but before that we need to examine the conduct of some of our leading media stars.
The Stark Absence of Basic Journalism
Most media channels did the predictable thing by outhashtagging each other – #RafaleRahulFail; #RaGaFail – wanting to be more loyal than the Shah.
A prime-time anchor, whose Twitter bio says he is an investigative journalist, tweeted:
When you do a good investigative story, your viewers hail you as a brilliant journalist but when you do a story based on false documents, it becomes our duty to question the decision of those who gave you false documents.
Just because you were praised for a good story in the past, it does not give you a permanent immunity from questions.
In any case, it does not require you to be an investigative journalist to know that our questions are directed at the government, which placed incorrect information before the Hon’ble Court, and not at individual judges.
Editors who made careers – their own and of those who currently occupy positions of power – out of leaked C&AG reports citing notional losses, decide to believe in a notional C&AG report. Forget investigative journalism, forget journalism of courage, all that was needed was basic journalism to detect these fairly obvious and gaping loopholes.
An over-enthusiastic journalist considered the doyen of journalism of National Interest, was so gleeful in celebrating a mythical ‘kick in the butt’ for the Congress, that he used both his feet to kick and discovered he had fallen on his own butt by the evening. He tweeted this within an hour of the verdict:
He pinned the tweet within 2 hours and unpinned it after Rahul Gandhi’s press conference.
Another journalist tweeted:
Their channel ran hashtags such as #ModiRafaleWin and #NoRafaleScam. Their Hindi channel claimed “haar par maafi maange Rahul Gandhi, Modi jeete Rahul haare” (Rahul Gandhi apologises after defeat, Modi wins, Rahul loses). Then there is a journalist who tweeted:
Another asked:
It Took Congress Press Conference for Media to Wake Up
It took a press conference by Rahul Gandhi to highlight this glaring anomaly for the media to wake up to it. Something that should ideally have been done by the media first and followed up by the Opposition, as it happened in the good old days when the UPA was in power and Arun Jaitley was preparing day after tomorrow’s headlines today for Arnab Goswami.
The bane of this era is the total, wilful surrender of the media before the government. Those who go out of their way proffering advice to the Congress on who should be its chief minister in which state, need to be told how they should start practicing their own profession now.
Each one of them is asking questions to Rahul Gandhi. He is not the complainant in the Supreme Court. Not one of them thought it right to analyse the verdict and ask questions to the government. And questions are aplenty.
Questions the Media Should Ask the Modi Govt
Apart from the hilariously obvious goof up on the CAG report, the obvious bungling on Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance of 2012 and Anil Ambani-led Reliance Defence Ltd incorporated on 28 March 2015 also escaped the attention of those who I call hawks of media in the Manmohan era and pigeons of media in the Modi era.
What was the role of the NSA in the functioning of Indian Negotiating Team and Contract Negotiation Committee? When did the initial approval for buying 36 aircraft (instead of 126) come from the Air Force? Why is it that Dassault can reveal the price, Anil Ambani’s company can reveal the price but the government cannot reveal it to the tax payer of India? Why was the benchmark price increased from $5.2 billion to $8.2 billion? Why has the claim of Defence Ministry official Sudhanshu Mohanty on this aspect been ignored?
The missionary zeal with which our media launches rescue missions for this government notwithstanding, the Supreme Court verdict has made the government look sillier and guiltier than before. The media’s complicit silence makes it look worse.
(The writer is former political secretary to Sheila Dikshit, and is with the Congress party. He tweets @Pawankhera. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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