India’s image problem has now moved into a state of crisis. The gulf between how the country is perceived from outside and the picture of India promoted by the current national government has grown to a point of tragedy or comedy, depending on your perspective. Life, Byron said once, is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. Feelings might have taken the driver’s seat, particularly with the brutal tragedy of the terrorist attack at Pahalgam, but the sobriety of honest thought is essential to assess the reality of the conflict with Pakistan that followed. This is where comedy returns, not only as a mark of thinking over feeling but, sadly, also of grotesquery of a different order. It takes us back to the longstanding problem of India’s international image and its startling contrast with the dominant domestic editions.
The question glares on the trip trail of the international public relations team of multiparty parliamentarians to tell the Indian side of the story in the recent standoff with Pakistan. The Georgetown academic, Christine Fair, gets it exactly right in her interview with Scroll when she points out that the very need for such a delegation marks something of a serious communication failure on the international stage. Pakistan, she reminds us, has been far better at communicating with the Western media. That India has failed at this is the irony of India’s size and heft, both economic and political, and its importance as a functioning democracy, if a rapidly declining one. But if size makes us complacent and inward looking, then we have a problem. We may fume at being bracketed with Pakistan. But sadly, this also shows that we have forgotten how to speak to others, particularly to outsiders who do not buy the ideological marketing of nationalist pride that distorts home truths for our citizenry.
An indifference to the world outside and the global image of the nation is sometimes characteristic of large nations that have enough within their own borders to preoccupy them. No nation has shown this as revealingly in the modern world as the United States of America whose cultural insularity is the stuff of legend. When you’re in the heart of Middle America where nothing but America is visible for thousands of miles all around, it can get hard to see other cultures beyond your land. Arriving in one such state in the last year of the last millennium as a student, I was appalled at the local image of India as the land of poverty, Gandhi, and the Taj Mahal. But even then, the impending computer glitch of Y2K had brought droves of Indian software engineers to the US, and as I moved to the east coast for doctoral study shortly after the turn of the millennium, I encountered a distinct change in the American image of India. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and other hubs of information technology as well as students and professionals from these domains increasingly defined the country; the ‘third world’ image from the Midwest in 1999 already seemed to belong to another age. When in 2007, somewhere between the arrival of Facebook and the iPhone, I took a faculty position at a university in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered a world where being Indian was synonymous with being smart, specifically a tech-geek — possibly a start-up founder or an ambitious Google employee in Palo Alto, where I lived, occasionally spotting Mark Zuckerberg in the local farmers’ market.
From California, the world seemed to look further west, to Taiwan and Hong Kong rather than to western Europe that loomed over the east coast and shaped what Amit Chaudhuri has called America’s “heritage modernity”. Miraculously, India seemed to be an extended part of this Rising Asia, not only in the tech culture it imported through immigrant and outsourced labour but also in the same breath as the great Asian Tiger of China. The market crash of 2008, coupled with the inauguration of the Barack Obama presidency, generated the feeling that the centre of gravity of the world was shifting from the White West and Asia offered the richest promise.
From being bracketed with China in the first and the early second decade of the twenty-first century, India is now back in the bracket with Pakistan and Bangladesh, just the way things used to be in the 20th century. A strange mix of insularity and delusion, propped up by a media at once sycophantic and hallucinatory, has kept us in denial about the steep drop of the world’s perception of India. Living in India and following the flatulent rhetoric of the government and stakeholders beholden to this leadership, one is made to believe in India’s ‘massive’ economy and vishwaguru status and take a few shopping malls, bullet trains and flyovers, the bare-normal steps of inevitable modernisation, as giant leaps into a shiny global future. But as Pratap Bhanu Mehta pointed out in an article in The Indian Express this February, while India’s delusion of relevance continues to be relentlessly driven by our internal machineries of ideology and a pliant media, neither in global trade, soft power, or political heft does India matter a fraction of what a country of this size and population should — and certainly far less than what our leaders in power would have us believe.
As someone who now lives in Delhi’s National Capital Region but continues to spend time in different parts of the world, including Africa and Europe, I see both the internal projection and the external reality and the absurd gulf between them. In research institutes, think tanks and policy centres abroad, one hears China in almost every conversation, but India rarely comes up. As the East Asian giant wrests global academic leadership away from the US, particularly in science and tech and most sharply in Artificial Intelligence research, India’s research output remains puny in volume and significance on the global scale. Our sheer size and whatever remaining semblance of democracy we offer give us a podium on the world scale that we immediately squander by being inconsequential on all fronts. No wonder we are left to vie with Pakistan to get the world to take our version of the truth seriously.
Saikat Majumdar is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest