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O Mere Sukh Ji, What chopper rides
do to blue pencils and
culture icons!
Gian Inder Singh
AMRITSAR/CHANDIGARH: Do headlines tell a story? Well, they
told one about Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal. “Sukhbir is
Badal’s Deputy,” said the Indian Express. “Enter Sukhbir, Papa’s
Deputy,” proclaimed The Tribune. And here we were all thinking
Sukhbir was going to be
Punjab’s Deputy
Chief Minister. Of course the emphasis is mine, but the subeditor
did put a story in the headline.
But do headlines ever tell the complete story?
After the euphoria is over and the bhangra teams have
returned home, Sukhbir has unfurled the tricolor and taken over the
portfolios of Home, Sports, Youth, Information and Public Relations,
and settled cozily into his new office next door to his papa, it is
time to tell you what really happened on the day “Papa’s Deputy”
took a sacred oath of office.
(How sacred an oath is for an office that does not exist in
the Constitution is a separate matter.)
It is also a story of the real face of those often seen as
helping propagate Punjabi culture and promoting the grand South
Asian tradition of Sufi poetry. It is also the saga of the great and
pious profession of journalism the way it is being practiced in
Punjab. And
it is also a peep into the minds of those who wield the mighty blue
pencils and who are expected to always create and guard the free
space in which reporters can work fearlessly and help reflect the
best and the worst of our society and politics.
 But
back to that colorful stage at the Ranjit Avenue Grounds in
Amritsar where
Papa’s Deputy was to be sworn in. All ordinary ministers take such
an oath in Chandigarh, most, including Papa, at the Raj Bhawan. In
innumerable Punjabi films and plays, the title of “Deputy” does not
denote number two; instead, it is used for someone with a pronounced
proclivity to misuse his power. “Tu vaddha Deputy lagiyan?” is a
dialogue in as many Punjabi films as the Hindi ones that spout, “Nahiiiii!!”
Deputy aa
gaya! So, the oath
taking was shifted to Amritsar and turned into a mammoth show. The
House of Badals was present in full strength. Harsimrat Kaur Badal
was effervescently telling journalists how hard working Sukhbir was
and how worried he was about taking
Punjab ahead. Bikram Singh Majithia’s acolytes were educating anyone who would
listen about the spirit of sacrifice. SGPC president Avtar Singh
Makkar was requesting a rather nice journalist to somehow mention
Surinder Kaur Badal’s sewa bhawna for langar lest her name gets
left-out of the family show. Parkash Singh Badal himself was taking
extra care to remind “select journalists” to ensure that news and
pictures of BJP leaders congratulating Sukhbir should be displayed
prominently. (“Select journalists” is a term special to
Punjab journalism
though it is not clear who ‘selects’ them. Most journalists who use
the term are believed to be themselves part of the pack when they
say a politician spoke to some “Chonven Patarkar”.)
Fortunately, our story also features the who’s who of
‘select’ journalists.
But let’s not veer too far away from the colorful scenes
where tractors, trolleys, trucks and buses had been bringing in
loads of Akali workers and spilling them on to the
Ranjit Avenue
grounds. It is not clear how far would the Maharaja, after whom the
Grounds are named, had approved of the rulers who force, snatch,
commandeer buses and trucks for such a public service.
Or of the peculiar ways in which Punjabi culture was
propagated from the same Grounds. Fresh-from-the-mint entrant to the
Akali Dal, pop singer Hans Raj Hans, climbed atop a stage specially
set up for him to display his talents of a Raj Kavi. Obviously, jis
da raj, us da kavi. Always keen to project himself as a sufi singer,
Hans let his dedication roll out in full flow.
Sukhbir Badal was still to reach the venue, so Hans pulled
out from his memory just the apt song: Aa ja ve mahi tera rasta
udeekdiyan (Oh come my lover, I have been pining for you). Lest you
mistake it for a lilting Punjabi number, Hans made it clear that it
was meant for Sukhbir. The agony of wait was soon to be over, so
Hans, now also the Akali Dal candidate from Jalandhar Lok Sabha
seat, was ecstatically singing: “Nit khair manga sohniya mein teri.”
What’s a Sufi if he doesn’t go all out?
In each of these songs, he kept extrapolating lines like
“Hove kaka ji di umar lameri”, “Hove Sukh ji di umar lameri” etc.
Those accustomed to seeing Hans with his curly long tresses
were amusedly watching the turbaned variety, his headgear a shade of
blue and tied in a manner that was stretched, adjusted and
re-adjusted to fall flush with his location on the sociological
intersection of where he stands today: Dalit, Balmiki, Islamic,
Sufi, Pop Star, Punjabi. Talk about multiple identity crisis, and
Hans had answered with his headgear sartorial sensibilities.
