It is of course an entirely different question of whether journalists can or do make a smart contribution to politics. Suffice it to say that at a personal level, many media persons have done pretty well for themselves. Where once they were outside the tent trying to draw politicians out into the open, today they are inside it and certainly relishing their new role.
Here are a couple of instances. The journalist Michael Gove, once a reputed columnist and till recently a minister in the David Cameron cabinet, has been in British politics for a good number of years. In these particularly dramatic times for his country, he chose to be beside his friend, again a former media man in the form of Boris Johnson, in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Gove and Johnson registered a surprising victory, with 17 million people preferring Brexit as opposed to the 16 million who chose to remain.
And then Gove stabbed Johnson in the back when he decided to present himself as a candidate rather than back Johnson for the leadership of the Conservative Party once Cameron had made known his decision to leave 10 Downing Street. In the event, Gove fell by the wayside as Theresa May romped home to victory and took charge as the country’s new prime minister. She has placed Boris Johnson in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. One wonders if it was a good move, for Johnson has never demonstrated any flair for serious politics, be it domestic or related to diplomacy.
And so you have the pitfalls coming up once journalists decide to throw in their lot with professional politics. In the process, there emerges the very real prospect of journalism losing some very good people, in the newsroom or in the niche of column-writing, to politics, and not being able to fill in the gap with their replacements. Mushahid Hussain was a remarkable journalist in Pakistan, until he linked up with Nawaz Sharif and then with General Pervez Musharraf, eventually losing himself in the depths of politics. He ought to have stayed in the media world. The pity is that he did not. The same holds true for some other good Pakistani journalists, such as Sherry Rehman, who is today a leading figure in the Pakistan People’s Party. But, yes, there are the exceptions. Maleeha Lodhi, once an influential voice in the Pakistani media, has in the past nearly two decades done extremely well as her country’s envoy to the United Kingdom, the United States and now the United Nations.
Which brings us to the question of what M.J. Akbar has been doing with his life in these past many years. He has been associated with the Indian media world in very senior positions; and there are the Telegraph and Asian Agenewspapers which remain testimony to his agile journalism. But there is too his politics to be taken note of. As a friend of Rajiv Gandhi, he joined the Congress and was elected a member of parliament. Over the years, especially in light of his fraught relations with Sonia Gandhi, he found his way out of the Congress patch and slowly but surely moved to the Right. It was a 180-degree turn for him when he linked up with the Bharatiya Janata Party and became its spokesperson. Today he is minister of state for external affairs in the Narendra Modi government. What does one make of that? Journalism has lost one of its own to politics. Worse, secularism has surrendered one of its votaries to the proponents of Hindutva.
There have been journalists who have been persistent in their efforts to come by a political role, often under governments of a less than democratic character. Altaf Hussain, the long-serving Bengali editor of Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper Dawn (he was appointed to the position by none other than Mohammad Ali Jinnah himself in 1946), turned desperate (in the opinion of some who worked with him or knew him) in his bid to find a place in the Ayub Khan government. In early 1965, Pakistan’s first military ruler obliged him, through giving him the ministry of industries and natural resources. Hussain wanted information and broadcasting. It went to someone else.
Altaf Hussain’s political career was brief. When the Ayub regime collapsed in the face of a mass upsurge in March 1969, Hussain and his cabinet colleagues found themselves without jobs. Altaf Hussain did not make it back to journalism. That begs the question of whether he ought at all to have ventured into politics and that too under a military dispensation. Hussain was of course not the first journalist in this part of the world to ally himself with a dictatorial regime. The politician-journalist Sirajul Hossain Khan, asked at one point if it was true he was about to join General Hussein Muhammad Ershad’s regime in Bangladesh, strenuously denied what he described as ill-founded rumours. A few days later, state-run television showed him being sworn into office as a minister by the military ruler.
General Ershad certainly had the satisfaction of drawing into his government men who, had they resisted the temptation, would have made themselves illustrious in their professions. Anwar Zahid was an excellent journalist with a superior command of the English language. On the editorial staff of the Bangladesh Times, he brought a certain verve to journalism. That phase in Zahid’s life came to an end when he joined the Ershad regime as minister for information. His infamous statement regarding his willing to sweep the streets of the city if his president asked him to will forever be associated with his name. Ershad brought into his cabinet Anwar Hossain Manju, one of the owners (at the time) of the daily Ittefaq. Manju has turned out to be different. He has stayed on in politics, at one point walking out of Ershad’s Jatiyo Party with a faction of his own and eventually finding a niche in the elected government of Sheikh Hasina.
Other journalists pulled or walking of their own volition into a seemingly attractive world of politics have been there as well, in Bangladesh. Afzal Khan, once a reputed sports journalist and television and radio news broadcaster, joined the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, serving as a lawmaker at one point. ABM Musa was elected a member of parliament at the general elections held in 1973. His friend and colleague, KG Mustafa, was sent off to Iraq as Bangladesh’s ambassador by Bangabandhu’s government. Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury was an Awami League candidate at the 2008 general elections and today serves as editor of the Daily Observer as well as media adviser to the prime minister.
The British journalist Alastair Campbell attained quite a bit of notoriety as Tony Blair’s spin doctor in the latter’s Downing Street years. Jacqueline Bouvier was a journalist who interviewed Senator John F. Kennedy for a journal in the early 1950s before marrying him to become Jacqueline Kennedy and eventually America’s First Lady in 1961. Bal Thackeray was a cartoonist in the media world before he became a rabid advocate of Hindu communal politics in India. Valerie Trierweiler was a beautiful, accomplished media person, until she met and fell in love with and separated from the future president of France, Francois Hollande. Nasim Ahmed served as a competent representative of Dawn in London, until the early 1970s when President Z.A. Bhutto appointed him Pakistan’s ambassador (Islamabad had by that point left the Commonwealth in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war) to Britain.
Source: Bd news24
