Party At The President’s House

The good news is that Newslaundry will turn two in February 2014. The bad news is, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that we will get to celebrate the event in the hallowed precincts of the Rashtrapati Bhavan as we had dreamt we would. A dream which was inspired by NDTV.

For those not in the know, NDTV celebrated its 25^th anniversary in December by commemorating 25 “living legends” – which included Shahrukh Khan, Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani – at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Watching the ceremony on TV, we at Newslaundry decided that this was exactly how we wanted to celebrate our 2^nd anniversary.

The crucial question was how does one go about booking an event at Rashtrapati Bhavan. This isn’t exactly a hotel, where you call up Reservations and make a booking. Maybe you needed to be on back-slapping terms with the management to get a reservation? But no, Sonia Singh, Editorial Director – NDTV, informed all of us on Twitter that in the eyes of the President’s men and women, all media houses are equal when it comes to being allowed to host events at his home.

If TOI and Hindu and NDTV can, so can Newslaundry – right? Well, that’s what we thought.

With Sonia Singh’s tweets as our beacon of hope, we got working immediately.  The very next day – Monday, December 16, 2013 – we drafted a letter of request seeking permission from the honourable President to allow us to use the auditorium of the Rashtrapati Bhavan to organise a similar event in which Newslaundry would “honour India’s outstanding journalists” as part of the 2^nd anniversary celebrations. The letter was emailed to the Secretary to the President (email address: secy.president@rb.nic.in) that very day. Keen to ensure that there was no lack of effort on our part (read to impress the bosses), a colleague and I decided to physically submit a copy of the letter at Rashtrapati Bhavan as well. After a few phone calls, we were told to deliver the request letter to the Central Registry office of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The guards at Gate 17 of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (the entrance to the Central Registry office) insisted that only one of us could go in. I volunteered and submitted the letter to one of the nicest ever sarkari babus I have come across. He assured me that we’d get a response in a “few days”. Content that it was a job well done and convinced that we were one step closer to realising our dream, we started waiting for a response from the President’s office.

Christmas has come and gone, but we have not yet received a response. Till publishing this article on January 3, 2013, our email still hadn’t been acknowledged. But it’s a new year, and I refused to give up without a fight.  So began a saga of unending phone calls that ranged over three days and at least 15 different conversations.

The first call I made was to the office of the Secretary of the President (since we had addressed our request to her), who directed me to the office of the Private Secretary of the President. The office of the Private Secretary of the President instructed me to get in touch with the office of the Deputy Military Secretary to the President where I was told– after much persuasion and pestering – that they were entitled to act only on the instruction of the Private Secretary. The office of the Private Secretary when contacted again stuck to its initial position – “Call the Deputy Military Secretary to the President”. So I essentially ended the day where I began – with a bucketful of nothing.

The next day, I called the EPABX number of the Rashtrapati Bhavan where the lady at the other end was kind enough to guide me to the office of the Ceremonies Section. The Ceremonies Section told me they were the last leg of the process and would only get involved if the Honourable President approved the event. They added that I should contact the Central Registry Office and ask for a status report on my request. The Central Registry Office told me to be patient and explained to me that there is a “process to things”.

We had also filed an RTI so that we could get a rough estimate of the financials involved in hosting an event at Rashtrapti Bhavan. NDTV’s awards ceremony at the Rashtrapati Bhavan auditorium was a fairly unique affair in terms of scale and size. The few other “non-governmental” functions that the Rashtrapati Bhavan has hosted were much more low-key. One was the release of a commemorative postal stamp on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of The Times of India. The other was an event to mark the inauguration of the The Hindu Centre for Policy Research.

The RTI (PRSEC/R/2013/60424) was filed with the President’s Secretariat on December 20, 2013. It usually takes a couple of weeks if not a month to get a response from the RTI department. The status report which we received for the RTI was very enlightening, though. It stated that our RTI application had been forwarded to CPIO (Central Public Information Officers) and informed us in dark red print that: “You are advised to contact the above mentioned officer for further details”. Which we would have done, if only the fields for the contact number and email id of both the CPIO and the nodal officer weren’t blank.

We’ve now filed another RTI seeking an explanation for the missing contact details.

I personally think my managing editor, Abhinandan Sekhri’s insinuation (given below) is plain gibberish and simply reeks of “the grapes are sour” syndrome.

After all, as Sonia Singh has said, only organisations of a “certain calibre and credibility” are given the privilege of hosting anniversary celebrations at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

NDTV, it seems, passed muster with the President. Maybe if the stars and Pranab-da shine down on us, Newslaundry will too.

Note: Part 2 of this story will be updated as, when and if we get a response from Rashtrapati Bhawan.