Reactions to the photographs of Andhra Pradesh Governor N D Tiwari cavorting in bed with three young girls have gone to extremes. I’ve heard people say that Tiwari’s behaviour was revolting and that he should be sacked for sleeping with women who were young enough to be his granddaughters. Others have complained about the fact that one woman wasn’t enough for him – he needed three.
Some responses have actually been admiring. On the day the Tiwari scandal hit the newspapers, most front pages had photographs of Manmohan Singh greeting A B Vajpayee on his birthday. It is no secret that Vajpayee, one of our best ever Prime Ministers, has not been well. So some wags made the point that a lifetime in the BJP aged you considerably whereas the pace of life in the Congress was much more relaxed. Tiwari is a year older than Vajpayee and yet here he was, romping with three young girls.
Others pointed out that Tiwari’s womanizing has long been legendary. When Veer Bahadur Singh replaced him as chief minister of UP in the 1980s, Veer Bahadur announced that he had purified every couch in the chief minister’s office with Gangajal because he knew what purposes Tiwari had put the couches to. And during the brief period when Tiwari broke with Narasimha Rao’s Congress and formed his own Congress (T), the joke was that T stood for Thoku.
On the whole however, Tiwari’s womanizing has hardly ever made it to the papers. Most journalists have taken the line that he has every right to sleep with as many women as he wants (usually at the same time) as long as it does not influence the way in which he conducts his political career.
That view has now been revised. Much of this is Tiwari’s own fault. A woman who was well known in Lucknow as his long-term girlfriend has now gone public with the details of their relationship even filing affidavits in court. A young man who claims to be Tiwari’s illegitimate son, has now sued him to acknowledge paternity.
However, the Andhra Pradesh orgy belongs in a different category. Anybody who has followed Andhra politics will tell you that most politicians in that state are not necessarily monogamous. Does the Tiwari expose and the immediate response it provoked – Tiwari resigned the next day – suggest that the media will now focus on the womanizing of the state’s politicians?
And if so, is this necessarily a good thing? Speaking for myself, I am still a conservative on matters like this. I believe in the old rule that a politician’s private life is irrelevant unless it can be shown that it affects the way in which he does his job.
If you go by this criterion, then the only way the Tiwari expose can be justified is by focusing on the back story. The Andhra channel claims that Tiwari was supplied these women by a person who had been promised a mining contract by the Governor. When the contract did not materialize, the photographs were released. If this is true, then Tiwari’s little orgy did have some bearing on how he did his job.
But even so, there are many unanswered questions. Who were the women in the picture? Were they paid to pleasure Tiwari? It is hard to see any young woman stripping off her clothes to join two other girls in a rush to satisfy an ageing debauch unless there was some financial consideration. If so, shouldn’t we be told? Moreover, were these women aware that they were going to star in porn pictures? What about their right to privacy?
Nor is the mining contract story entirely convincing. Governors do not award contracts when state governments are in office. Even if Tiwari had been supplied an entire football team worth of prostitutes, he would still not have been in a position to give contracts. Admittedly, he could have asked a Minister for a favour. But in that case, surely it is easier to send the nymphets directly to the Minister (or to pay him a bribe – which is the usual way these things are done in Andhra) than to risk giving this old boy a heart attack from too much exertion or too much Viagra?
I think we should demand convincing answers to these questions. It is not enough to carry sexy pictures of politicians only because we’re all thrilled or shocked. The media must establish why Tiwari’s privacy was breached and what social purpose was served.
And as for Tiwari himself, what can one say? Give it a rest, old boy, perhaps :-)
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