Asia Times: India/Pakistan


	June 22, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

India and the West: Cultural disconnect
By Sultan Shahin

NEW DELHI - Completely biased, baseless, ill-advised, ill-informed, malicious, completely without foundation. These are some of the expressions used by a horrified government of India to describe a report in Time magazine that portrayed Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 77, as an aging, drunk, "half-dead" leader.

Titled "Asleep at the wheels", the report in the international news magazine that hit the stands on June 10 asked, "As India and neighbor Pakistan put up their nukes, is an ailing and frail Vajpayee the right man to have his finger on the button?"

Ruling Hindu fundamentalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) activists burned issues of the magazine in Mumbai on Tuesday, calling the report a Western conspiracy, a view endorsed by no less a person than Defense Minister George Fernandes of the Samata Party, an ally of the BJP in the coalition government.

The minister of information and broadcasting, Sushma Swaraj, put Vajpayee on display at a dinner on Wednesday for a few senior Indian and foreign journalists (Time was not invited) to see for themselves that he is in fact hale and hearty. As this writer can confirm, having seen the premier first hand, he is indeed in good health and there does not appear to be any reason to worry. In fact, he was quite in his element, enjoying life as he has always been known to. He even appeared not to care two hoots about the disparaging report, or his minders would not have allowed him to order his favorite cholesterol-laden "Kulfi" ice cream to which Time objected.

The Time report introduced Vajpayee as a person "who drank heavily in his prime and still enjoys a nightly whiskey or two at 74". (Actually, he is 77.) It goes on to say that the Indian leader takes painkillers for his replaced knees and has trouble with his bladder, liver and his one remaining kidney. "A taste for fried food and fatty sweets plays havoc with his cholesterol. He takes a three-hour snooze every afternoon on doctor's orders and is given to interminable silences, indecipherable ramblings and, not infrequently, falling asleep in meetings," the article goes on to say, adding, "Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then, would be an unusual candidate to control a nuclear arsenal."

Vajpayee's health has long been a topic of discussion in domestic political and diplomatic circles. The Time report mentioned how a Russian television channel had reported that during the recent security conference in Kazakhstan, he appeared to be unwell. The Russian correspondent claimed that Vajpayee did not appear to be very attentive during his meeting with President Vladimir Putin. A statement by the Prime Minister's Office claimed that the entire world media had witnessed the Indian premier's participation in the summit.

But the Time report commented that Vajpayee's stewardship was looking "less and less comforting". It said that the frail bachelor "seems shaky and lost, less an aging sage than an ordinary old man". Quoting a diplomat, the article said that Vajpayee appeared to be "half-dead" during his meeting with a Western foreign minister. The article also claimed that there was consensus among observers and diplomats that hawkish Home Minister Lal Krishan Advani was the prime-minister-in-waiting and claimed that the second most important man was National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra.

It said that Mishra, a 70-year-old diplomat and civil servant, functioned as the equivalent of a White House chief of staff and was considered to be the brains behind the recent diplomatic tussle between India and Pakistan. It also mentions how he played a pivotal role at the recently concluded security conference in Kazakhstan, and even stayed back to go Moscow for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

Stung and making no secret of its annoyance, the government prompted the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) to issue a summons to Alex Perry, the correspondent who wrote the report, for being in possession of more than one passport. The FRRO summons, hand-delivered at the Time office in New Delhi on Tuesday, demanded that Perry appear in person before an officer of the FRRO with his two passports and a registration certificate issued by the office, failing which legal action would be initiated against him. Describing the summons as "rubbish", Perry's office has sought to put off the matter until Wednesday because he is on an assignment for the magazine. Time has stood by the report.

Incidentally, Perry reportedly has three legal British passports. A British High Commission official said British nationals, especially frequent travelers, were entitled to more than one passport if the need arose and passports were issued when visas expired. Strangely, the government of India doesn't seem to be aware of this practice.

Sources at Time also said that the so-called two passports were nothing more than "one passport with an attached booklet of additional pages. Under the British system the additional booklet is provided a different number. However, both documents are glued together and there is no question of the Indian visa being in a different passport."

Time magazine has also served legal notice seeking to restrain the pro-government newspaper, The Pioneer, from publishing any further personal details of Perry. "The publication of Mr Perry's address," the notice said, "not only intrudes upon his privacy but also jeopardizes Mr Perry's security and safety and makes him vulnerable to physical harm."

Responding to the notice on Friday, Darbar Ganguly, an executive of The Pioneer, said, "We are quite baffled. The supposed upholders of democracy and freedom of the media worldwide are hardly expected to try and gag the press in India ... it is astounding that after endangering India's national security by publishing a bundle of bazaar gossip on the prime minister's health and habits, and claiming Mr Vajpayee is unfit to have his fingers on the nuclear button, Time magazine is talking about its reporter's security and safety only because his residential address has been printed as part of our report."

