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How in hell has Sonia been allowed to get away without giving a single interview?

Since David Dhawan will never make Signora No 1 to tackle the issue tugging at the heart of every Indian-born Indian -- Sonia Gandhi, if you haven't caught the drift -- it falls on the holder of passport number A2408046 issued by the Republic of India to throw in his two-bit on the Miss Maino of the 10 of the Janpath of the New Delhi.

No, Sarji, it's not for me to ask if, in this country of a billion peoples, the Congress couldn't find a single Indian born outside Italy to head the party. Because if I do, Ram, Ram, then the BJP will have to decide a cutoff date by which time all Indians wanting to rule this country ought to have been born within the geographical borders of this country.

If they do that, Sarji, we might lose a born leader, as in a born-to-lead leader, not a born-in-India leader like Lalchandji Kishinchandji Advani of the Karachi of the now Pakistan. And wouldn't that be a real pity?

Thankfully, as Dorab Sopariwala said in Prannoy Roy's presence last week, Indians are more liberal than their leaders. Well said, bawaji.

No, as a humble hack ekeing out a living by putting mouse to pad, my problem with Soniaji is a simpler one: how in hell has the president of a political party which brought down the last government and which aspires to form the next one, how in hell has Shrimati Sonia Gandhi been allowed to get away without giving a single interview to the Press?

I mean a "real" interview. Not some seductive soundbite -- dimples and all -- to NDTV's Arnab Goswami waiting on an airport tarmac. Not those sugary sweet-nothings to Vir Sanghvi, on Star Plus. But a professional interview to a responsible print journalist of a responsible newspaper or magazine. (Even Sanghvi.)

Soniaji has been Congress chief for well over a year now, and not one single full-length print interview has appeared anywhere. For the Widow of the Father of the Defamation Bill, that's pretty strong proof of how much belief she has in our democracy, and the freedom of the press which, we, the people of India, cherish.

What, I ask, have all those champions of the freedom of the Press -- the editors, publishers and proprietors -- been doing while the leader of the oldest political party in the world's largest democracy was playing around with our polity without even the rudimentary accountability which we in the media should expect as our birth right?

Five Questions • Is death the sole ticket to success for Indian political parties? Indira Gandhi dies, Congress triumphs in 1984. Rajiv Gandhi dies, Congress triumphs in 1991. Jawans die, BJP triumphs in 1999? • Shouldn't candidates like Sonia and Mulayam Singh Yadav who stand from two constituencies be asked to foot the bill for by-elections when they resign from one of the two seats upon election from the other? • For a party so opposed to "foreigners" and "outsiders", couldn't the BJP have found a more local and less "foreign" candidate than Sushma Swaraj to take on Sonia in Bellary? • Maruti cuts its prices to counter Tata Indica; Indian Airlines slashes fares to counter Jet and Sahara. Shouldn't public sector companies be sued for overcharging us all this while? • Given his recurring back trouble, will Sachin Tendulkar last as a player till the next World Cup?

Two months ago, I posed this question to a major functionary of the Editors' Guild of India. "She's scared; scared that we will pin her down, and get her to say things which she might not want to," said the editor, who once wrote a signed column asking for an interview with A B Vajpayee (when the BJP media managers were blocking it) and got it.

"Why don't you write a new column asking Sonia to speak?" I asked.

"As it is, they're calling us a Congress mouthpiece," he said.

Fair enough, but what have the other huge-circulation publications -- The Hindu, Ananda Bazar Patrika, The Indian Express, Malayala Manorama, The Times of India, Eenadu, India Today, Punjab Kesri -- which have a duty to their readers beyond those advertisements, what have they been doing? It's certain that almost all of them have tried but failed. But should we let her off so easily?

Shame, I say, shame.

Shame because, a. our media has become such a comfortable lot quoting "sources close to 10 Janpath" that the pivotal tenets of journalism -- attribution and accountability -- no longer matter to us, and because b. the man who advises, probably decides, Sonia's media appearances is an outstanding, professional journalist, a Doon School buddy, who works for Wall Street's no 1 daily.

Any halfway "decent" journalist would agree that nobody is duty-bound to be grilled by the Press. Sonia would have been fully entitled to her silence if she were just a private individual. Indeed, the only interview she has to date given an Indian publication was to the Hindi journal, Dharmyug when she was just w/o Rajiv Gandhi.

But the moment she stepped into the political pulpit -- first by becoming a member of the Congress party, then by becoming the president of the Congress party, later by dislodging a government, and finally by proclaiming on the steps of the Rashtrapati Bhavan that she would form a government -- she lost that right voluntarily.

Why did we fail to exploit that to get her to explain how she could have forced an election on us? Why couldn't we get her to answer all the questions which have been bedevilling us: her honeymoon with Jayalalitha; the questionable Bofors and HDW deals; Arun Singh; Ottavio Quattrochi?

Oh, haven't you been watching Ms Gandhi's television appearances and aren't those enough, you might ask. (Yes, I have, and no they aren't.)

No, I don't have anything against television. It's simply that, in its infancy, Indian television -- especially of the slick, south Delhi kind -- relies very heavily on the willingness of the "subject" to be exposed to the arclights, and is easily susceptible to the kind of "media management" that the Congress has doubtless already begun employing, as evidenced in Sonia's appearance on Star Plus.

By its very nature, television has its hands tied when it comes to asking the tough, uncomfortable questions that the leader of a political party that has brought down three governments in three years but promises a stable government if elected this year, ought to be asked on air. Television doesn't have the time to probe; the next commercial always comes in handy. That's why Sonia G chose Sanghvi, not Shekhar Gupta.

It is quite possible, of course, that Ms Gandhi will give some "tailored" interviews to the press in the runup to the polls as part of the image-building process, but in the heat of the election, it will be all style no substance. Sans the gravitas of serious interviews, they will leave you, the voter, no wiser on the important questions she needs to answer if she wants to convince you to vote for her party.

Sorry, we let her off without making her accountable for the decisions she was making. Et tu?

Krishna Prasad