Rahul Gandhi, Arnab Goswami & The Big Grapefruit Interview

About half of the journalists who cover the White House in Washington DC are from the American media. There is a belief that each one of them gets up every morning with the conviction that the government was going to lie to them before sundown. The American media is relatively independent and objective because its members cultivate two important traits: a measure of healthy scepticism and irreverence towards people in authority.

However there is another aspect to American journalism. It is the planted question, and its cousin, the grapefruit. As an aside, a planted question asked in a parliamentary debate in Australia is called a Dorothy Dixer.

In American media parlance, a grapefruit is a seemingly tough question (a journalist asks during the course of an interview) but is in fact a scripted favour to the politician being interviewed. It is like a slow ball bowled in a cricket match which lands near the batsman’s feet. He can simply smash it beyond the ropes.

The planted question, the Dorothy Dixer or the grapefruit serves the same purpose: promoting one’s party’s policies and programmes and criticizing the opposition. Although George Bush, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been known to have used the ‘planted question’ technique in their campaigns, there is a perception in the West that it is more common in India. Bhagyashree Garekar of the Singapore Straits Times told John Dickerson, it was a common practice in India. See the penultimate paragraph of this article: HillaryClinton gets snared by a planted question

But the devices are usually employed as a small component – usually one or two questions in the question and answer session at the end of a speech or in a parliamentary debate or one question in an impromptu interview with a politician. Can you imagine a whole interview being stage-managed; or to put it simply the whole interview being a grapefruit? But that was what exactly Arnab Goswamy’s interview with Rahul Gandhi was! See its full text here: Rahul Gandhi'sfirst interview: Full text

Max Atkinson, a UK based communications expert says that ‘news interviewers are paid to be neutral’. He goes on to say that ‘appearing to take sides can get them into serious trouble’. It sounds surprising, doesn’t it? But Atkinson is talking about the media in Britain, not India. Atkinson suggests that the solution to compel evasive politicians answer difficult questions is to conduct the interview in front of an audience. If only Atkinson knew how the Barkha Dutts, Rajdeep Sardesais and Sagarika Ghoses conduct their interviews in front of studio audiences!

One expected Arnab Goswami who breathes fire, screams and shrieks, on his primetime show to be persistent with his questions, to pin down Rahul to take positions and at least seek to answer some pertinent questions. Instead Arnab served Rahul the biggest grapefruit that one can imagine, by querying about Narendra Modi and flogging the dead horse of Gujarat 2002. Atkinson would be surprised to know that Indian news interviewers who would be neutral on the subject of Narendra Modi are a rarity. Here is how Rahul’s view of the Sikh genocide of 1984 in which his father had a hand compares with the communal riots of 2002:

In 1984, RahulG was 13. Yet, he knew that ‘the government was trying to stop the riots’. In 2002, he was 31 but he heard that ‘the government in Gujarat was actually abetting and pushing the riots further’.

Rahul Gandhi’s inability to frame his replies in grammatically correct English, though he was presumably educated in England, is not a major issue:

‘I like difficult to tough issues. I like dealing with them.’

‘Yes, we will be specific but if I would like to sort of explain things in a broader fashion, I think that will okay with you.’

‘I think probably the Sikhs are one of the industrious people in this country.’

What is surprising is his mendacity about the process of electing a prime minister, especially by the Congress party. By the by, Rahul utters the word ‘process’ 29 times in the interview; ‘issue’ 47 times, ‘RTI’ 71 times and ‘system’ 74 times!

Rahul of course doesn’t want to lose an opportunity to plug in his family history, especially the poignant aspects of it (‘as a child, he saw his grandmother jailed and later assassinated; and his father assassinated’). Then there is the invocation of Arjuna (‘he only sees one thing, he does not see anything else’)!

What does one make of this sentence: ‘I am here basically for one thing, I see tremendous energy in this country, I see more energy in this country than any other country, I see billions of youngsters and I see this energy is trapped’?

Here is a gem: because the judiciary and the press are not under the RTI, political parties should not be brought under the RTI as that ‘changes the balance of power’! He is however candid about one thing: in our parliamentary system as it stands today ‘an MLA or an MP does not make laws. He merely presses buttons.’

This is how Rahul perceives how the economy works: ‘We are working on prices, as I said we have spoken to our Chief Ministers and we have reduced prices in states where we are in power.’

The nation certainly wants to know what Rahul proposes to do to grapple with the myriad problems the nation faces: spiraling inflation, unemployment, billowing current account deficit et al. The nation would want to know how he would deal with hostile neighbours like Pakistan and China; how he would tackle terrorism and what he intends doing to resolve a number of other problems that befuddle the nation. Sadly the net take away from the interview was that it veered our national political debate away from these questions and bringing Gujarat 2002 back to the centre stage. And that was the grapefruit that Arnab gifted to Rahul!

