Mr. Raj Narain has made so many irresponsible statements for so long that it is not easy to pick on his latest one as being his worst. But it speaks for the depth to which our politics has sunk that he should name the leader of a major party as having been a CIA agent in Mrs. Gandhi’s Cabinet. We could have dismissed it as a matter of no great consequence if the caretaker Prime Minister, Mr. Charan Singh, had also not spoke in a similar refrain a couple of days earlier. He had the good sense not to name the individual. But he had identified him fairly clearly and he had done so before he had conducted the “inquiry” which his minister for external affairs, Mr. SN Mishra, had threatened. Mr. Raj Narain has not exercised even that kind of restraint. He has publicly and openly maligned a respected political leader simply because he happens to be leading a rival party. For the Lok Dal working president has had no evidence to go by.
At least he has not offered any to his interlocutors belonging to the press. Instead he has given them a lesson in deductive logic. But while this exercise in character assassination deserves to be condemned in the strongest possible language, it must also be said that Mr. Raj Narain is not the only guilty person. Mr. Charan Singh is equally guilty and so is Mrs. Gandhi. Surely she should have pondered over the consequences before yielding to the temptation of making use of what an American author has written in a very different context. Should it not have occurred to her that by accepting at its face value whatever any American says we are enabling him to destroy the tallest among us and that this, if anything can lead to destabilization? After all, she herself has been a victim of this kind of writing by no less distinguished an American than Mr. Patrick Moynihan. And as if this was not bad enough, one of her principal aides, Mr. C. M. Stephen, has chosen to speak on the subject in a manner which ‘ creates the impression that there is a CIA agent in her Cabinet in 1971 and he knows his identity. For Mr. Stephen has said that the individual is not in the Congress (I). This raises another question. Who has told him and on the basis of what evidence?
All this places the press in a very difficult position. We have chosen to keep Mr. Raj Narain’s statement out of the paper. The statement was, in our view, libelous and its publication by us would have exposed us to the charge of libeling a highly respected individual who can be the country’s Prime Minister one day. We also did not wish to be party to what we have little doubt is a blatant campaign of vilification in the midst of an election campaign. But some of our contemporaries have taken the American view of the problem. They have published the charge and its repudiation by the maligned leader’s colleagues. It is difficult to be sure whether our approach or theirs is the more appropriate one in the circumstances. Either way, we can handle an episode like this. But what are we to do when we are faced with more insidious and less blatant lies day after day? It is easy enough to recommend a code for journalists but virtually impossible to devise one and implement it so long as our politicians do not begin to behave somewhat less irresponsibly.
The Times of India, 20 November 1979