Nature abhors a vacuum...

Independent journalists fill a space mainstream media has abdicated

From the Adobe stock image collection

LOUIS JOSEPH, the Duke de Vendome, was a highly-rated French general and one of the top commanders during the War of Spanish Succession. He was also unbelievably arrogant — one of his ‘idiosyncrasies’ being to take his portable toilet into the room where he usually held court, and to park himself bare-arsed on the potty while receiving official visits.

One day, a bishop deputed by Francesco Farnese, then Duke of Parma, came to meet Vendome to discuss some official business. The general was, as usual, on his potty; while the ducal ambassador was speaking he rose, turned his back to the bishop, and wiped his arse.

The disgusted bishop walked out and told the duke that he would never go to meet Vendome again, no matter how urgent the matter. The duke asked him to find a substitute; the bishop nominated Giulio Alberoni, who had through assiduous use of flattery and the other arts of sycophancy risen from bellringer in a local church to a position in the household of the bishop.

Alberoni duly went to meet Vendome, who as per usual was on his potty. During the meeting, Vendome got up, turned his back to Alberoni, and ostentatiously wiped his arse. At which Alberoni exclaimed: ‘O culo d’angelo‘ (Oh, the arse of an angel), ran forward, and reportedly kissed Vendome’s arse.

Unsurprisingly, Vendome gave Alberoni a place on his staff as secretary. Alberoni helped push the claims of Philip V to the French throne; he became a Count and a royal favourite at court (History does not say whether he had to kiss Philip’s arse as well, but it does record that over the years he rose to a greater position of eminence than the bishop who had given him his initial assignment).

This story, originally sourced to the memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon, keeps surfacing in my memory of late. (The fiction writer Jeffrey Archer in Hidden in Plain Sight has a modified version featuring the same Duke).

It surfaced when I first went through the list of Cabinet ministers — a bloated list of the same panderers, courtiers, and time-servers, all characterised by a mix of incompetence and arrogance, that we’ve been burdened with for the past ten years.

It resurfaced when Twitter threw up clips of India Today anchor Rahul Kanwal’s intemperate outbursts during the early stages of the election results. Again, as I watched a panel discussion hosted by ANI’s Smitha Prakash with certain right-wing influencers who collectively lamented their inability to exert any influence. (BTW, the Duke of Saint-Simon referred to above is credited with first using the word “intellectual” in its noun form). Ajit Anjum, one of the independent journalists who gave Prakash and company so much heartburn, has an excellent response.

The story returned to memory while observing the radio silence on BJP leader BS Yediyurappa, against whom a non-bailable warrant has been issued in a POSCO case (Four of his associates are being investigated for tampering with evidence).

The allegation — that the Lingayat strongman molested a 17-year-old who, with her mother, had gone to seek his help in bringing those who raped her to book — had been doing the rounds in Karnataka, and in the wider political circles, since February. But like the Prajwal Revanna case, the BJP top brass did a three monkeys, because they needed BSY to bring in the Lingayat vote.

When the NDA Cabinet was announced two of BSY’s loyalists, Shobha Karandlaje and V Somanna, found themselves on the list. (Karandlaje, who has been made Minister of State in the Ministry of Labour and Employment, is best known for her core competence — gas lighting and serial attempts to stoke communal tensions. I’d written about one such dangerous episode here.)

Similarly, Revanna’s uncle HD Kumaraswamy knew of his nephew’s serial sexual abuses, chose to keep quiet rather than queer the pitch for the NDA of which his party is a member, and has been rewarded with a Cabinet berth. And all of this has escaped any concerted media scrutiny — which explains why the Duke de Vendome’s posterior has been constantly on my mind.

I’d hoped that the ambiguous verdict of the recent elections would have given mainstream media a sense that a great weight had been lifted off their shoulders. I took heart in what I thought were early signs of a turnaround, as for instance this editorial written by Aroon Purie, editor in chief of the India Today group (and Rahul Kanwal’s boss).

No such luck, though — after a brief lull of about 48 hours, the usual suspects are back to business as usual. There have been four terrorist attacks in the span of four days in Kashmir; National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, all of 75, has been given an extension co-terminus with the tenure of PM Modi — but no prime time debates on the escalation of violence in that tormented state.

In Manipur, fresh violence was reported on Wednesday in two separate incidents — but if you followed prime time news, you wouldn’t know that either.

Meanwhile the PM, who per his Twitter stream is having “productive meetings” with the likes of Macron, Zelenski and Rishi Sunak, found time to post a suggestion that we all try Trikonasana to improve our posture and concentration. (I need to figure out how to do emojis on Substack — I badly need a face-palm one here).

To revert to the discussion mentioned above, Smitha Prakash and her cohort spent considerable time wondering how the various independent journalists were getting such traction. (At one point, risibly, one of the panelists said that the videos of one such journalist were being shown on large screens mounted on vans — who is going to tell him that if you play a video on a screen, it counts as one view even if a few hundred people watch simultaneously?)

Maybe, instead of speculating on why those journalists who had aroused the angst of Prakash and company were getting traction, they could have asked, and attempted to answer, the obvious question: What are we not doing right? (No, it is not getting the right wing to push their junk, or getting Modi to “deal with them”).

I follow all of those journalists: Ravish Kumar, Abhisar Sharma, Dhruv Rathee, Ajit Anjum, Sakshi Joshi, Punya Prasun Bajpai among others. They are the ones living the journalist’s credo: Give voice to the voiceless, hold power to account.And judging by their viewership, they are filling a very real need, stepping into the vacuum left by mainstream media.

I’ll leave you with this thought, from Timothy Synder’s book On Tyranny:

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

PostScript: I’ve gotten a heap of responses to a question I had posed earlier: In what direction do I take this newsletter, now that the dust has settled on the elections?

Suggestions range from “keep writing the way you do” to starting a podcast/YouTube channel, looking at books and writing, doing topical interviews with people who can provide context to the news…

I am traveling from the 18th to the 25th, both days inclusive. I won’t have much time, and mind-space, to write at length during that period — but since the trip is likely to include a lot of driving, I’ll have time to think through all your suggestions and figure out next steps. More on that later.