By Aakar Patel
Assume for a moment that I am a big and strong fellow who lifts heavy weights easily and is flexible and fit. If someone approached me to comment on what they saw as my unhealthiness and absence of strength, would it affect me? If the first assumption is true, that I am in fact big and strong, then it should not make a difference. In all likelihood, I will ignore the comments and move on.
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Assume that I am wealthy and have been for generations. Why would the remark from a stranger pitying the fact that I was poor or that I looked destitute upset me or anger me? It was not a reflection of the truth, which was that I was in fact not only rich but had been so forever. The view that someone else holds of me will not affect me negatively if that view is not only wrong but the opposite of what I know to be reality.
The remarks from others about me only bite when they are close to the truth and when I am insecure about the very things that their words carry. The words of a young woman, a foreign reporter, have caused the mighty Ministry of External Affairs to lecture her, and the world at large, about the greatness of this nation. Lessons were given about our heritage and our culture and ancient traditions in response to an anodyne question about freedom. Something about constitutional values and fundamental rights, including the right to approach the Supreme Court, was also said.
The young woman followed up with a question which will not occur to most Indians. Why, she asked, did Indians have to approach the Supreme Court to claim fundamental rights? The answer from our foreign office grandee was that it was his press conference and therefore presumably she should shut up.
The media here then jumped in. Not on the side of its fraternity, mind you, but to close ranks with the government and scream at the reporter for daring to ask things that were so obviously false. What the point of any of it was lost to the dispassionate observer, but it is interesting to examine the pathology here.
Why do we get angry and upset when questioned about our behaviour and values if we are secure in the truth? The answer to that can only be that we are not in fact secure. And then the next questions must arise: is that because we are insecure despite the truth? Or insecure because what we are claiming is not true?
Let us assume that the first is the case. That India and its government are insecure despite the truth, and the facts, which are that we are a democratic nation, where individuals have liberty and that the state is not malign. We are merely touchy when we are asked about the subject. If that is so, then the advice to foreign reporters and observers is to engage us as if we were children. We should be patted on the head, told we are good boys and girls, and given some sort of lollipop. Being asked hard questions will provoke a tantrum from us and this should be avoided.
It should be mentioned here that this is how other nations deal with our government. If they want something from us, they will offer us a lollipop (or a medal) and a place to recite our little speech, and then extract from us what they need. When Israel is told it is misbehaving in the region and that its idiotic war has damaged the world, Benjamin Netanyahu has been pointing to the validation of Israel offered by the mother of democracy as his defence. That medal was extremely good value for money.
Let us now turn to the other possibility that we are insecure because we know that what we are claiming is false. That we are not in fact as democratic or liberty-loving as we claim to be and to be reminded of that upsets and angers us.
If this is the case, there is an easier solution for it. It does not concern the external world and they do not need to calibrate their behaviour towards us or treat us as children. This solution is to simply speak the truth.
For the past 12 years, India’s diplomats have been operating under a Nehruvian carapace. We have been telling the world, particularly the democratic and developed nations, that we are secular, pluralist and liberal. That we respect human rights and individual liberties. This is of course false. And when the foreign media examines the facts they know it to be false.
It is just that India’s government now speaks with a forked tongue. It says things and behaves locally in a different way than it speaks abroad. It does not brag to the world and their reporters about bulldozers and lynchings and bail denials and voter deletions and community exclusions that are the basis of new India. It talks the language of Nehru and inclusion.
It would be easier for all of us and for the world and its reporters if we stopped lying about what we are actually all about. Someone, making a clever pun, once said that diplomats are individuals sent to lie abroad for their country. But given the anxiety and anger that lying produces, we should consider the option that honesty might be the best diplomatic policy.
