Last night, prime time news television (or a section of it to be more accurate) found its villain of the day to explain India’s World Cup loss: Virat Kohli and his girlfriend Anushka Sharma. The same Kohli who till just weeks ago was being acknowledged as the finest batsman in the world, being compared to the legendary Sachin Tendulkar after a remarkable test series and a hundred in the first World Cup game against Pakistan.
I am often asked why I keep reminding viewers/readers/netizens of 2002 Gujarat. ‘Look beyond it, the world has changed,’ I am helpfully reminded. Yes, indeed it has. And I am happy to report the new, changing India. When I wrote my 2014 elections book, a friend asked me why I hadn’t written more on my experiences of covering the 2002 riots: I reminded him that this book was about the elections of 2014 and how Narendra Modi won them. 2002 was part of the narrative,but was not the dominant issue because, yes, India had ‘moved on’ at the ballot box.
Let me first say that it is indeed an honour to be delivering the PK Kaul memorial lecture. Mr Kaul was one of the country’s most respected civil servants, a product of an age when civil servants were truly çivil’. Times have changed but I do believe that there will be a core set of values that Mr Kaul represented that will last forever. And so I am humbled to be here today at the NOIDA club where I have spent many a convivial afternoon in the company of friends.
In the 2015 Delhi elections, Arvind Kejriwal didn’t just demolish his opposition; he also defeated the media. That might seem a strange thing to say since the general impression for a long time has been that Kejriwal and his AAP party are a creation of the media, and television news in particular. The fact is, February 2015 is not December 2013. Then, we couldn’t get enough of Kejriwal: he was popping in and out of tv studios and every move, every soundbite of his, was tracked with relentless energy. ‘Would you do it with any other chief minister?’ I recall Narendra Modi asking me once in a phone conversation.
