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If the Modi system had the powers of self-reflection and correction, it may have imbibed three important lessons from the prime minister’s recent travels abroad that had cut a swathe through five countries from the UAE to Italy. 

One, that while it is possible to flatten out the lowly journalists of India, pulverise them into submission, brainwash them into reproducing every government handout as a product of genuine “news gathering”, get them to regard the prime minister as an unassailable force for global good, and so on, the world has not lost the nasty habit of demanding answers to niggling questions from those in power here.

Two, merely calling oneself the oldest and largest democracy in the world does not make us one; we would need to prove that we are a democracy through the strength of our democratic institutions and our actual ground record in terms of human rights and communal harmony. 

Three, while we in India have long relegated the institution of the press conference to the kingdom of amnesia, the world continues to take its role as a basic tool of accountability very, very seriously.

Twice in this span of the prime minister’s travels of a little short of a week, the country has had to contend with the contradictions between India’s loud claims of being a democracy equipped with a free media and a harmonious, multi-religious society, and its actual record on the ground. 

The first kerfuffle broke out in the Netherlands (‘Modi Govt’s Tightly Controlled Script Comes Under Dutch Journalistic Scrutiny’, The Wire, May 18), when a Dutch journalist of Indian origin pointedly wanted to know why the tradition of a joint press conference between the prime ministers of India and the Netherlands was being dispensed with. Linked to this question was of course the Dutch prime minister’s publicly voiced concern that both press freedom and the rights of minorities were “under severe pressure” in India (‘Modi’s Netherlands Visit Is Coloured By Dutch PM’s Remarks on Rights in India, Insiya Hemani Case’, May 17).

A few days later the script was replayed in Oslo when a courageous commentator with the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen, Helle Lyng Svendsen, asked Prime Minister Modi as he was leaving a joint Indo-Norwegian press briefing, why he was not taking questions from “the freest press in the world?” (the reference of course was to the RSF’s World Press Index published last month in which Norway figured as Numero Uno in the list, while India way down at Number 157).

What was striking was the manner both these moments of what should have been acute embarrassment for Modi were handled by his government and its supporters. The responses had two dimensions: an official one from MEA official Sibi George, and an informal barrage of social media responses. Both came coated heavily in patriotic lard. 

The latter conformed to a pattern long set in which any supposed disparagement of the country or its prime minister invites the most repulsive counters from tweet-happy cellphone warriors, taking their cue from the BJP’s IT cell. One specimen, calling itself ‘Desh Bhakati’ (Patriot), came up with this one against Helle Lyng six hours after the issue went viral: “You are nothing. You have no right to question PM Modi. Bought a blue tick with Chinese funding and now acting like a journalist…”

But it is the formal response from George, well-versed in the art of the non-answer, that was the most cringe-worthy. The questions posed to him were straightforward and basically boiled down to why was the Indian government was dodging the genuine queries of the foreign media. What they elicited, instead, was a long spiel from George apropos of nothing. As the Wire analysis noted:

“George, deployed an assertive counter-narrative frequently used by the political leadership to neutralise international human rights critiques. The diplomat attempted to frame the journalist’s concerns as personal ignorance, stating: ‘We face these kinds of questions basically because of the lack of understanding of the person who asked the question.’” 

He then proceeded to gurgle out some well-known........

© The Wire