Tharoor line | Why is Modi’s government afraid of criticism? | Shashi Tharoor

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The recent broadside launched by the spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs at the BBC, in response to the broadcast of his documentary The Modi Question on the Prime Minister’s culpability in the Gujarat riots, showed the government in its most states belligerent and most defensive. . Anxious to protect the Prime Minister from the documentary’s damning accusations, ministers and government officials have been at pains to attack and discredit the BBC, going so far as to suggest that his film was a politically motivated attempt to tarnish the image of India. since he had assumed the leadership of the G-20.

The government also acted quickly to prevent the film from being widely shown in India, blocking social media handles that shared links to it (and asking YouTube to remove a copy of the documentary that had been uploaded to the site). It was, in other words, a full-scale assault on foreign critics of the Prime Minister.

It reminded me of another incident just a few months ago, when another outsider, prominent Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, smeared The Kashmir Files, which had its biggest supporters in government.

Lapid, head of the Indian International Film Festival jury, expressed his embarrassment at such a vulgar propaganda work being screened at a prestigious festival, where it was simply not on par with other works in competition. Lapids was an artistic and aesthetic judgment he was fully entitled to make, but government defenders attacked him for allegedly demeaning the sufferings of the Kashmiri Pandit community, which he had never done, pressed l ambassador of Israel to denounce his own compatriot, and even transferred from the Direction of the Film Festival the unfortunate official who had invited him to preside over the jury. Poor Mr. Lapid is unlikely to get another invitation or visa to India as long as the current establishment remains in power.

Thin-skinned people overreact to criticism because it seems to challenge their own self-esteem. To see a national government do this, and this too in a democracy, where criticism regularly flies in all directions, is (to put it mildly) unusual.

Shashi Tharoor

A third instance of such irritable behavior came earlier last year, when experts from the World Health Organization estimated that India had underestimated its mortality levels from the Covid pandemic until ‘five to ten times, and that in fact 3 to 5 million Indians had perished in this calamity. There too, the reaction of the Indian administration was savage, questioning the integrity, good faith and even the statistical methodology of the WHO, a United Nations body whose intergovernmental executive committee had been directed during the pandemic. by our Minister of Health. The Indian figures, the government insisted, were perfectly accurate; other Indians who had perished during the pandemic had died of unrelated causes.

The three episodes have a number of features in common. The first is extraordinarily thin skin, something one associates with hypersensitive and immature individuals and not with official institutions, let alone governments. Thin-skinned people overreact to criticism because it seems to challenge their own self-esteem. To see a national government do this, and this too in a democracy, where criticism regularly flies in all directions, is (to put it mildly) unusual.

Second, the government seems to have confused its allergy to criticism with its obligation to protect India’s national honor, to the detriment of the latter. National honor is a valuable asset, but not everything said about anything Indian necessarily affects it. Taking such a belligerent approach to criticism implies that our national honor is so fragile and insubstantial that it can be tainted by any opposing view on an issue in which the government is implicated. This desire to control the narrative extends to everything from India’s official poverty statistics to details of Chinese incursions into India. It is equally regrettable.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi walks after the handover ceremony at the G20 Leaders’ Summit, in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, November 16, 2022. Photo: Reuters

Finally, it is clear that there is a highly developed awareness of its image abroad on the part of the government. What outsiders say matters a lot more than it does to most governments. The thorny rebuttals issued by senior government officials and official spokespersons reflect an awareness that foreign criticisms sting because they are generally well-founded, because they cannot easily be dismissed as politically biased, and because they can damage the brilliance of countries and prime ministers. carefully cultivated global image. That is why our government reacts with such vehemence to slights that most other governments would ignore.

The problem here is that mature civilizations, especially democracies, don’t behave that way. They are expected to foster a culture of dissent in which criticism is part of the normal exchanges in society. They should have developed a strong sense of the right of others to disagree with any prevailing orthodoxy and either accept such disagreement in stride or seek to engage constructively with critics to sincerely understand the basis of their disagreement. Acting as if there is only one way to look at government action, and that any criticism is ipso facto illegitimate, is the hallmark of a banana republic, not a mature democracy.

Indian civilization has long had a culture of inquiry, dissent and debate, from ancient times to the present day. By doing so, our government and its officials are embarrassing India and betraying our traditions. It would have been much better, in all these cases, for the Indian bureaucracy to take the lofty position that its critics are entitled to their opinions, with which our government does not agree. Or in some cases, even to acknowledge that there may be something we can learn from our detractors. By overreacting, challenging the bona fides of outsiders and even seeking to stifle their stories, the government has only drawn more attention to critics and exposed its own vulnerabilities. Governments are not pubescent teenagers – and ours should stop behaving like one.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to supporters at a Labor Party event in Wellington, New Zealand, October 11, 2020. File photo: REUTERS/Praveen Menon

Jacinda lesson for Indian politicians

The shock resignation of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after five successful years in office must have seemed incomprehensible to anyone familiar with Indian politics. Indeed, his entire career would strike Indian politicians as coming from another planet: Prime Minister at 37 after just nine years in Parliament, won praise around the world for his handling of the Covid pandemic in his country, was applauded around the world for raising awareness of the Muslim minority after a Christchurch mosque shooting massacre, gave birth while prime minister (and still unmarried ) – and burned at 42, she quit at an age when most Indian political careers would have barely begun. By contrast, our leaders spend decades in politics climbing to the top and cling stubbornly once they get there, seeing electoral victories and defeats as mere milestones on their inexorable journey to senescence. I know what this job takes, she told an emotional press conference, and I know I don’t have enough left in the tank to do it justice. Can you imagine an Indian MP, let alone PM, saying that? Perhaps even ancient and vast India could learn a thing or two from tiny, newly born New Zealand?

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