Thanks to remarkably prompt action by the government, an insidious attempt to malign some of the country’s well-known journalists can be said to have been frustrated to some extent. But only to some extent. For so foul has been the atmosphere in the country for some years that a lot of people are prepared to believe the worst about anyone. Every charge, however improbable, against anyone, however honourable, can find in our land today not only ready listeners but also ready believers. If reports could be put out that Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan worked in collaboration with the notorious CIA, as they were before and during the emergency, or if it can be alleged that Mrs. Gandhi has accumulated huge personal fortunes and salted these away in foreign banks, as it has been in the past 20 months, what is there to get excited about if two dozen journalists are unfairly named as CIA agents, stooges or sources of information? Indeed, it might even serve a useful purpose if this unfortunate attempt by some identifiable and some unidentifiable sources to discredit newspapermen drives home the point to men who run the media that it is not a good thing to be self-righteous and treat others, especially those in public life and in the administration, as corrupt and venal men and women. The latter are as vulnerable as the former and their survival is dependent on their reputation. All in all, it is about time all of us take a pause and reflect whether in this orgy of self-righteousness we are not undermining democratic institutions which must rest on trust among a lot of people. All intelligence agencies in the world put together cannot destroy all that we cherish one-tenth as effectively as we ourselves have been doing by treating everyone else as if he or she was capable of every crime and perfidy.
It is possible that when Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, minister of state for finance in Mrs. Gandhi’s government during the emergency, decided to name in the Rajya Sabha last Friday a number of journalists as CIA agents on the basis of a document of doubtful origin and character, he was swayed by bitterness against the press which his leader thinks has been hostile to her. Thus no larger inference would have been in order if the former prime minister’s own mouthpiece had not given the allegation special prominence the next day and if the magazine edited by her daughter-in-law had not repeated it in the very next issue. In the circumstances, it is not easy to take the view that Mr. Mukherji acted entirely in anger and on his own. Or, indeed, that there is no connection between the agency which put out the allegation and those who decided to make use of it. In that case, we may not have heard the last of it and all that can be said is that the government should try to track down the source or sources of mischief before those dangerous men strike again. But those who took the decision at this end to try and undermine the credibility of Indian journalism should know, if they do not, that all major intelligence agencies run departments of dirty tricks and one day it may be their turn. The agencies serve their own ends, not Mr. Mukherjee’s or Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s.