Encyclopaedia of Professional Journalism is a pioneering effort by Prof. T.N. Rastogi who is widely acclaimed for in-depth scholarship. He provides painstaking details as an octogenarian on corruption in high quarters and advocates probity in public life as per the core dictum of India’s Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee whom the author describes as the second generation Prime Minister after the first generation Prime Minister in Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, though the two great Prime Ministers have had differing ideological baggage. The author is deeply impressed on our Prime Minister’s thinking cap on Lok Pal on the anvil for the fifth time in the last 34 years. He believes that law is above all irrespective of the high and mighty in the hierarchical setting. This thinking bears correspondency with Nehruvian thinking on choppy waters of politics with the stamp of Mahatma Gandhi’s principled politics. The two Prime Ministers bear striking resemblance on this score under dissimilar circumstances in the hypertrophy of Politics and Economics. The spreadsheet of our parliamentary democracy is on the voter who casts the die of political democracy the litmus test whereof is on poverty alleviation for social justice by providing the philosopher’s stone in today’s circumstances of political weather which has become foggy thanks to Bangaru Laxman and UTI muddles in the present regime. Earlier, P.V. Narasimha Rao regime had so many scandles with Telecom of Sukh Ram and so many other scams that journalists got the bitter taste in their write-up. Even Rajiv Gandhi was surrounded by Bofors and the rest. This story is very dismal indeed. We have not penetrated deep into the malaise of poverty in our federal polity in the flux of development of our parliamentary democracy. We need good governance on the chessboard of Indian politics. Good governance depends on the trajectory of legislative, executive and judicial wings in harmonising relationship in the thicket of Constitutional Jurisprudence. And good governance is like an electric current that runs through the whole system of clean and incorruptible public administration. A question marks hangs on our public administration. Luckily the ship of the State tor good governance in public administration is captained by liberal-minded Atal Bihari Vajpayee whose vista-vision is great indeed. He knows it far too well that the flagship of our Welfare State m with the main-in-the-street inasmuch as he is giving a Midas touch to our democractic politics. The media is playing a good role in this direction.
