It should ideally not matter in this age and time whether a national leader is married or a divorcee or even a widow/widower. It should similarly be no one’s concern, depending on the national standards of morality, or in some cases the country’s laws, if the person at the helms has a relationship sans marriage. Except for the American presidency where the spouse (so far the wife) has become a public figure thanks to a combination of Biblical mindsets together with exigencies of television there seems to be hardly any example of a national penchant elsewhere to keep them coming in pairs. In this respect, the British royalty has tended to see itself through a relatively narrow prism of public morality, an image it has struggled to keep, though not always successfully.

From this perspective alone, Saturday in New Delhi was unique. All three top Indian dignitaries – the president, the vice-president and the prime minister — watched the Republic Day military parade with their spouses but not the foreign dignitary they had invited as the chief guest. French President Nicolas Sarkozy was made to endure his enforced loneliness, so we are told, because he happens to be between marriages. His fiancée is understood to have opted out of the frame, or perhaps pushed out of it, after much media discussion over problems of protocol. The irony couldn’t be greater. Here is a French president like few before who never seems to tire of flaunting his ladylove before a fawning media at home and abroad. And there we watched him struggling with his loneliness as he posed before the Taj Mahal, a symbol of eternal love. Saturday’s parade was also a first for India for a positive reason. President Pratibha Patil became the nation’s first woman president to take the salute.

As for the Indian rarity of all its three main office-holders sitting on the ceremonial dais with their wives or husbands for the traditional parade and pageantry we need to look at the early beginnings of the celebration. The first such occasion naturally came under Jawaharlal Nehru’s watch as prime minister. He was a widower, so no problems with that. But President Rajendra Prasad though married has said in his autobiography that he never saw the face of his wife for most years of his life. According to the custom in his native village in Bihar he could only meet her in the night and that too without a lamp or even natural light to facilitate a glimpse of each other. That leaves us with the possibility that Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a great scholar of philosophy, and like Nehru a liberal statesman, may have been accompanied by his wife. But we are not sure if that indeed did happen. The combination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, President Shankar Dayal Sharma and Vice-President M K Narayanan may well have been the first opportunity the three top dignitaries and their wives to gather at a public event.

This is a roundabout way of coming to the point about national duplicity of course. How else do we explain the fact that the Indian media found so much time in writing and commenting on President Sarkozy’s private life, but was coy when there was a matching story, if such stories matter, right under their nose about their own national leaders? And if you care to sift the number of sources of the unconfirmed reports that were involved in purveying the finally cooked up news to DNA, to name one Indian newspaper that used it, about President Sarkozy’s girlfriend, we might just begin to understand the degree of interest our media has shown in this genre of news. “Carla Bruni, the fiancée of French president Nicolas Sarkozy is pregnant with his child — less than two months after their high-profile love affair began,” said the Mumbai-based DNA quoting a semi-official news agency, which in turn quoted the British tabloid Daily Mail as its source. The alleged pregnancy of Bruni, a former supermodel, “has been confirmed by doctors in Paris”, the Daily Mail of Britain reported on Jan 11 quoting a French website 20minutes.fr. Not first hand, not second hand but third or fourth hand news was vended about someone who was to be the chief guest at India’s national day parade. Now if this reflects a normal interest in the private lives of leaders why don’t we display the same zeal in peeping into the way our own leaders’ lives?Yes there have been books and some odd so-called research about the sexuality of Mahatma Gandhi. There have been comments about Nehru’s alleged affair with the viceroy’s wife and Indira Gandhi too has been the subject of innuendo in one or two books. The media has generally kept off the subject matter. And somehow by the time we come to Atal Behari Vajpayee’s supposed ladylove who actually lives with the former prime minister in his official home the media trail goes completely cold. Why? How is Vajpayee’s love life any more private or inviolable than Sarkozy’s? There could be very genuine questions about the Indian leader who generally commands a lot of respect on both sides of the political divide. One question obviously is to do with a law that entitles prime ministers and their family’s protection by elite SPG commandos even after they demit office. Where does the “foster family” stand in the scheme of things vis a vis SPG? And the most important point of course is if indeed there is relationship between the former premier and the lady who is usually described in BJP circles as a close friend, why have we not seen the media carrying her picture ever?

The obsession with the Sarkozy-Bruni story and complete aloofness from the Vajpayee saga reflects a dilemma over public morality that the Indian media as also the country’s burgeoning middle classes face. At one level there is a great liberal attitude of progress but the very next step is stalked by a barbaric mindset. Kissing in English movies is good and the censors have no problem with all the wet scenes that Hollywood and cheap Italian flicks churn out regularly. In 1933, Devika Rani, grand niece of nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, kissed her husband Himanshu Rai in the movie Karma. But since then no Indian heroine is ever shown kissing a man and while rape scenes are a staple diet they are carried out with all the clothes intact. The temples of ancient Khajuraho and Konark have the world’s most erotic scenes on display so much so that parents don’t want to send their adult children by themselves there, but try and depict those figurines on the canvass and all hell would break loose. The conclusion is inevitable. India was a far more liberal civilisation than the way it has evolved. To begin with there were no vigilante groups of the Hindu and Muslim varieties that roam the streets today, ready and armed to bludgeon a Valentines Day event here or a fashion show there.

We were fortunate in the days bygone that we did not have the pusillanimous media, which cheapens our values and our integrity by joining hands with reactionary forces, a media that has different yardsticks to judge a story depending on whether the object of inquiry is a Vajpayee or a Sarkozy. In fact this was another facet of the Republic Day celebrations that needs to be probed and discussed thoroughly. What is the value of a state award that was bestowed on three popular TV journalists? What is the link if any between the awards the media gives to government functionaries and the ones it gets back from the government? This and similar questions may be unearth the real scandal not the marital status of national leaders.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com