Commentary/ T V R Shenoy

Prince Charles was damned as an adulterer. What of Diana?

Have you heard of Caroline of Brunswick? If not, she was the adulterous wife of King George IV who absolutely hated her. So much so that at his coronation, the monarch ordered the doors of Westminister Abbey shut in her face!

Caroline, however, had a talent -- almost a genius -- for ingratiating herself with commoners. And the citizens of London were determined to avenge the insult to their favourite. They wandered around forcing the great peers to hail her. One of their targets was the Duke of Wellington.

"Well gentlemen," said the victor of Waterloo, "if you insist, God save the Queen -- and may He grant you all wives like her!"

One hundred and seventyfive years later, people are kicking out in the name of another beloved princess -- Diana, princess of Wales. They are all but forcing the media to bend its knee. And the press is doing so, but without Wellington's irony or sense of proportion.

"Vultures chase Diana to death" screamed a headline. And the public boos the press as vehemently as it mourns the Queen of Hearts. Is the media really to blame?

Was it the press that chose a drunken driver, who had the equivalent of one and a half bottles of wine in his veins? Was it the press that told the people in the car not to use seat-belts? Was it the press that ordered the driver to speed through Paris at 196 kilometres an hour?

The French authorities certainly don't think so. True, they arrested seven photographers with great flourish. But what are the charges? That in France it is a crime not to help accident victims!

If the victim weren't Diana, princess of Wales, would they have bothered to do even that?

But the media aren't asking such questions right now. The focus is on the best way to rein in the dreaded paparazzi -- those freelance photographers who specialise in embarrassing and/or revealing snaps of celebrities.

Diana's brother has gone one step farther. "They have blood on their hands," was his measured judgement on the editors who bought those pictures.

Oh really? Tabloids happen to be a business like any other. They published those snaps of Diana because the readers -- the same ones howling against the press -- loved seeing Diana frolic. If they thought it immoral, they didn't have to buy the papers. And the paparazzi would have trained their telephoto lenses elsewhere.

If, that is, the Queen of Hearts had allowed them to do so. Let us be honest, the late princess of Wales assiduously cultivated the media. And it paid off in her squabbles with her husband.

Prince Charles was damned as an adulterer because he loved another woman. What of Diana?

Poor Dodi Al-Fayed wasn't exactly the first man in her life. She was responsible for breaking up the marriage of former English rugby captain Will Carling. There was a cavalry officer (who kissed and told). There was supposed to be a Pakistani doctor...

But the media continued to hail her as a younger, better-looking version of Mother Teresa. They spoke only of her patronage of various charities, her campaign against land-mines, and so on.

All that was possible because of just one thing -- her marriage into the British royal family. There are hundreds of women who are better looking, thousands who work harder for good causes. What set Diana apart was marriage to Charles. How did she repay him?

With a messy and expensive divorce. Her booty included a rent-free palace in London and the cash equivalent of over Rs 500 million. Through all this, the media backed her. How could it not with those lovely photo-opportunities? (Remember that 'poor little me' photo at the Taj Mahal, after she refused to accompany her husband elsewhere?)

But media-attention can't be switched on and off like a tap. After cultivating publicity, Diana couldn't suddenly demand privacy to cultivate her own affairs.

The press should go in for introspection. But a postmortem on Diana isn't required. Rather, journalists need to ask themselves how they allowed themselves to be so effortlessly manipulated yesterday, and why they are kicking themselves so hard today.

Wealth, beauty, and royalty are a rare and heady cocktail. But rarer still is a Mother Teresa. Can we get over the obsession with the Queen of Hearts and concentrate on the ladies at Nirmal Hriday?

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