The Time imbroglio has also endangered the possibility of the government allowing 26 percent foreign direct investment (FDI) in the print media, a proposal that was about to be presented to the cabinet for approval. It has given a new lease on life to communists in the opposition and Hindu fundamentalists in the government who are permanently opposed to FDI in the print media as part of the process of globalization and liberalization of the economy that has been under way in the country for about a decade.

The first reaction of the government, as well as the media, was to bury the Time in silence. Not a squeak anywhere for the first five days, until the independent newspaper Asian Age decided to break the silence. Then, of course, as is India's wont, all hell broke lose. Fernandes went to the extent of calling it part of a conspiracy by forces hostile to India. "These forces were trying to take advantage by showing the Indian leadership in poor light," said Fernandes, adding that the government and the people should take serious note of it and identify the people who were behind it.

Condemning the write-up as an attempt to lower the dignity of the nation, Railway Minister Nitish Kumar said it had affected the sensitivity of a billion Indians. "We seek an apology from the magazine," he said.

BJP spokesman Vijay Kumar Malhotra said the report was baseless and mischievous. A spokesman for the Samata Party, an ally of the BJP, Shambhu Srivastva, accused "forces within the country [of having] aligned with the outside forces to malign the country's leadership". He accused Western powers of having two policies regarding their fight against terrorism. One was for west of Pakistan and other was for the east of it, he said.

Srivastva said the article was meant to serve two purposes. One, it was meant to weaken the resolve of the country to fight terrorism. Two, it wanted to create an impression that the nuclear weapons of India were in unsafe hands. This was meant to create an atmosphere for intervention by the Western powers.

While the government and the ruling party lashed out at Time in varying degrees of vitriol, it fell upon senior journalist Chandan Mitra, editor of The Pioneer, to articulate the outrage that many people, even outside government circles, felt at the country's prime minister being treated so shoddily by a foreign publication. Admitting that it was "certainly unusual to write a rejoinder, especially when it does not involve this writer or his publication", Mitra said, "However, as an Indian I was outraged. I was outraged by the supercilious, patronizing, white-supremacist, flippant and crassly ill-mannered tone of the piece. I was outraged that a magazine of such awesome reputation could actually publish a catalogue of bazaar gossip, almost totally incorrect and unsubstantiated. I was outraged that not a single person was quoted to confirm even one damaging observation. I was outraged that an American journalist and his redoubtable publication had mocked the democratically elected leader of a country of 1 billion people."

Mitra recalled that Americans resorted to similar mockery against their adversaries during the Cold War. Leonid Brezhnev and Mao Zedong were often at the receiving end of the poisoned pens of American scribes, pilloried for their alleged fetishes, weaknesses of the flesh and physical disabilities. Since the erstwhile USSR and China were closed societies, it was impossible to ascertain the veracity of such crudely irreverent comments. "But," Mitra continued, "to write such gibberish against a man who leads one of the most open societies in the world is not just in pathetic taste but also indicative of a mindset that is contemptuous of non-Western societies. Also, the turgid pieces against communist leaders of yesteryear were part of the American psychological war to debilitate the enemy. Are we to conclude the Time magazine's tirade against our prime minister is a postscript of that strategy?"

A normally restrained and scholarly Mitra continues, "I am not an acolyte of the prime minister and meet him but rarely. Still, I know him well enough over 25 years and interact sufficiently now to categorically say that Alex Perry's article is a compilation of outright untruths, insinuations, distortions and obnoxious assertions. It is apparent he has never met Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee or spoken to anybody who could give him an authoritative account of the prime minister's health or habits ... the article mostly comprises figments of a journalist's imagination. The stuff that has been put in cold print would not have been said by congenitally irreverent scribes even after consuming three stiff whiskeys at the Press Club.

"The prime minister is accused of forgetting names, dozing off at meetings and even looking 'half dead'! Indian TV crew are allegedly instructed to shoot him only waist up to avoid showing his ungainly, post-knee surgery gait. Alex Perry then has not lived in India long enough or watched Indian TV channels. While it is true that Mr Vajpayee is an unlikely entrant in an athletic contest, it is a blatant lie that TV cameras are ordered not to show his shuffling walk. As if Indian TV channels would obey even if instructed. If I know their mindset they would focus even more on the lower half of his anatomy if directives to the contrary were given. What does Alex Perry take the prime minister's advisers and Indian journalists for? Such things might be happening in the US, but they don't happen here."

The whole saga appears to be a clear case of cultural disconnect between India and the West. Almost everyone feels that the Time report was inspired by the US State Department and was part of its coercive diplomacy to force India to pull back its troops from the border with Pakistan. This is being considered something similar to the travel advisories issued earlier for Americans to quit India and the Western expression of concern in mid-April for the brutal massacres of Muslims in Gujarat state.

