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As the lurid details of Kenneth Starr's report on American President Bill Clinton's peccadilloes unfolded on the Internet minutes after their release, there is perhaps a sobering thought in it for our errant politicians. That, as the world is shrunk by the information technology revolution, audiences have become truly global. It's a brave new world out there, one that can be harnessed to put across a point of view -- as effectively as one's opponents can use it for their purposes, like with Clinton.

Luckily, however, for the Indian politicos, with their unending list of lapses of the moral and amoral kind, there is little to fear from this. One reason is, of course, despite the brouhaha, the IT revolution is not sweeping across the land, and it is no one's claim that one fine day we will be where the developed world is. This means that scandals will break and inquiries will be held into them, but there is no reason to believe that one's impoverished constituents are going to be influenced negatively by the free flow of information.

But the other reason for Indian politicians to take it easy is that the IT revolution, for it to be really effective as it is in, say, the United States, presupposes a much more vigorous media than the kind that characterises the Indian counterpart. In India, it is almost as if the media labours under a self-imposed code of conduct, one that enjoins upon it the obligation to distinguish between the personal and professional lives of persons in public life.

It can be no one's case that politicians in India are god's gift to society or they set Himalayan standards for others to emulate. There may be a few, a handful, whose personal integrity is beyond reproach, but the general run of Indian politicians are of the kind that one will not want to bring home to mum and dad. Quite a few must be guilty of far worse offences than Clinton who, at least on the surface of it, merely indulged in consensual sexual activities with another adult.

Is it a supine media, or is it merely being decent about a lot of indecent things? The answer to that, obviously, would depend on whether one is a reader/subscriber or involved in any manner in the newsgathering enterprise. Personally, and maybe because I come from the latter grouping, I believe that the Indian media leaves politicians' personal lives well alone out of a sense of fairness, however misplaced it may be.

There were a few exceptions, of course. Like with Rajiv Gandhi and the Bofors scandal.

A lot of commentary has gone on to demonstrate how the media, at least sections of it, kept the flag flying in the arduous times of Emergency in 1977, and how the post-Emergency period saw the media flowering into investigative journalism. But still, if the real test of the latter lay in challenging the might of the establishment, that happened only with the Bofors scandal.

In a lot of ways, that howitzer deal brought about the maturing of not only Rajiv Gandhi but also the Indian media. To be fair to the late prime minister, it was nothing short of a nude-nudge wink-wink kind of campaign, that relied on innuendo and insinuation than hard facts, where the words of the leading campaigner were given the gospel treatment. It is altogether another matter that despite boasts of having the names of kickback recipients out in 30 days, the nation is none the wiser than it was 10 years ago.

In a sense, there is an element of similarity between l'affaire Gandhi and Clinton. The former, elected to govern a venal nation -- where nothing moves without the traditional application of grease on official palms -- was expected to provide inspiring leadership. He didn't.

Clinton, the latest American president to have an abundant supply of testosterone and relative youth to do something about it, was expected to behave in a manner atypical of a lot of men, not just American men.

Both were felled by the media, Clinton's misfortune being that he happened to be caught out at the peak of the IT revolution.

Actually, Rajiv Gandhi provided the American president with a ready reckoner of what not to do. Both men tightened the noose around them by first stalling, and then denying the whole thing till the truth was dragged out, kicking and screaming. The people would have been a lot more forgiving had the two made a clean breast of it right at the beginning, rather than run the gauntlet in the manner they did. I can't help believing that the voter is willing to forgive most lapses, but not mendacity on the part of those he has elected.

With Gandhi, the soolution was certainly worse than the cure. His successor proved to be a man of enormous equivocation, despite his probity. In effect, the media it was that made him, and then unmade him. Since then, it seems to be from this side of the barricades that it has learnt its lesson, and has since desisted from either hounding or hagiographing politicians. It is entirely conceivable that had the post-1989 scenario unfolded differently, had the dreams of the nation been pursued rather than petty personal whims, the course the India media has taken since then would have been very different.

Had that been the case, today Indians would not be left gloating over salacious details of the Starr report and wondering whatever is wrong with the local press, why they don't chase after our politicians rather than doing a puff job on them. A child that has been scorched in its first exposure to fire, can surely be pardoned its reluctance to experiment with the leaping flames?

Saisuresh Sivaswamy