Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s recent criticism of the middle class for protesting against the rise in wheat and rice prices, which has drawn a howl of protest from the Opposition, has once again drawn attention to the United Progressive Alliance’s battle over the last year-and-half to get positive coverage in the media.
Mr. Chidambaram’s visit to Bangalore was part of a series of visits being made by the Group of Ministers (GoM) on media that he heads to State capitals to publicise the contents of the “Report to The People” released on UPA 2’s third anniversary, to focus specially on the progress made in the social sector. Thus far, two or three of the GoM’s seven members have travelled to Bhopal, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Kolkata and Bangalore — the next stop will be Chandigarh.
“There’s been a great deal of achievement in the social sector over the last three years, but it gets all drowned in the noise on the channels,” government sources told The Hindu adding, “Nothing that we have achieved in the social sector gets through, as the print media also takes its cue from the TV channels.”
It was, therefore, decided that the GoM members travel to State capitals and interact with the regional media, giving an overview of the difficulties the country is facing on the economic front and the measures being taken to tackle that situation, as well as highlighting the progress on the government’s 15 major flagship-social welfare programmes.
Media splash
On the whole, the sources said, the GoM was satisfied as these interactions received wide coverage in the local media: the only problem is that it is only the controversial statements that have hit the national headlines. So, if Mr. Chidambaram’s remarks on the middle class have got wall-to-wall coverage, his comments in Kolkata — in response to questions he was asked — about the continuing violence in the countryside drew the ire of the ruling Trinamool Congress, making a splash in the media.
This has also been a bad week for the UPA government, with the Time magazine running a report on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh titled “The Underachiever,” spawning a spate of TV discussions and a vigorous endorsement by the Bharatiya Janata Party, that chose to forget another Time cover in 2002 on the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, headlined “Asleep at the Wheel.”
In May 2011, facing a serious dip in its credibility following a series of financial scandals, the UPA decided to create a “structured mechanism to disseminate information and relay the government's position on emerging issues, especially those that have political ramifications.”
An order issued by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) mandated the GoM to “meet every day at a fixed hour, analyse the events of the day and issue suitable directions to a nodal officer to prepare appropriate material for briefing the media.” One of the Ministers in the GoM or the Minister concerned with the matter was to brief the media at 3 p.m. every day, according to the order. But while the GoM meets every day religiously, its briefings are sporadic.
Linking party, Centre
The GoM, one of its members had said at the time of its inception, was to “keep in close touch with the Congress to ensure coordination between the party and the government briefings,” as “sometimes, the party speaks, sometimes it refrains, saying it is in the domain of the government. The new mechanism hopes to bridge that.”
But even though the GoM was created after discussions between Dr. Singh and Congress president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, after some Ministers pointed out the urgency of dealing with the government and the party's credibility deficit, the Congress has continued to view it entirely as a government initiative.
The GoM got off to a good start, even showing signs of excellent coordination with the party, but, its inability to deal with the really tough issues, propensity not to hold briefings when the situation was difficult, inability to devise a long-term strategy to identify why the media was so universally hostile and deal with it and, finally, the breakdown of the government-party coordination, meant its gains were offset by its losses. Over the last year, the GoM has not been able to stem the continuing criticism of the slew of financial scandals.
New spokespersons
Then in December 2011, an effort was made to supplement the GoM’s efforts by appointing 11 new government spokespersons to strengthen the media outreach on this and other ticklish issues. Those drafted included Ministers of State Krishna Tirath, Ajay Maken, Jyotiraditya Scindia, D. Purandeswari, M.M. Pallam Raju, Jitin Prasada, Sachin Pilot, R.P.N. Singh, Ashwani Kumar, Milind Deora and Rajeev Shukla.
While these 11 were not part of the Chidambaram-led Group of Ministers on media, they were to assist the GoM by being available to the press, particularly TV channels and the fast expanding regional media. But while some of these Ministers initially appeared on TV, now most of them are unwilling to do their bit, with some even being discouraged by party leaders from making such appearances.
The GoM on media is now making one more effort, travelling to the States, with one of its appearances getting positive coverage in the national media — its visit to Gujarat, which appears to have unsettled the ruling Narendra Modi government there.
