India's Most Wanted

India's Most Wanted
Shailaja Bajpai

Coincidences are often unnerving. Last week, Indian Express published letters from readers who had identified Suhaib Ilyasi as one of the TV Personalities of the M. The same day's headlines announced the reported suicide of his wife after an argument over his alleged admirer. Readers had responded to our month-long television contest, `The Best on the Box'. They had to identify their favourite actors, actresses, serials and then chose one television professional as the `TV Personality of the Millennium' -- a misnomer when one considers that television in India is barely 40 years old! Still, the aim was to form an idea of who, in the opinion of readers/viewers, had made a significant and singular contribution to the experience of television.

The usual suspects showed up. Serials such as Hum Log, Buniyaad, Ramayana, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, Saans, were among those identified by the public. So were actors Neena Gupta, Alok Nath, Shekhar Suman, Pankaj Kapoor, Satish Shah, Kanwaljeet, Shefali Chaya. In thecategory of anchors, Prannoy Roy led the list which included Shekhar Suman, Simi Garewal, Rajat Sharma, Cyrus Broacha. Nothing startling here: these were names which would feature on anyone's list.

The TV Personality of the M: the initial responses were predictable: Prannoy Roy for his contribution to the electronic media's flourishing news and current affairs business; Shekhar Suman for his versatility as an actor in dramatic and comic roles, his stand-up comic performance in Movers & Shakers; Mukesh Khanna, the super hero, Shaktimaan received a few ayes by those who felt he was a role model for children.

Interestingly, no woman was selected. There are a plethora of actreses -- Anita Kanwar, Neena Gupta, Kavita Udaan Choudhury, Priya Tendulkar, Divya Seth, and more recently, Shefali Chaya who might have been considered though, perhaps only Priya T and Neena G have been path-breakers.

And then came the surprise in the pack. Or was it really a surprise? Who has combined public service with entertainment,crude though the latter might be? Who has used television as an interactive medium, deployed it in the service of the nation? Who has helped India strike back against organised crime? India's Most Wanted, Suhaib Ilyasi.

Of course.

The man whose weekly television programme, originally on Zee and now on DD1, has led to the arrest of at least a dozen criminals in different parts of India; criminals the police, the CBI had been unable to nab; the man who invites all Indians to make India a better place to live in; who in a lilting sing-song voice, declares war on crime; who promises that we (alongside him) ``can and will make a difference''. Call now.

Ilyasi's show has developed something of a cult following. It was one of the top three shows on Zee and is doing exceedingly well on DD too. The young anchor's TV career spans barely two years but his fame spans the country. By his own admission, he has attained snap-your-finger stardom but doesn't quite know what to do with it. By becoming the husband of adeceased wife, Anju, who reportedly committed suicide because of him, Suhaib Ilyasi has become a victim of his own popularity.

Ilyasi was only second to Shekhar Suman as our respondents choice for the TV Personality of the M. They praised him in unusually complimentary terms: he was a ``saviour'', he ``dared to stand tall''; singlehandedly, he was ``saving this sinking nation'' by bringing it to ``order''; ``he delivers the goods'', ``he is the voice of the people'', he ``terrorised'' criminals, he was a ``crusader'', he had ``that fighting spirit that makes the TV audience bow its head before him''. He had made a difference. And all at the cost of endangering his own life. ``May his tribe increase'' .... etcetra, etcetra, the encomiums flowed like the combined waters of the Ganga and Brahmaputra.

India's Most Wanted is a carbon copy of America's Most Wanted. It is loud, crudely-produced, poorly dramatised. So what is all the fuss about? Well, it is peppy, it has a certain tempo to it along with catchykey phrases: ``We can and will make a difference'', ``India fights back.'' It places power in the average individual's hands at a time when we are faced by the monolithic, centralised authority of a largely anonymous state mechanism. A `soft state' in which criminals, high and low, routinely escape punishment. While the mission of IMW is to catch them.

IMW appealed to our sense of patriotism long before Kargil did. And to boot, it was sorta entertaining, with real crimes thrown in; as the number of criminals it helped capture mounted, so did the `feel good' factor -- see here, we did make a difference.

The thrill of helping solve a crime. Heady stuff. Gave viewers a high, a sense of participation and accomplishment. Juxtapose it with the atmosphere of helplessness generated by Kandahar. Why viewers would have more faith in Ilyasi's ability to capture the hijackers than the government's! That says something about Ilyasi and his show. It says more about us.

Ilyasi cultivated the persona of a publiccrusader, a man possessed with a patriotic mission, the `angry young man' (if this isn't too far-fetched), the archetypical individual who stands alone against the forces of evil in a wicked, corrupt society. It was clever, it worked.

We get the heroes we deserve. What we got here is Suhaib Ilyasi, TV vigilante as a messiah. Suhaib Ilyasi's wife is dead, apparently, because of his inability to come to terms with the elixir of stardom and (perhaps) the persona of an avenging angel he had so successfully sold to the nation.