When Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire five years ago to protest the way authorities had treated him, he sparked off a wave of protests that would come to be known as the Arab Spring. If Bouazizi had been in India, we would still be arguing about who sold him the kerosene, a politician would have found a way to blame another politician and a third, like say the Aam Aadmi Party's Ashutosh, would be sobbing away on television.

It might be trite to criticise Ashutosh for openly weeping on Aaj Tak, complaining that he didn't come into politics to be accused of having caused the death of a man. Ashutosh could very plausibly be genuinely hurt by the allegations hurled at him or even just by the death of the farmer. But it's important to point out: this is the man who, a day earlier, sarcastically said that he would ask Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to go up a tree and save the next person who tried this. After receiving plenty of flak, Ashutosh withdrew his comments.

On Friday, the AAP leader also compared the death of Gajendra Singh at an AAP rally on Wednesday to the 2002 riots, after demands for Kejriwal to resign came up. "Why should Kejriwal resign?" he told CNN-IBN. "Did Modi resign after 2002?" He followed this up by going on AajTak and crying about the state of politics, journalism and the world.


Could there be a better way to distract people from the reason Gajendra Singh purportedly died? In case you missed out on what that was entirely, it wasn't the land acquisition ordinance but the recent spate of unseasonal rains and the damaged crops that caused him distress. As other farmers from Rajasthan have echoed, life is already difficult for farmers, and the unseasonal rain has made things much worse.

#AshuCries

Take the AajTak show as a perfect example of how this worked. Anchor Anjana Om Kashyap, facing a panel that featured Ashutosh, the Bharatiya Janata Party's Sambit Patra and Gajendra Singh's daughter, did attempt to steer the conversation towards things like minimum support prices for farmers, even though she peppered it with questions about Singh's daughter's feelings.

But the network and the show's producers made it clear what they thought the real story was: not Singh's death or even crop damage, but Ashutosh's weepy tirade. They even had a hashtag for it: #AshuCries, where the network encouraged people to write in about the "exclusive" tears. To make matters worse, the channel played Ashutosh's outburst on loop, in such a manner that it was impossible for it not turn into a meme and seem funny, instead of tragic. Which is exactly what happened.



Similarly, across the other channels, the issue up for discussion had more to do with the circumstances of Gajender Singh's death – #IsSorryEnough was TimesNow's hashtag for the day, a reference to Kejriwal's apology – rather than crop damage.  Gajender Singh's death is indeed a story to cover, considering doubts have emerged about whether Gajendra Singh was even attempting to commit suicide, with some suggesting his death was accidental, and the reaction of authorities as well as AAP workers bears looking into, but to turn the entire issue into another blame game that ends with no closure, is unlikely to make anyone satisified, least of all Gajender Singh's kin.