The BJP has stepped up efforts to fill the information deficit that is widely believed to be the reason for the rumour mills spinning yarns about the ruling dispensation.
Starting Monday, when the ruling party invited Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani to clarify doubts with regard to various initiatives that her department has taken, the ministers will have at least a weekly interaction with the media in the BJP headquarters.
In her interaction, the HRD Minister took pains to clarify that the ongoing controversy over the Government renaming Teachers’ Day on September 5 to Guru Utsav. The BJP’s southern allies, the PMK and the MDMK, have objected to the move, branding it as an imposition of Sanskrit in official parlance. “Guru Utsav is an essay competition. I can’t believe it is being politicised,” she said.
Irani then went on to give a long summary of her various initiatives in the ministry, an endeavour that other ministers are expected to follow.
Besides these interactions in the party, different ministers are set to increase the frequency of their interactions with the media. Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javdekar is expected to hold a press conference on Tuesday. Over the past week, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has held formal interactions as well as structured interviews with different media outlets. The BJP is hoping to get Power Minister Piyush Goyal over to the party headquarters some time next week.
“We will have more Union ministers briefing the media,” said a BJP leader.
This signals a change in the media strategy from the initial three months of the BJP coming to power. The party, which has always been a media friendly one, had suddenly become taciturn. With little access to real information, scurrilous gossip has been masquerading as news, it now feels.
A prime example of it was the outburst by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who believes that he has been the victim of media propaganda. Although he did not blame anyone in particular, he was clearly perturbed about media gossip about his son Pankaj Singh having been reprimanded by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi for an alleged misconduct. He complained to Modi and BJP President Amit Shah, both of whom had to issue separate statements defending him last week.
Information is kingMoreover, newspaper editorials in the past couple of weeks have pointed to different instances of ministers having been ticked off by the Prime Minister either for entertaining industrialists or displaying sartorial inelegance on official tours.
The BJP has clearly acknowledged that a lot of it has to do with scarcity of information. And the party looks set to correct the impression.
“There has been a lot of misinformation and slanderous gossip in the media. We do not want the party and the Government to become the victim of false propaganda. Correct information should flow through official channels,” said a BJP leader.