SOROOR AHMED discusses why Indian media, both print and electronic, gave so wide and live coverage of the oath-taking ceremony of new US Presidnet, Barack Hussein Obama even at the cost of some important developments inside India.
It is understandable that the Americans celebrated the oath-taking ceremony of their new President, Barack Hussein Obama. The turn-out was unprecedented and the zeal shown by the crowd had no match in their own history. The Blacks, not allowed to vote till 1965, had reasons to feel elated, while the Whites went overboard in extolling the first non-White head of the state because they, as a guilty conscious race, had to erase the horrendous crime committed against the Negroes during the past four centuries. They see in Obama the last hope to revive the sinking economy.
But the big question is why we in India were made to watch on almost all our television channels for over three hours the live telecast of the President of a country situated thousands of kilometres from our coast. The front-page of almost all the English and even many vernacular dailies were completely devoted to this ceremony and no other news. The news related to him remained the lead item for several days on our TV, radio as well as in newspapers.
The Indian media behaved as if our country were the 51st state of the distant United States of America. In the process the important news related to the Kalyan Singh-Mulayam Singh tie-up in UP got pushed into the inside pages of many newspapers.
In Bihar almost all the dailies of Patna, not to speak of Delhi, completely blacked out the news of the brutal police lathicharge in the chief minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Darbar in West Champaran the same day. The people were protesting the widespread corruption and loot in the government machinery. There were many other important developments related to our own country, which were consciously played down or given no space at all.
In India the trend of telecasting the swearing-in ceremony of the American Presidents live from Washington started in 2001 when George Bush-II took over for the first time. This was repeated in 2005 as well. Many newspapers gave first page treatment to this item. But as in the United States, this time we crossed all the limits not only in just highlighting the event but in eulogising Obama to the sky. Our channels went on to telecast every smaller detail related to Obama and the cultural and musical programmes, which followed his oath-taking.
We do not know the size of the shoes of our Prime Minister but we now know that Obama’s is 11. Before Dr. Manmohan Singh was elected Prime Minister, we never knew the name of his wife and daughters. About Obama’s we knew everything months before he finally took over.
This obsession for everything American seems rather intriguing as Bush, and not Obama, was till recently the most popular personality in India (save and except some concerned circles). When the rating of the outgoing President was lowest in his own country – and in many other countries of the world – we were showering praise on him and his Republican Party.
Many Indians or people of Indian origin living in the United States had been rooting for the Republicans as the Indo-US nuclear deal was signed when the Republican president was in power. We went crazy when Republican, Bobby Jindal, became the governor of Louisiana. Many of them even went to see him as the future President of the United States of America.
Even in the Democratic Party many in India were strongly behind Hillary Clinton, obviously because she is the wife of the former President, Bill Clinton, who visited India. Hillary herself has good contacts in India. When primaries were going on some months back Digvijay Singh, the minister of state for external affairs in the Atal Behari Vajpayee cabinet, announced that he was eager to go to the United States to campaign for Hillary’s candidature among the Biharis there. Digvijay is from Bihar and he said this for the local consumption. But perhaps he was not aware that, not to speak of Biharis, even the Indians as such do not matter much, in the election for primaries.
However, by all accounts Barack Hussein Obama was the last choice of Indians who matter yet after his victory our public opinion-makers switched the side. They started seeing all the virtues in him and soon we started dubbing him as a great friend of India. No doubt the relationship between the two countries was never so good as it is today. We have common business and political interests. But we have common interests with many other countries as well. We still have a very cordial relationship with Russia and thousands of Indians go to that country to study medical and engineering. It was a former super power and still has the potential to bounce back to become a big power. We have strategic interest too with Russia as it is geographically much closer to us.
Yet the election held in Russia, not to speak of other countries, hardly got any coverage in the Indian media. The development in this country was also unique. President Vladmir Putin, after serving as the President for two consecutive terms, has now taken over as the Prime Minister of that country. But our media hardly discussed any issue related to this development for reason best known to them. The truth is our media barons have their own business interest in highlighting whatever big or small, good or bad is happening in the United States. They have absolutely nothing to do with Obama, a non-White becoming the President of that country.