It was on this Tuesday that I found something unusual in ‘The Hindu’ .On normal days, reading newspapers in the wee hours of morning was just limited to glancing the sports pages and the front page. But Tuesday morning was not so. There was this special coverage on Wikileaks- the India cables as assessed by ‘The Hindu’ . I thought,” yes !! Assange uncle has arrived in India, all set to rock the nation, all set to set the political lines on fire and moreover all set to be a sensation in the country”. What way was that eye-catching for me? I was never a big fan of scientific journalism and so what makes not only me but millions across the world to stand up and salute the works of Julian Assange and his associates? Well I knew that finding an answer to this question of mine is never a big deal. It is simple. What the rest of the world’s media could not achieve , has been achieved by a group of men with probably the most eccentric and meticulous planning of the order the world has ever seen.
The furor over wikileaks’ publication of cables pertaining to the US army has caught the world by surprise. Even though there are eyebrows being raised over the heroic stature bestowed on them, one thing stands out. Assange vows for Change- a change in the way information is being is given to the public. In 1958, one of the leading Australian newspaper contained this famous quote,” In the race between secrecy and truth, it is inevitable that the truth will triumph”. We live in an era where in we get the information from any source. But the question lies in not only its authenticity but also in the degree of secrecy involved in it. When we talk of wars and its coverage, people are more often deprived of the holistic information. The governments lying to its people about these wars and then asking the entire nation to participate in the war is quite absurd. Why not tell the truth and let people decide on it, if the war is justified. And that’s what Wikileaks has exactly done. They have published documents that contain these hidden and lesser known things about embassy cables on foreign policies, diplomatic and political dealings of governments and corporate corruption by using internet technologies in new ways to report the truth. The Wikileaks also ensures that there is absolutely no room for scapegoats as it is all about blaming someone for the fault of his own and not of anyone else’s.
Although the wikileaks’ meteoric rise to fame was not primarily India-centric, now it has begun to create mayhem in the political ranks and is now nothing but a sensation in the Indian media and public. Of course the people’s burning desire to know the unknown and untold stories of certain diplomatic issues and also the governance is very much in view these days(with the likes of ‘The Hindu’ lending them a helping hand). The cables on the ‘cash-factor in south Indian politics’ is a much debated topic among the general public and politicians. So will we get to see yet another opposition disruption in parliament over the election policies of UPA govt. in 2004 elections or will we get to see those in spotlight being suitably questioned and let the cat out of his bag? Well for that we’ll need to wait a bit and in the meantime just exalt a bunch of exotic individuals who are ruling the roost in the world media and taking journalism to an unseen contour.
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