KGB funds, yawn ...

REGIONAL ROUNDUP

While the reaction of political parties to the Vasily Mitrokhin diaries was understandably muted considering the Left parties and the Congress were in the dock and the BJP is in a complete disarray, the coverage of the disclosures of payments by the KGB to the Left parties as well as to former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was quite lackluster as well.

The issue was given a pedestrian coverage in all the three Kannada newspapers "" Praja Vani, Kannada Prabha and Vijaya Karnataka. The stories were relegated to inside pages such as 10 and 11.

Only Praja Vani had a front page pointer to the story inside on September 19, when the news was made public on September 18. Nor was there any analysis or an edit on this subject in any of the newspapers.

Most Bangla newspapers displayed a marked lack of enthusiasm in their reportage of the revelations made in the book based on KGB agent Mitrokhin's secret diary notes.

This is surprising because all the mainline Bangla newspapers "" Ananda Bazar Patrika, Bartaman and Aajkaal "" rarely lose an opportunity to highlight any developments that are politically embarrassing for the Left Front leaders in Bengal.

In this case, however, the revelations that dragged legendary Left leaders such as Pramode Dasgupta and Bhupesh Gupta managed to get displays only on the bottom half of the newspapers. The headlines were muted and the reportage was restrained. Most reports were restricted to listing the various reactions of different political leaders.

There was no attempt by any of the newspapers to publish a summary of the book's revelations about the Left leaders There was no editorial comment either. Ananda Bazar Patrika carried two reports "" both of them in the bottom half of the front page. While one report was filed by its Delhi news bureau, the other was filed by its London correspondent.

It was only the latter London datelined report which carried some interesting details of how Left leaders like S A Dange and C Rajeswara Rao dealt with the KGB. Bartaman's contribution was in the form of a display report (not on the front page though) on how the BJP was wanting a probe ordered into these revelations with the help of President Kalam.

Aajkaal came out with a Kolkata-datelined report on how the CPI-M leaders had threatened to file a criminal case against the authors of the book leveling what they considered were false and inaccurate charges against their leaders.

In the north, the mainline papers gave it a shoddy treatment, though Rajasthan Patrika had it on the front page on two days, and Dainik Bhaskar had an editorial on it, the nub of which was whether the stories were aimed at putting the UPA on the defensive.