Karan Thapar meets Modi

The Gujarat CM Narendra Modi walked out of an interview with Karan Thapar less than 5 minutes into the program ‘Devils Advocate’ for the private news channel CNN-IBN. See here for details.

Karan Thapar is usually pretty sharp. He is one of the best we have in India. However, in this instance he failed to keep his guest.

1. You had Modi in the interview chair. He was yours for the next 30 minutes. That is something many other news channels would die for.

2. You had many other things to ask him that people want to hear. The dissidents in his party, Kesubhai Patel, the economic achievements and so forth. You never got to that part.

3. The secret is to keep the sensitive parts to the end of the interview. This way you cover all the ground you want and have him walk out at the 25th minute. You would have succeeded as a journalist because people got to hear his views on everything. You tripped up at the start.
4.Larry King for example interviews many types of characters, he however knows where to draw the line and not allow his guest to walk out (which would qualify as a failure). CNN-IBN’s parent channel would certainly not make it a headline !

Why did Modi walk out ?

Karan thinks that he was not ‘rude or aggressive’.

“I actually don’t know why Modi stopped the interview. I wasn’t rude or aggressive in my tone. It seemed like it could be an opportunity for him to lay to rest the ghost that has been troubling him for five, possibly six years. But all I can guess it that either I touched a sensitive point, a raw nerve or I worried him of what was to follow and he anticipated a bigger problem,” Karan Thapar said on CNN-IBN.

Source: IBNLIVE

He is right. I do not think Karan Thapar was rude or aggressive. So why did Modi walk out ?

Reality Check thinks : Karan Thapar failed to judge Modi’s response right in the beginning of the interview !

The following sentence is the culprit :

.. despite that people still call you, to your face, a mass murderer. And they accuse you of being prejudiced against Muslims? Do you have an image problem?

I have said many times in the past, I continue to be amazed by how BJP leaders like Ravi Shankar Prasad, Arun Jaitley, Rudy, do not respond when a Congress leader or a media anchor refers to Gujarat as a genocide, pogrom, (and more recently a holocaust). They do not even respond when Congress spokesperson like Smt Jayanthi Natarajan call Modi and even Advani guilty of this genocide. Their defence mechanism it simply to bring up the anti-Sikh riots. This is as-if two wrongs make a right.

Unfortunately, Modi does not seem to be from that stock. To call him a mass murderer on national television (even if couched in an indirect reference) – could be considered to be defamatory in nature. There is nothing Modi could have said, given his limited English verbal skills – that would have helped. For Modi, the ‘upside potential’ for this interview was very low. Most guests would have walked out if this was the tone laid out at the beginning of the interview. A journalists’ goal is to complete the interview and extract as much as possible from the guest without him walking out on you. Karan Thapar who is usually an expert in this – sadly failed to read Modi correctly.

Call Sonia Gandhi and drill her about her citizenship issues or about her educational qualifications, call Karunanidhi and ask him to respond to people who claim that he is guilty of murdering Rajiv Gandhi, they will all walk out. I would agree with them and attribute it to a failure on the part of the host.

Let us come back to the ‘mass murderer’ part. Modi has not been convicted of mass murder, nor are people calling it to his face as claimed by Karan Thapar.

Do hosts in other countries throw such questions at their guests ? Can Larry King ask George Bush if he is responsible for the heartless murder of gullible young American soldiers in Iraq and ask him to respond ? No, this is serious defamation. They would have a libel case on their hands in no time.

John Clark filed a defamation lawsuit against the Larry King show – merely because some tickers were shown at the bottom of the screen that were defamatory in nature. The case details are here. More about US Libel Laws as it applies to the press.

So, the moral of the story is. News anchors and interviewers in India, please moderate your language. Use the word accused or alleged in the absence of a conviction. Do not use words like mass murderer, holocaust, genocide – unless the target is legally accused of those crimes. We understand your eagerness, but do not trip over it yourself.

Blogosphere links :

Offstumped has a post here