Until recently, Karnal Singh, the chief ministers point-man in the police department, was normally the one-stop shop for journos for daily information. In comparison to Karnal Singh's clout in the police department over the past few years, the last two Directors General of Police were mere senior officers biding their time until retirement, holding their hands over a soft fire in their respective offices to keep warm.
Karnal Singh may be responsible for a lot of not-so-pleasant issues. But the alleged instance of insensitiveness, where Mr Singh categorically stated that a recent much-publicised rape victim's hymen was intact, but possibility of a two-finger insertion was possible, was actually an issue that Mr Singh was wrongly lynched for. This writer was present at the press conference then. It was only after persistent questioning by reporters, that Mr Singh to come out with an in verbatim response, reading it out from the medical report.
This was quite unlike the press conference of an unabashedly media savvy cop Superintendent of Police Inder Dev Shukla, involving the sexuality of star athlete Pratima Gaonkar who had committed suicide in mysterious circumstances.
There are other issues that come up repeatedly in the contentious relationship between police and journalists.
Today, a journalist inadvertently narrated to me a story from the Jataka tales, with a moral vis a vis a peculiar situation in his office, a local English-language newspaper. Endless hours have been consumed by journalists especially at Cafe Prakash as to how an editor could allow his dupester reporter to carry on, despite complaints of cheating filed against the reporter at the local police station. It is another story that the officer Police Sub Inspector Raut Dessai, who was handling the complaint, was also duped off a few thousand rupees by the same journo.
Sorry, I have digressed. This is how the story goes….
A she-monkey is trapped in the middle of the flooding river. As the water level rises, she keeps pushing her little one upwards away from the watery jaws of death. But as soon as the water reaches her nose, and keeps swelling further, the mother shoves her little one below the water on the bed, and stands on it, in order to gain additional height that could possible allow her to survive.
The story's original moral is the survival of the fittest. But I think one should give the listener some liberty enough to alter it a bit. The moral which fits the bill here, I think, is survival of the canniest. And Goa is no more alien to such philosophies, which generally appear to have a genetic similarity with Bihar and the other cow-belt states, where the motto of survival is, Jiski lathi uski bhais (He who wields the stick, own the buffalo).
(For more information on this issue, one could contact just about any journo from The Navhind Times)
We could shift to the equation between the Police Press
Relations Officer (PRO) and the media.