Attempts at glib talk didn’t work for the former Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe when he was interviewed by Mehdi Hasan the enfant terrible of Al Jazeera. It seemed that Hasan’s guest had basically said goodbye to facts and arguments and was relying on trying to be clever, with retorts such as ‘you are going off your head,’ and ‘you have now got cornered.’
None of it put Mehdi Hasan, Ranil Wickremesinghe’s interlocutor off his stride. Rarely, it seemed, in the annals of recent media has an interview subject been so comprehensively taken down by the host.
Later, the former President tried some damage control by way of a press conference to explain away the bashing he received at the hands of Hasan. That didn’t seem to be good strategy either. Why hold a special press conference to explain away your recent interview, unless it is felt that there was something badly awry?
giveaway
So that was a dead giveaway, the fact that the ex-President held a press conference, and said that the interview was edited, and claimed he came out positively in the segments of the interview that were edited out. That was as strong an admission as any that in the segments that were aired, which lasted for almost one hour, Wickremesinghe himself thought that he had fared quite badly.
Fared badly he did, and the quicker there is a candid admission of that fact, it would be easier perhaps for the leader of the UNP to salvage at least a modicum of dignity after the fact. The interviewer has been lambasted in some quarters for his interview style, which was criticised for the lack of courtesy on occasion, to offer the subject a proper opportunity to reply to his questions.
However, that this is Mehdi’s modus operandi was rather well known. Those who agreed to the interview i.e the former President’s handlers, would have known this aspect only too well. It is almost certain that Wickremesinghe walked into the interview with the idea of demolishing the demolisher, because he overestimated himself as he habitually does.
The former President had previously given himself high marks on the score of tackling troublesome interviewers. His approach to interviews back home has been to parrot out rather irrelevant stories while making glib comments. None of his recent interlocutors back in Colombo had the gumption to call his bluff on this unfortunate tendency, and perhaps Wickremesinghe and his handlers thought the same method of deflection would work nicely against Al Jazeera’s Mehdi.
But Mehdi didn’t allow his subject to digress into lengthy asides where Wickremesinghe would try to impress with some sort of esoteric knowledge about any number of rather obscure subjects. For instance, when Wickremesinghe tried to tell his host why he apparently likes the EU, Mehdi said he doesn’t have all the time to discuss the merits of that organisation. When Wickremesinghe then resorted to glib comments which he uses to good effect with tame and servile interviewers back home — and with some equally obsequious foreign reporters as well — Mehdi would retort with a smarter comment. When Wickremesinghe tried to needle the interviewer, saying for instance, “don’t lose your temper ‘Mehdi shot back, “Only one of us so far has threatened to walk out.”
There is no way that Wickremesinghe and his team do not know the facts as described above, and that his strategies to attack and belittle Mehdi failed rather miserably.
So, it is rather optimistic on their part to try to spin the interview as an example of Wickremesinghe walking all over his opponent, i.e something positive for Wickremesinghe. It was anything but.
Mehdi basically mopped the floor with Wickremesinghe in the Head to Head, and this fact is so painfully obvious that it is the consensus opinion everywhere in this country except, of course, in the Wickremesinghe ecosystem where his acolytes and handlers try to put some gloss on what was indubitably an unmitigated disaster.
One of the most galling aspects of the interview didn’t concern Wickremesinghe’s implosion, but related to the fact that he abjectly allowed anti-Sri Lankan elements on the panel to present their cases far better than he did his. By the time he was through, the former President had agreed to the proposition that justice had not been meted out to any of the communities caught up in the end-phase of war in 2009, and that he wanted to bring about that measure of justice but couldn’t do so because of the legal system that obtains in the country.
Why would he make such unqualified and incriminating assertions? Successive Sri Lankan Governments have contested the figure of 40,000 having perished in the last phrase of the war, as attributed to a so-called UN report.
The position of various Sri Lankan Governments has been that this was never a proper UN report and that it was a mere private advisory to the then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, done by certain persons whose credibility had been severely dented.
powerful
But Wickremesinghe wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to be popular with the liberal elite in foreign countries — particularly powerful Western countries — that promote this theory that there were enormous casualties during the last phase of the war.
He doesn’t want to tell them the obvious that this narrative strains credulity, because it is impossible for 40,000 bodies to have disappeared into thin air. Nowhere near the remains of 40,000 bodies were found in this country. Wickremesinghe later said there were 15,000 missing persons — a figure even higher than the 6,000 claimed by host Mehdi — but never rebutted the 40,000 fatalities figure pointedly.
The former President didn’t offer the aforementioned counter-arguments — not so much even in a tentative way — to his panellists, because he tries to be, on the one hand, popular with them by agreeing with their positions, while maintaining also that they are LTTE agents.
It seems Mehdi Hasan and his panellists destroyed Wickremesinghe despite the fact that he bent over backwards to be popular with them. All that can be said is more the pity, Mr. Former President. It’s always difficult to replace principles with expediency, and that’s why the panellists got the better of Wickremesinghe in their exchanges.
If someone fails to acquit himself with a modicum of credibility in an interview, that is his private problem, but when he drags the country down in the process, it is no longer a private problem.
Wickremesinghe and his rather sheepish spinmeisters try to make out that he acquitted himself rather admirably on Al Jazeera’s recently aired Head to Head. That’s risible and a case of claiming black is white.
But if they really want to know how astute people handle interviews even with a troublesome and blunt interviewer such as Mehdi, they should watch the Head to Head he did with Shashi Tharoor, India’s Congress Party MP, who is, of course, a well known intellectual and public figure.
Tharoor clinically and with much disarming candour took apart Mehdi’s arguments, and all the while kept his dignity intact instead of prancing about like a kindergartner saying, “You are going mad” and “… let’s do this without getting excited.”
Tharoor said nothing of that sort. Instead, he replied in impeccable English, and had a well-articulated, logical retort to every combative question Mehdi put to him. That’s partly because Tharoor is very confident in his abilities, so confident that he doesn’t childishly think that he can outsmart the interviewer with one-liners and asides, as Mr. Wickremesinghe does.
Tharoor is an intellectual, and not someone who merely thinks he is one. It is why he was able to parry Mehdi’s questions with admirably nonchalant finesse. He didn’t have to hold a press conference after the event to say that he did well, though his better parts were edited out.
He knew he did quite well despite the pressure of a tough and sometimes rude line of questioning. He had no post-interview brief to paint himself as something he was not, because Tharoor was an absolute maestro, as opposed to someone who pretended and continues to pretend to be one.