Rahul Gandhi, BCG’s ‘problem child’!

In marketing, Boston Consulting Group’s growth share matrix (or BCG matrix) is an instrument used to assess the current state and predict the future performance of a product (brand) or product line. In marketing parlance, the grid determines a product’s ‘attractiveness’. The grid plots a product’s relative market share against market growth to analyse its current state and predict its future. The four quadrants in the grid which represent the life cycle of a product are named ‘dogs’, ‘question marks (or problem children)’, ‘stars’ and ‘cash cows’. While ‘stars’ and ‘cash cows’ are every marketer’s dream the ‘question marks (or problem children)’ are a real dilemma. This is because if these products make the ‘success test’ in the market place they move into the ‘stars’ category and eventually into the ‘cash cows’ category. But while they consume large amounts of resources for promotion, they do not generate immediate revenues. If they gain market share, they move into the ‘stars’ category but after years of consumption and effort, if they fail, they degenerate into the ‘dogs’ category. Even as ‘dogs’ they pose another dilemma to the marketer. Some marketers believe that although the ‘dogs’ do not generate large net revenues; they are still useful because they split overheads. More importantly, from a human resources standpoint, they help in maintaining employment potential. Occasionally marketers have to choose the hard option – bite the bullet as it were – and shed the ‘dogs’.

What does all this have to do with the politics? Well, political philosophies are like product lines and individual political leaders are like products. Remember, how the ‘India shining’ campaign turned out to be the undoing of the BJP in 2004. Not even its enemies predicted the BJP would lose the election. For the common man, prices were stable and inflation was under control. The era of licences and permits and scarcity was well and truly past. There was an abundance of never before choices in the marketplace. The sun was shining on a billowing economy; presaging increased employment generation. ‘God appeared to be in his heaven and all well with the world!’  Why then did the campaign bounce back? It is perhaps one of those marketing enigmas. The story is quite similar to that of brand Churchill who won the Second World War for Britain with his slogans, ‘All out for England’ and ‘V for victory’, who was then quietly shown the door by the British electorate! 

As we advance to 2014, the Congress party wishes to launch brand Rahul. The teasers for brand Rahul have been in the air for far too long, that people wonder whether they would see the première at all. An elementary principle of brand management is that even the fattest advertising budgets or the slickest commercials will not be able to help a marketer if a brand does not have inherent strengths.

In 2008 Barack Obama rode to power on the flood tide of his oratory. One is yet to see Rahul delivering his ‘Gettysburg address’! From what little one has seen Rahul’s oratory does not exactly seem to set the Ganga on fire. In all these years since he came to represent the family fiefdom of Amethi in parliament, one has heard only one ‘Kalavathi’ speech from him and no other intervention, not even to ask a question!

Although according to his sycophants Rahul ostensibly represents youth in spite of his 43 years, he does not seem to inspire the youth brigade of the internet age with his profound wisdom. As students of Mumbai discomfited Barack Obama, their brethren in Patna and Ahmedabad made Rahul squirm. What is the vision he has for the youth of this country? How does he plan to educate and employ them? No one knows, for no one has heard him elaborate. The only solution his party comes up with in times of crises is offering freebies and proposals of reservations and more reservations.

Notwithstanding his pilgrimages to Dalit homes and second class suburban travel, his understanding of men and matters leaves much to be desired. (Gujarat is larger than the European Union!) One fine morning he decided to take up the cause of the victims of Bhatta-Parasul village whose lands were forcibly acquired by the UP state administration. Narrating the horrors he witnessed of people (presumably) killed and burnt, he informed the media that there were ‘70 feet of ashes’, whatever it meant!

If the piece in The Economist (Adams Robert. The Rahul problem. September 10, 2012) is anything to go by, even his biographer (Ramachandran, Aarthi. Decoding Rahul Gandhi) was hard put to paint a colourful portrait of him. AR says, ‘this is the moment for Congress to dare to think of something radical: of reorganizing itself on the basis of policies, ideas and a vision of how India should develop.’ According to his biographer (as cited in the article) Rahul wants to apply the principles of management he learnt from Toyota to modernise the Congress party’s youth organisation. 

For brand Rahul the time has come to move from the quadrant of ‘problem children’: up, to the quadrant of ‘stars’ or down, to the quadrant of ‘dogs’, to be dropped eventually. As of now there is nothing to indicate that brand Rahul can become a ‘star’!