 Many
Punjab journalists had earlier seen Hans Raj Hans in
Chandigarh on a
stage, singing not only similar songs for Bibi Sonia Gandhi ji, but
even composing a special one for the Italian Catholic whom he had
then described as Mother of India. Incidentally, when Hans was
singing that song “O Bibi Sonia”, with an extraordinary long hek,
Amarinder Singh was present on the stage and Hans, who had travelled
to the venue in Bharat Inder Singh Chahal’s car, always addressed
him as a Maharaja. By the way, it was Amarinder Singh who had first
bestowed on Hans the title of Raj Kavi.
But Hans was not the only one who had exchanged places by
singing from the stage of Badals and changing his songs’ subject
from O Bibi Sonia to Mere Sukh Jiyo. Some others had also changed
places and moved up the ladder. They were the ones you trusted to
bring you home the complete story. Instead, they preferred to become
part of it.
In a first of sorts, at least in
Punjab, top
journalists were airlifted by helicopter from
Chandigarh
and flown to the oath taking ceremony in
Amritsar
where they preferred to not sit in the press gallery but to sit on
the special stage set up for the VVIPs.
Hindustan Times’ Resident Editor Kanwar Sandhu, Indian
Express’ Resident Editor Vipin Pubby, Punjabi Tribune’s Resident
Editor Sidhu Damdami, and top guns of Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran
besides minion-style senior journalists of Hindustan Times, Bhaskar,
Jagran etc shared the stage with the Akali top brass. All this
while, shocked reporters covering the function sat in the press
gallery and wondered how would they describe what was happening. But
morning editions showed the editors had resolved their dilemma. None
of this found their way into the stories they filed. “If my Editor
goes and sits on the stage with the Badals, my job is to only do
some pen-bhangra in the story,” explained a journalist. Now, that
was beautifully put: Pen-Bhangra!
No wonder, next day’s newspapers in
Punjab had the kind
of reporting that Sukhbir Badal might have scribbled himself. No
public relations agency could have pulled off the kind of feat that
Sukhbir’s dirty-tricks department did. “It is tough going around
managing so many reporters; senior editors are a handful and easy to
manage,” explained a right hand man of newly anointed Deputy CM,
sorry, Papa’s Deputy.
Sukhbir’s degree in studying management sciences seems to
have paid off, and he has raised that science to an art form.
A mere 72-hours later, Kanwar Sandhu’s “Point of View”
emerged. In his regular weekly column, the editor who had taken care
to attend the swearing-in ceremony attired suitably in a bandh-gala
coat, wrote: “(S)ince few, if any, worked hard enough in recent
years to stake a claim to counter the painstaking efforts of Badal
Jr, they have no option but to ‘welcome’ the development.” Oh, oh!!
That’s what helicopter rides do to the blue pencil. If his
column had a multi-media version on the website, such gems would
have been followed by the kind of sound that rings through cow belt
middle class Indian drawing rooms every time Komolika appears in
saas-bahu serials.
 “Within
the SAD, the move will rejuvenate the younger elements while making
the senior leaders and party jathedars squirm,” the editor was not
done yet. He referred to “Sukhbir’s dynamic style of functioning”,
said “Punjab desperately needs a change in governance...Systems must replace ad-hocism
and the ubiquitous and unbridled sifarish culture”, but on whom did
the editor place hopes for such a utopia in
Punjab? Well,
Sukhbir of course. Who do you think dishes out chopper rides to
match the elegance of bandh-gala coats?
Ajit’s Barjinder Singh Hamdard was also there. Yes, of course
in a bandh-gala. But even he refrained from suggesting what a
section of the English media did. “Perhaps it would have been in the
fitness of things if the roles between the two had been reversed –
Sukhbir elevated to the post of Chief Minister and his father made
the president of the Akali Dal,” the Point of View could have been
titled “Sukhbir’s inner thoughts.” Can you smell the makings of a
new advisor with a blue quill that can write
oozing-with-editorial-oomph press releases?
Indian Express did not take much notice of the ‘Hans as Raj
Kavi’ phenomenon, something that was crucial because Hans does not
only stand today on the intersections we suggested above to serve as
a specimen for social scientists; he is also the official Akali
Dal-BJP candidate from the reserved Lok Sabha seat of Jalandhar,
and, if elected, will represent India’s second oldest political
party in the House of Commons. His brazen conduct weeks before polls
cannot and must not have escaped the reporter’s eyes, not at least
when the editor too was prowling around.
The Tribune was
the only newspaper that made an effort to bring out substantive
parts of the story but even its reporters refrained from commenting
on what the editors were doing on the VVIP stage, a common malaise
since we do not have a healthy construct of media criticism or
journalistic ethics as a subject of study. Ajit has for so long been
an in house newspaper that no one flips the pages to look for a
pro-people story. But with the choppers available ever so easily, is
Punjab on the cusp of a new phenomenon of high flying editors mixing
blue turbans and blue pencils? O Mere Sukh Jiyo! You have lived up
to the Deputy of the Punjabi films!
28 January 2009
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