Vaidik-Saeed meet: Is everyone falling for a big PR stunt?

Ved Pratap Vaidik continues to make history.

He has not only met Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, alleged mastermind of 26/11. He also entered the even more exclusive club of those who have told Arnab Goswami to “shut up”.

“Shut up. Shut up. You are a junior journalist. Don’t accuse me.”

It was a telling episode of news as infotainment. Admittedly it was low on information (7 minutes and 45 seconds into the slugfest Goswami is still saying “My first question to you”) but it was high-octane entertainment.

In fact, the entire Ved Pratap Vaidik brouhaha feels like a match made in heaven for bored media, an itchy opposition and a limelight-hungry journalist. With Hafiz Saeed (who knew one of India’s most wanted men was on Twitter?) tweeting expert commentary from the sidelines to keep stoking the fire.

This is farce of the highest order.

Actually Goswami’s basic premise was wrong. “You’ve been caught red-handed meeting Hafiz Saeed,” he accused Vaidik.

But Vaidik has been tweeting pictures of himself with Saeed saying “Hafiz ne kaha Pakistan Modi ka swagat karega.” (Hafiz has said Pakistan will welcome Modi.) He has been on every media channel boasting about it. There is no being “caught red-handed” here.

This is the kind of relentless self-promotion that any freelancer should be envious of.

Until yesterday most Indians had not heard of Ved Pratap Vaidik even though he has been around for a while and is close to Baba Ramdev. He was basically the kind of man whose network of connections put him on junkets like the one that took him to Pakistan along with Salman Khurshid thanks to the Regional Peace Institute which has Mani Shankar Aiyar as its board member. Junkets, even more than politics, make for strange bedfellows.

But who is Vaidik when he is not being an intrepid uncle-jee version of Christiane Amanpour?

In The Telegraph Sankarshan Thakur gives us some precious insight into Vaidik, the most famous Indian we didn’t know. He has been opinion editor for Navbharat Times and the editor of Bhasha, the Hindi wire service. His specialty is Aryavarta otherwise known as South Asia. He just wrote a piece on Arun Jaitley’s budget calling it Modi kaa Manmohak Budget (Modi’s Spellbinding Budget). According to Vaidik, who is clearly the best source on Vaidik, Congressmen wanted him to be “elevated to deputy Prime Minister” during PV Narasimha Rao’s time.

Vaidik’s defence that as a journalist he meets everybody from Maoists to Prabhakaran is perfectly sound except that no one knows how much of a journalist he is these days. As Thakur points out, you don’t just show up at Hafiz Saeed’s Johar Town residence in Lahore for an interview with the man. “Phone lines need to be burnt, subterranean connections made, purpose and credentials verified and channels cleared, before such a meeting can come to be.”

Vaidik has cheerfully added to the confusion about how the meeting happened stirring up more cloak-and-dagger intrigue which translates into even more publicity for him.

He tells The Times of India that the meeting was sudden and serendipitous.

When I was in Pakistan, the media criticism of Hafiz Saeed in India came up for discussion. It was then that a Pakistani journalist asked me if I would like to meet Saeed in person. I agreed and a call was immediately made to fix the meeting.

He tells The Indian Express the meeting had “been in the works for more than a year and was arranged by an anchor of a prominent Pakistani news channel.”

That has led Shashi Tharoor to wonder on Twitter “The picture of Vaidik w/Saeed shows no notepad, pen or taperecorder: was this a journalist’s meeting or an emissary’s?”

But what kind of self-respecting government would send out as back-channel emissary a cannonball like Vaidik? Richard Nixon sent Henry Kissinger secretly to China from Pakistan as well but Kissinger, no shrinking violet himself, did not go on every news channel to brag about it. A high-level security official tells the Hindustan Times “This is not how back-channel communication occurs. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee used R K Mishra as envoy to speak to Pakistan, it was discreet. The entire Satinder Lambah initiative under UPA was discreet. You think the government can trust a loud-mouth like Vaidik?”

The more plausible explanation actually comes unwittingly from Vaidik himself.

I am a known name in Pakistan. My writings and articles are translated and reproduced in Pakistani media.

He is a man who has that mysterious thing known as “connections” and he is not afraid to use them.

He bragged to Arnab Goswami that he did a three-and-a-half hour interview with the late Afghan leader Babrak Karmal without a tape-recorder. Karmal clearly had plenty of idle time running Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Vaidik is a self-important man not afraid to drop names and has over a long career collected many names to drop and leverage. He is so self-important that he disavows connections with the Vivekananda International Foundation by telling reporters, “You are totally mistaken. I have never been a part of Vivekananda International Foundation. In fact, I have a grudge against them as they never invited me to deliver a lecture.”

Now after a 55-year career he is having his dream moment in the sun. Every channel wants him. Parliament is in an uproar. Rahul Gandhi has woken up. The house has been adjourned because of him. Vaidik said yesterday “ If they raise the issue in Parliament, it is good as they will publicise me against my will.”

It’s not quite against his will. It’s more like a freelancer’s dream plan of creating buzz coming true. A PR agency could not come up with this kind of publicity. “Everyone is watching you right now,” Arnab Goswami scolded a shouting Vaidik as if he was a misbehaving toddler. “People are watching you all over India and in forty-seven countries.” Goswami meant to shame him but Vaidik must have been in seventh heaven.

Thakur ends his piece about Vaidik wondering “where the core of all this clamour is: his ‘interview’ with Hafiz Saeed. What desk did he send it to?”

Rest assured when he does decide to rustle up some copy, Vaidik will have no shortage of bidders. Do not be surprised if we see Ved Pratap Vaidik as a contestant on the next season of Bigg Boss.