Why India is getting bad press

KP Nayar

Strategic Analyst

There is only one explanation why India’s Acting High Commissioner in Canberra and China’s Consul General in Sydney are on the same page, against the Australian media. Crossed stars? Bad fate? When Communist China and democratic India are together, but separately accusing the Australian media of malice, slander, ignorance and prejudice, it just does not seem right. This ought not be their common fight, but unfortunately, that is what it has become.

Few officials from the Indian side now explain their government’s viewpoint to the global media. So the foreign media delivers its judgement on India ex parte by default.

India has got off better than China in this unedifying fight. The Daily Telegraph, which calls itself the ‘voice of Sydney’, recipient of the Chinese diplomat’s letter to the Editor, tore the Consul General to shreds in a two-page spread by way of reply. It printed a point-by-point rebuttal of allegations in the letter that the Telegraph was seeking ‘attention and more Internet hits’ with its ‘false’ reporting of China’s coronavirus baggage.

Nothing even remotely similar happened to India’s Acting High Commissioner who wrote to The Australian, a mass circulation paper. This is to India’s credit. It demonstrates respect for India’s democratic values, even if there are strong feelings in the Australian public domain, especially its media, that New Delhi messed up its response to the second wave of the pandemic. It is because Australians value India’s free speech and its free media that its diplomat got off scot-free, devoid of the public humiliation reserved for China.

Australia’s gatekeepers of free and open public discourse believe that Acting High Commissioner Palaniswamy Subramanyan Karthigeyan has a right to reply to the newspaper’s charges that ‘arrogance, hyper-nationalism and bureaucratic incompetence have combined to create a crisis of epic proportions in India’, with a crowd-loving Narendra Modi, while citizens suffocate from lack of oxygen. No such right of reply for Consul General Gu Xiaojie.

Since the Australian media is receptive to an Indian diplomat’s right to reply to allegations against his Prime Minister or his country, what would have been a better course for Karthigeyan in dealing with the damaging report in The Australian? In the old days, when the media and India’s government officials were not adversaries, the Acting High Commissioner would have invited the newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief, or more likely, the journalist who wrote the searing indictment of India for a drink. While lifting elbows through the evening, the Indian diplomat would have put across his government’s point of view.

That no longer happens in Indian embassies and high commissions abroad, with rare exceptions. No wonder then, that Modi and India now routinely get bad press in most parts of the world. Few officials from the Indian side now explain their government’s point of view to the global media. So the foreign media delivers its judgement on India ex parte by default.

During my three decades as a foreign correspondent in various parts of the world, Indian deputy chiefs of missions, with their ears to the ground, have been the go-to persons for the media in the countries where they are posted: not just for stories on India, but for exchanges of diplomatic gossip and behind-the-scenes goings-on in royal courts, presidential palaces and local foreign offices. Alas, no more. First, the then External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj emasculated the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) by making it their main job to repatriate a distressed Indian home or to send the body of an Indian home. Simultaneously, the perception grew in the IFS that journalists are enemies and that their careers could be damaged if a RAW station chief reported back to the headquarters that such and such a diplomat was hobnobbing with local journalists.

In Washington, in the years when praise for India was fulsome in the US media, I have watched venerated American editors, senior opinion writers and diplomatic correspondents hang on to narrations of events in Afghanistan within the India-backed Tajik and Uzbek militias under the veil of secrecy, events about which the US media had no clue. Journalists invited to one deputy chief mission’s house for dinner would often stay past midnight exchanging stories with him from the time he was Joint Secretary for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Because he had been on the ground in fractious Afghan provinces at a time when the writ of the central government did not run beyond Kabul’s city limits, he had anecdotes which the American media valued. Such give and take gave India good press in the US.

Then there was a minister (Press) at the Indian embassy in Washington who was a drinking buddy of every leading anchor on major American TV channels, and was on first-name terms with opinion-page editors of major US newspapers. His relationship with them began when he was only a First Secretary at the Indian embassy in Warsaw and some of these journalists were posted in Poland, where the Iron Curtain was unravelling under solidarity trade union leader Lech Walesa. When he was later posted to Tehran, the relationship continued because the US media had no access to Iran. This diplomat, who later set a record as the longest-serving spokesman of the Ministry of External Affairs, proved to be such an asset for PMs Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh that they could get their views into the global media.

It was such work by media-friendly diplomats that made editors from Australia to the US realise that India is not China, a notion that is now at risk as the events in Australia demonstrate. Media relationships are not built in a day. But it is easy to destroy those relationships in no time and they are not easily restored. No wonder that Modi is getting bad press abroad.

Tailpiece: Karthigeyan’s predicament in Canberra was brought about by a quirk of fate. He was posted as High Commissioner to Fiji in January. Out of a sense of loyalty for his boss, High Commissioner Gitesh Sharma, he stayed on in Canberra till Sharma retired on March 31. Otherwise, Karthigeyan would have been quietly at peace in enchanting Fiji instead of being at the receiving end of bad publicity for his unimaginative letter to the Australian editor.

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