It is just a colloquial expression. But the provocation must have been great. How else does one explain the Mayakovsky-translating, film festival-attending, graduate in Bangla literature likening the premier anti-CPI(M) newspaper of West Bengal to such a creature as a smelly rodent. Responding, one guesses replying would be inappropriate here, to a Bartaman reporter, the Chief Minister, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said that considering the newspaper’s reportage over the year, another government would have taken action against the newspaper, but then he would not stink his hand by killing a mole. The translation is feeble. It does not do justice to Mr Bhattacharjee’s earthy “chucho mere haath gandha korbo na.”
The CM is an honourable man and there is little doubt that the newspaper must have been nasty and insolent. But the earthiness is surprising. It would have been understandable and fitting to rail against it, as People’s Democracy does with unfailing regularity about the press in general, and call it a particularly recalcitrant member of the bourgeois press. But that would have also been to label his friends in the ABP group who till the other day had taken the position that the King can do no wrong even if all was rotten with his kingdom. Another explanation could be that the mole response is a more visceral one. When one is challenged and boundaries are pushed, it is not to acquired knowledge and learnt arguments and language that one turns, but rather to expressions closer to one’s emotions. Contrast chucho with class enemy or bourgeoisie and the distinction would be clear. That chuchos can also be class enemies is also a possibility.
The point is not, however, whether Mr Bhattacharjee thinks of pests and press in the same breath. It is whether any provocation is big enough in a democratic system to call a newspaper a pest. The use of the expression though directed at Bartaman could not but have been a synecdoche. And were this newspaper not a mole, a small but smelly thing, but a big, brawny rat, would he have considered piping it out to the river or just swatting it. There sits an undemocratic impulse in knuckles that think of press as pests, which of all the creature categories known to us have their own named killing instruments (remember there is no canine-cide or avian-cide; there is, however, pesticide). If there is anything defamatory, there are laws in the land to take the press to court. If there are lies, the chief minister of a state has the pulpit to refute. If there is a lack of fairness, there are ways in which to set the record straight. The language of rodents taken to its logical conclusion is not about just the smell, but about extermination. At some point the stench would not be an impediment to smothering it.
There is an alternate line that one would like to suggest. That there indeed was something felicitous in the choice of the idiom. That there might have been the unconscious at work here. There is indeed a stink, but the stink is not in the press or the paper. The press is merely purveying the stink, the rottenness in the state. And it might be a good idea to address the cause of the stink and not the tiny purveyor of the smell. But most politicians have never had the sensibility of a Lady Macbeth who at least in derangement knew that none of the perfumes of Arabia would sweeten her hands and make them smell good. The stink might not be in the press, it could well be in the corridors where the CM sits or parties.
One mole may or may not sully. But if things continue the way they have it surely will not be a newspaper or the press that will be responsible for leaving Mr Bhattacharjee with malodourous hands.
