Beyond The News — India botches on finishing, Pak hits winners

From that moment onwards, the Indian team lost the neutrality — if not sympathy — of a referee who initially tried to accommodate New Delhi’s assertive ball play. All of last week, the United States was blowing the whistle against even non-existent Indian infringements, while the Pakistanis got away with the most brazen foul playimaginable.

In forum after forum, talk show after talk show, Pakistan has successfully portrayed India as an aggressive, hegemonistic, regional bully which started the arms race with its nuclear aspirations, thus forcing a small, helpless, vulnerable country to go nuclear in self-defence. Forgotten in this whining act of self-pity and self-laceration was India’s own security concerns vis-a-vis China, Beijing’s help to Pakistan in nuclear and missile technology which began the whole shebang, the problem of crossborder terrorism, and the larger question of universal disarmament and arms control.

Like in hockey, India’s lack of understanding of contemporary tactics in media and public relations has helped shred its reputation. The small group of insular leaders who decided to cross the nuclear Rubicon probably did not have an idea of the adverse fallout in a world where 24-hour cable news channels, talk radio and Internet generate endless chatter and amplify any news. Had the nuclear tests occurred in the1980s, or even in 1990, it would not have generated such decibel or bandwidth. It was important to control the direction of this debate generated by non-stop news.

The accepted canon of modern hockey is ball possession: If you can keep the ball with you most of the time, you can control the play and its tempo. India did not have a strategy or even the players after the tests. It lost the ball in the beginning and has been chasing it for the rest of the game. It did not have the spin doctors and media managers in place — either in New Delhi, or more importantly, in Washington — to hold the fort and generate counterattacks. From the time India’s Home Minister — himself a former journalist — opened his mouth, India was the Big Bully, the Bad Boy.

India’s only front-line player in Washington is ambassador Naresh Chandra, trained in the classical version of diplomacy and media management. A fine thinker with penetrating insight, a cunning mind, and a profound understanding of history, politics andgeostrategy, Chandra is a master on television shows which afford him anything more than ten minutes — an eternity in television time. On programs like the respected Jim Lehrer News Hour and C-Span’s Washington Journal, he made brilliant and compelling arguments about why India’s nuclear gambit was driven by a larger perspective.

But on the more superficial and flaky talk shows like CNN’s Crossfire and network news (alas watched by more people), which work on sound bytes (edited for effect), Chandra is a dead loss.

Thoughtful and insightful, but slow and ponderous, he comes of poorly against quick-witted hosts and opponents.

Such is the anti-India mood generated by the tattle of television and the distortions in the print medium that it has permeated across the Clinton administration with the two principle spokesmen of the Clinton administration, Presidential aide Mike McCurry and State Department spokesman James Rubin, going an a daily India-bashing spree.

Just how much innatehostility and rancour there exists against India was evident again at the White House briefing yesterday in spokesman McCurry’s patronising blooper. Asked about the emergency declared in Pakistan, McCurry, otherwise a genial and self-effacing spokesman, but who does not seem to have the slightest clue about South Asia, offered this comment: "The declaration of a state of emergency could conceivably have something to do with the very dire circumstances that some parts of the population of India now face because, in part, at some small measure at least, because of the economic penalties that India now faces, also in part because of the heat wave, because of the general economic conditions that exist in New Delhi."

Not all of the administration has been as thoughtless or gratuitous. Led by President Clinton himself, senior diplomats like Strobe Talbott and Thomas Pickering have struggled to contain the visceral outpourings generated by a poor understanding of the region and its history and politics. But fed bypartisan commentators and led by the media frenzy, many of the administration’s younger officials have decided, much to the delight of the Pakistanis, that India is the baddie.

The nuclear question has also brought out of the woodworks some of the Reagan era cowboys who feel a challenge to the world order they dreamt of. In some of the sharpest commentary heard so far, former Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger did not want "pipsqueak countries" like India to be recognised as nuclear powers. His colleague Robert McFarlane was even more visceral in the New York Times.

"We must make clear to the Indian Government that it is today what it was two weeks ago, an arrogant, overreaching cabal that, by its devotion to the caste system, the political and economic disenfranchisement of its people and its religious intolerance, is unworthy of membership in any club," he wrote on Friday, after a meeting with Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan ten days ago which touched him deeply.