The silly “confrontation” between an Indian and a Pakistani warship — flowing from the recent minor episode of the rescue from Somali pirates of the Egyptian merchant ship MV Suez, whose crew of 22 included six Indian nationals — won’t even merit a footnote in a study of India-Pakistan relations. But there has been a lot of noise, a lot of smoke without fire, and a lot of uninformed breathless television reporting, before which the Indian government simply keeled over.
It was overwhelmed by the rush of events and their high-pitched media reporting. Since our bureaucrats are fundamentally trained to communicate only with one another, and only on file, in a situation deemed to be “sensitive” they tend to close shop and cite rules and precedents that might satisfy their superiors but does little to assuage sentiments in the public sphere. It is thus that India lost the battle of the waves to Pakistan when INS Godavari had a “brush” with PNS Babur, and there rose a cry that the Indian government was immune to the plight of Indian sailors aboard a foreign vessel on the high seas.
Communicating in time, and in an appropriate manner, is not one of the strong points of our state system, which basically means the higher bureaucracy and senior politicians. Admittedly, such real-time communication with the public is a relatively new concept, while the mindset of the Indian state was shaped by the colonial experience and is still rooted in the 19th century discourse of power which held it foolish to let on things to ordinary citizens. Not communicating with the people arose from disdain for them, and that above all was the rationale for secrecy and confidentiality over the smallest matter. However, in a far more open world in which information, ideas and propaganda travel at the speed of lightning if not light, it does no harm to get your punch in first. Once beaten on that count, your side of the story is usually as good as dead. And then the narrative of the other side takes centrestage and becomes the basis for discussion and opinion-making. This is what seems to have happened in the case of the Indian warship. Its rescue-making efforts were not heeded by the trapped Egyptian vessel, which had a Pakistani captain. So it played an also-ran while the Pakistani warship took the credit for the humanitarian rescue, including that of Indian seamen who are presumably still under Pakistani supervision. In the process, the Pakistani warship also aggressively nudged the Indian military boat, presumably taking revenge for the humiliation the Pakistan Navy had suffered in 1971. The pity is that this sideshow played out just a few days before a scheduled round of talks between the foreign secretaries of the two countries. It is not inconceivable that in being aggressive, Pakistan’s overall plan was to manufacture an unpleasant incident before a round of talks. But this is nothing compared to what might happen if the six Indian crew are not released by Pakistan swiftly, as that would set off an outcry within this country, forcing the government into a crouch of sorts.
Much of this could have been prevented if the Indian government’s public diplomacy machinery was proactive and shipshape. Its own narrative could have been built on an entirely different basis — say, one of courtesy and magnanimity to the Pakistani ship that took the lead as it was in closer proximity to the Egyptian vessel in distress. As things turned out, the Indian reaction gave the impression of being late, churlish and inapposite. Late communications and defensive responses have often been the bane of our diplomacy, especially while dealing with masters of the art of propaganda who reside in places like Islamabad.