The reason is not hard to find. It would be difficult to find any Indian publication breaking ranks with the government on foreign-policy issues, and even on television different viewpoints are carefully stage-managed, usually by means of discussion panels. A typical discussion on, say, the situation created by the India-Pakistan standoff would present different viewpoints by featuring a former army chief, a former air marshal or a retired admiral, academic or journalist, but all from the establishment. Even the British Broadcasting Corp's India-related programs follow the same pattern as they are managed by Indian journalists. The Indian media and people nurtured on this tradition naturally, then, think that the Time story was inspired by Uncle Sam.

Those trying to prove that Perry is a US intelligence operative will make it difficult for him to live in India unless he wants to keep company with the likes of Iftikhar Gilani, the resident editor of two major Pakistani newspapers, News and The Nation, as well as bureau chief of the Kashmir Times, published from Jammu. Gilani is in jail for violating the Official Secrets Act: his computer hard disk had on it a seven-year-old document downloaded from the Internet detailing India's armed manpower and hardware capacity. No one has been able to answer since when have the Pakistan government's publications become India's official secrets.

India simply does not understand the panic in the West over the possibility of a nuclear war in South Asia. Indians are used to ignoring their leaders and their seemingly weighty pronouncements. Even at the time of elections, no one studies any party's manifesto (if there is one). People simply vote according to the caste and community of the party leaders or candidates. They have to apply their minds somewhat sometimes when leaders of the same caste clash in a constituency. Elections over, they let their leaders make money any which way they can and apply their own minds to making money any which way they themselves can.

This is the general pattern, though a couple of elections have been fought in certain areas on certain issues. No one takes the politicians seriously. Political statements are dismissed as rhetoric. So when Vajpayee sends a million troops in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Pakistan, and he himself goes to the border to address the troops and asks them to be prepared to make sacrifices in what is going to be a decisive war, no one really takes this as an indication of an impending war. There is no panic.

Even if somebody feels nuclear war is a possibility, he doesn't panic. He would be hardly worse off dead than he is alive. Life doesn't have the same value on the subcontinent as in the West. Between five and 10 times as many people died in the Bhopal gas disaster in 1984 as in New York on September 11. In the past 18 years, no government has even cared to seek the extradition of Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief, considered responsible for the most murderous industrial disaster, so that he could be tried in an Indian court. It took a Western writer, Dominique Lapierre, and his colleague Javier Moro to feel enough compassion for the victims of Bhopal to write a worthwhile book on the subject and contribute the proceeds to the victims of the tragedy that killed between 16,000 and 30,000 people and injured more than 500,000. Throughout the length and breadth of India, it is basically the Western-financed non-governmental organizations that provide some succor to the hapless people of the country.

Imagine George W Bush in a situation similar to Vajpayee's, standing on the border of Iraq, Iran or North Korea, the current members of the axis of evil, addressing a million US troops and calling for a decisive war - the West would take him seriously, and if the adversary were a superpower almost as strong as the US itself, there would be panic. India and Pakistan have been bitter enemies for half a century, they have already fought several wars, and thanks to the BJP's decision virtually to force Pakistan in 1998 to go nuclear, now they are both nuclear powers. The panic in the West is understandable. But so is the indifference in India. If only the two could appreciate each other's point of view.

It is not unnatural for the West to judge the health of Indian leaders from the same standards of health that they demand of their own. An occasional Ronald Reagan might be acceptable, but by and large the West likes its leaders to be able to run at least a few miles at a stretch.

Nuclear weapons, threats of wars and old age do not go together. Indeed they should not go together, particularly in the 21st century. Maybe it is time for Vajpayee to retire, though, as a rule, Indian politicians don't. In his case the decision to quit should be easier. He has a clear heir in place. In any case, he is implementing the policies of Advani now. If a poet-politician known for his compassion and humanity is reduced to a position where he has to justify mass murders of his own people, what is the point of remaining in power?

Vajpayee should also take lessons from newspaper editorials that consider him nothing more than a moderate mask for the fascist policies of the BJP. When he says something, the newspapers comment, "Thus spake the mask." One would have thought that this was more humiliating than the Time report.

As a mask, Vajpayee has performed his role admirably. To his abiding glory, the so-called secular allies of the BJP lie exposed, so much so that they would now dare not protest if Advani became the prime minister. Why not accept the reality and let the real leader emerge from the shadows and take over now that no camouflage is needed? That would even help the party at the hustings, whenever the government decides to go to polls. It would help Vajpayee, too, to retire gracefully with his dignity intact and probably also giving him time and opportunity to compose better poetry.

If the Time report makes Vajpayee and his party start thinking along these lines, it would have served a purpose to the party and the country by placing the real leader of the party at the helm of affairs and giving him some experience at this level before the next general elections. If the ruling party and the coalition think as they seem to - that the report is inspired by Uncle Sam - that is all the more reason that they should start thinking the question of leadership afresh. After all, Uncle Sam usually gets what he wants, at whatever cost.

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