A tale of two interviews...

The following article was written for MyInd Makers. Pasting it here for reference:

I live in Hyderabad and I woke up to this front page in The Hindu yesterday.

What stuck as mighty odd to me was the fact that, in the Hyderabad edition of the paper, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s interview had been given better coverage than the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu’s interview! One would think that people in Hyderabad would be more interested in knowing what the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister had to say. However, that is not the point of this article. I went on to read both the interviews and was taken aback by what the Delhi Chief Minister had to offer and how the scale of expectations were decidedly different for the two Chief Ministers of two states.

The interview with the AP CM covered the following topics – river interlinking, new capital (Amaravati) development, coastline development, shifting of the capital, Janmabhoomiprogram, IT for development.

The interview with the Delhi CM covered the following topics – DDCA, BJP, Prime Minister, LG – essentially just the controversies that have been brewing since the past couple of weeks. The interview just focused on the (senseless) utterances of the Delhi CM and his weird justifications of the same. Not a single question on policy; not a single question on his achievements (Note – the first question to the AP CM was “what is the most satisfying achievement (from 2015) you would like to highlight?” ).

Does the Delhi Chief Minister have no worthwhile achievements to talk about and therefore his interviewers have to focus on the controversies he generates to stay in the news? Andhra Pradesh is a new state at nascent stage, is plagued with controversies vis-à-vis some central assistance – and yet the interviewer had so many policy related questions to ask. Is it because the Chandrababu Naidu has done so many things or left imprint on so many policies that are worth debating? Infact, I am sure you can pick any Chief Minister of any state in the country, and they will have many policy related events and ideas to talk about.

In stark contrast, the Delhi Chief Minister is just indulging in rumour mongering day in and day out. He just doesn’t seem to have enough significant policy related answers – perhaps because he has done no policy related work so far? Even in this interview, he says – “I was told this”, “I was told that” – without a single reference to who told him and what is the validity of that information. The interviewer does not push him either. All he has done is to live by the rumour. I am yet to see a single interviewer asking Arvind Kejriwal why he spent 500 crores on advertisements or  why he increased salaries of MLAs by 400%?

Just in the last one week, The Hindu published three critical articles on the Andhra Pradesh government – this is what is expected from the media – to bring to the people various arguments that go into policy making. Can any one show me three articles in the entire year that are critical of the policies of the Delhi Chief Minister? Is it because there are no policies worth talking about?