The Wiki-trick

The parliamentary furore over WikiLeaks has died down, but not without leaving some questions in the minds of those unversed in diplomatic practice. The huge fuss made by Opposition parties over one particular cable, dated July 17, 2008, from US charge d’affaires Steven White to the US state department (162458: secret) — which reports allegations of funds stashed to facilitate vote-buying before that month’s confidence vote in the then United Progressive Alliance government — raises questions about the significance of such communications in international diplomacy, and how much we should make of it all.

The fact is that cables are only one form of reporting from an embassy to its capital. Information is also conveyed through other means — emails, both encrypted and ordinary; and telephone calls, on secure lines or tappable ones. So on any subject, a leaked cable represents only a part of the communications likely to have been used and cannot convey a complete picture of the embassy’s view of any particular issue.
In addition, the headquarters at the capital has other sources of information to complement its embassy’s communications — notes of conversations with visiting officials, assessments obtained from third countries, intelligence evaluations and files of previous correspondence. Cumulatively, that makes the cable’s rendering a very partial one indeed.
The problem with WikiLeaks is compounded by the impossibility of knowing how complete the leakage is. Do we have every cable sent by a particular embassy on a specific subject? Might there have been others, even on the same day, that haven’t been leaked? Are these cables even complete in themselves or have they been edited or trimmed? And what about the “redactions” that WikiLeaks managers have done, which may have omitted crucial names or identities that would enable us to judge the worth of the analyses contained therein?
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was excoriated by the Opposition for telling Parliament that the government of India could not confirm the “veracity, contents or even existence of such communications”. Strictly speaking, though, he was right. Not even the state department has officially confirmed the authenticity of the leaked cables. But even if they are, as most people assume, authentic, they are clearly selective and incomplete.
As one who has seen (and drafted) rather a large number of cables in the course of a three-decade United Nations career, I am only too aware of their entertainment value, as well as of their limitations as a source. American diplomatic cables are often famously gossipy and speculative. As a glance through some of the WikiLeaks trove will confirm, US diplomats will take you out to lunch and derive a cable from your chatter; they will attend a seminar with three retired ambassadors and pen an analysis of the “considered views” of “the Indian strategic community”; they will pick up party gossip and report is as unverified fact. In the case of the White cable so extensively quoted by both the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the allegations were reported by an unidentified embassy staffer to the political counsellor, who put them in the charge’s cable — in other words, it was reported speech of reported speech, hardly a worthwhile basis for a major controversy in our national Parliament.
Other embassies resort to the same or similar practices. Indeed, since these cables are not intended for publication, but are meant to be read by a limited audience with access to multiple sources of other context-enhancing information, they rarely need the kind of verification or fact-checking that a simple newspaper article would require before going to print. To treat them as anything more than they are, as our Opposition absurdly did, is to grant US diplomatic reporting an assumption of infallibility that a devout Catholic would blush to ascribe to the Pope.
And then, isn’t it touching that our notoriously devious political class assumes that everything spoken by an Indian to a US official must be true? Has no Indian ever lied to a foreigner before, or simply said things for effect? Or even spoken in a certain way to tempt the listening American into an indiscretion?
When WikiLeaks first burst upon an unsuspecting world late last year, an opinion writer in the respected technology website DigitalJournal.com scathingly wrote that it “constitutes a needless and irresponsible act of mindless trouble-making and mayhem-sowing which (will only) please those who seek to create chaos”. He could have been anticipating the shenanigans in our Parliament in late March.
At about the same time, I told an Indian interviewer, in a statement that had me pummelled on every youthful commentator’s website, that WikiLeaks was irresponsible and unethical. I argued that, just as in our daily lives we will occasionally say things to people (both positive, for example, flattery, or negative, for example, criticism) that we would not want others to overhear or repeat in public, so too countries had the right, and indeed the need, to convey opinions or assessments to each other that they would not wish to share with the world. Statements made under the assumption of confidentiality are not intended to be revealed for the delectation of a prurient public unaware of the context or the background. To reveal them carelessly in such a way is to interfere with the effective conduct of international diplomacy, which ultimately keeps our global relationships moving smoothly. Governments need confidentiality in order to conduct their daily business. Indeed, confidentiality oils the gearboxes of inter-governmental relations. A world in which no government could speak frankly to another for fear of its secrets being broadcast to others would not be a safer world as fans of WikiLeaks naively argued, but a more dangerous one.
One of the famous clichés about India related to the almost mythical Indian rope-trick, in which a curled rope on the ground mysteriously uncoiled itself to stand erect, allowing a boy to climb it. WikiLeaks led our Opposition to perform a parliamentary version of an Indian rope-trick — they climbed up their own premises without visible means of support till their arguments vanished into thin air. Unlike the rope-trick of legend, this was not a pretty sight. Let us hope we never have to witness it again.

Shashi Tharoor is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency