He, an honest IAS officer. She, an honest IAS officer. Young. In their thirties. Barely into the fifth year of
the Indian Administrative Service. Mates of Batch 2009. There was more. Naturally.
He took on the land mafia in
Karnataka. He was their scourge. He untiringly tried to unearth tax evasion by
them He was transferred umpteen number of times. As his reward. The public
adored him. Of course.
She is credited with constructing
75,000 individual toilets in Mandya district where she is currently posted. Her
target is 1.02 lakh toilets in as many households. Under the Swachh Bharat
Abhiyan. On March 11, she was selected by the Union government to train fellow
IAS officers for effective implementation of her initiative.
Five days later, on March 16, he
died. He was found hanging from a fan in his home.
The unnatural death threw both of
them into a vortex which now threatens to blacken their well-earned official
reputations. It has already muddied and muddled their private lives.
When the dust settles down on this
case in the near future, as it naturally would, the two officers would be
remembered more for their private discretions or indiscretions than their
achievements as officers of the Indian Administrative Service. The media and
the politicians will be held solely responsible for such an eventuality. Should
they be? You judge.
A day after the officer’s death
there was a clamour for a CBI probe. The opposition parties in Karnataka and the
media were exclusively behind the clamour. The state government tried its best
to stall it, but eventually gave in.
Which means, on the face of it, the
premise that the death could have been a suicide is ruled out. At least in the
discourse in the media and social media.
The CBI will try to probe if the
officer was killed, suffocated to death or whatever and if so by whom. If it is
unsuccessful, it will have no option but to agree with the state police that it
was a suicide.
The state government backed its
police which from day one was saying it looked like a case of suicide, claiming
it has irrefutable evidence to say so. The local CID began a probe that ran into
trouble when the lady officer’s husband approached the Karnataka high court for
a stay on it being made public. It was granted.
That put paid to the state
government’s plans of tabling the preliminary report of the CID in the state
assembly as a counter to the opposition’s demand for a CBI probe.
Within hours of the knowledge about
the officer’s death on May 16, the media advertised the notion that the death
was linked to actions he had initiated against certain real estate companies in
the last few months. The media extolled his achievements, turning him into a
martyr, laying the blame at the feet of certain mafia in Karnataka. The
opposition parties took up the cue: the mafia was being protected by the chief
minister which was why he was intent on proving the death as a suicide.
An irritant to the media’s
doctrine-of-ratings was the state police which kept on insisting that it was a
case of suicide. The media simply brushed it aside. It pooh-poohed the
government, questioned its integrity and wondered if it was trying to protect
the officer’s ‘’killers’’. The media could not name the ‘’killers’’ for the
simple reason that it did not know who the killers were if at all there were.
How could a ‘’hero’’ commit suicide? Such a scenario did not exist in the media
textbook of sensational journalism. So, as far as the media was concerned, the
officer did not commit suicide. And therefore the need for a CBI probe.
There was another section of the
state’s population which subscribed to this theory: the opposition parties,
specially one particular party. Its leadership wasted no time in jumping on to
the CBI-probe band-wagon. It may be a coincidence that both the party’s top
leader and the dead officer belong to the same caste which is, equally
coincidentally, politically against the caste to which the current chief
minister belongs.
The leadership’s initiative saw the
officer’s parents, poor fruit sellers who worked all their lives to educate
their son, being given no time to grieve for their child; instead they were
brought to the state capital and settled right in front of the assembly so they
could grieve in public glare for the media cameras to record their grief for the
purpose of breaking-news visuals and, of course,
posterity.
They were obviously tutored by some
one as otherwise they could never have articulated their demand for a CBI probe
the way they did. Poor parents, they were apparently told that they would
receive crores of rupees from the government and everyone else if it was proved
that their son was murdered. Those using them as a shoulder to fight their
political battle wanted more publicity for their cause, So, they drafted a
letter, an open letter, to Sonia Gandhi, signed by the officer’s
now-publicly-grieving mother Gowramma and his unidentified friends. Was the
letter sent to Sonia Gandhi’s office or residence by courier or handed over in
person? No. It was sent to the advertisements section of a national English
daily for a prominent display in its March 22 Delhi
The media, ever the faithful,
‘’anti-establishmentarian’’ lap dog, ensured no scene of all this drama was
missed out on.
Having settled the ‘’family’’
campaign, the opposition party began targeting the CID which claimed it was
trying to put together a preliminary probe report. In no time, ‘’authoritative
sources’’ started leaking information about private matters relating to the dead
officer and living woman officer.
The media exhibited no sense of
propriety in naming the woman officer into its cooked-up narrative. It could not
justify why it was dragging her name into the story. Yet it did. Ratings matter
more than privacy. There were debates on how many WhatsApps and texts and mails
were exchanged between the two officers before his unnatural death. Their
privacy was butchered at the altar of insensitive journalism as the media
debated on the nature of the relationship between the two officers. It was
one-sided, it said. The man was in love with the woman, it said. The woman did
not reciprocate, it said. They eventually got married though not to themselves,
it pointed out. Yet he did not forget her, it said. He was pestering her, it
said. She was complaining, it said. The breaking-news went on and on and on.
Finally, he committed suicide just after texting her informing her he was taking
an extreme step to which she replied in the exclamatory, ‘’ no kidding?’’.
Having said all this, the media says in the same breath the CBI should probe the
unnatural-which-is-not-a-suicide-death.
A part of this
unattributed-yet-authoritative media narrative was that the woman officer had
brought her trauma to the notice of a friend who happened to be the advisor of
the chief minister of a neighbouring state. The media said the woman officer had
also written to the Karnataka chief secretary about the male officer harassing
her. The opposition spiced up the narrative by adding that the chief secretary,
wanting to secure his future after retirement, was intent on ‘’proving’’ that it
was a failed personal relationship which led to the officer’s suicide so as to
hide the real reason – the alleged shielding of a real-estate-owning politician
by the chief minister – being the unnatural death.
Two critical bits of information the
opposition party latched on to, to say that the CID could not probe the affair.
One, that the CID has no jurisdiction to record the statement of the chief
minister’s advisor. Two, the CID has no jurisdiction to record the statement of
the state chief secretary. Therefore, the CBI alone can conduct the probe. Sweet
logic, tempting enough for the media to launch a national campaign for the
probe.
The media and the opposition party
continued to denude the two officers of all their privacy. Soon reports began to
circulate that the officer’s marriage was in doldrums because of his
relationship with the woman officer; that they were close to divorce; that his
father-in-law was involved to a more-than-necessary extent in his son-in-law’s
life. It was besides the point that the father-in-law incidentally was
overlooked for an election ticket last time by Siddharamaiah. Notwithstanding
this coincidence, as claimed by the media, the father-in-law’s side also raised
the demand for a CBI probe.
As things stand, on the day the
state government succumbed to the demand for a CBI probe, let us see which of
the interested parties favour which probe:
CID probe: the state government led
by its chief minister
CBI probe: the media, the opposition
party, the entire social media, the parents of the dead officer, the in-laws of
the dead officer (in that order, the order determined by the loudness of their
respective demands for the probe).
As things also stand, the officer
may have committed suicide, may have done so voluntarily or under coercion or
under emotional stress, may have been murdered by suffocating him and then
hanging him by the fan, or killed by some other diabolical method.
If he did not kill himself, logic
says someone must have been the killer. Who? Everyone is a suspect, including
the real estate mafia. Or, some other person whose identity and motive are not
currently known or being considered even could have been responsible. Or, maybe
a supernatural force ended his life. Or, someone emptied his bedroom of all
oxygen, killing him (that still does not explain how he happened to hang by a
rope). The point it, it could be anyone, repeat, anyone. In which case, why is
the media and the opposition dragging only the lady officer into the public
domain? Because there is a truth only the media and opposition party knows as of
now? Or because the media and opposition party cannot resist being
lascivious?
By the time the CBI completes its
probe, one thing would certainly have happened. To repeat myself, in the
collective memory of the people of this country, the dead male officer and
living woman officer would be remembered more for the tidbits of their private
lives prised open by the media and the opposition party than their achievements
as IAS officers.
Whither journalism. Wither journalism?
No comments:
Post a Comment