The many trials of India

There is an American saying by which “if you hit me once, shame on you. But if you hit me twice, shame on me”. The reference obviously is to the cowardice in case a person gets hit a second time. And the reason why he got hit a second time is because he did not hit back the first time.

But what would you call a person who is being hit and humiliated routinely and does nothing about it? Well, you might say that it is difficult sometimes to do anything if the bully is far stronger. So, the best thing then is to keep taking the blows till either the bully gets tired or takes pity on your condition.

What if the bully himself is weak? How would you classify a person who has the strength to hit back, in fact hit back so hard as to cripple the bully, yet chooses to bury his head in sand? What would you call a person who is hit by every passer-by yet does absolutely nothing about it?

You don’t have to think hard to identify who I am referring to. And you can’t blame the stars for the pitiable state that India presently finds itself in. Every day brings a new shame. Each new morning carries the news of a new humiliation. And we are not even talking about the big boys on the block like China and Pakistan. We are discussing pygmies here, and their recent behaviour.

Tiny Maldives looks at us in the eye one day and we are forced to ask the ex-president Nasheed to leave the premises of the Indian high commission where we had given him asylum. We might try to put a gloss over it and say that we had negotiated for his safety with the Maldivian government. But the bitter reality is that within days of that, the same Maldivian government put Nasheed in jail to show you who calls the shots. Yet, we call ourselves an aspiring global power!

Contrast our behaviour in this case with that of little Ecuador. It stood up to the UK, a far more powerful country. And close to a year later, it continues to give asylum to Assange. In contrast, we caved in within a matter of days, and Maldives happens to be one of the smallest countries in the world.

But why just Maldives, look at the way Sri Lanka humiliates us routinely. Fifty thousand Sri Lankan Tamils, some put the figure far higher, were slaughtered during the last days of the Sri Lankan army’s brutality against the LTTE.

Whether the LTTE was a criminal organisation, which needed to be wiped out, is not the issue here. The point is that there was a horrible massacre of innocent civilians that included children, women and the elderly.

The entire world is horrified at the scale of human rights violations committed by the Sri Lankan army against innocent civilians. Yet we hesitate to shed a tear for them in the fear that we might offend Sri Lanka. India was once a champion of the downtrodden; ours was a respected voice in the world against inequities like colonialism and racism. But we seem to have changed tracks; we chose to watch silently as women and children were being slaughtered in our backyard.

It is said that we did so because of the apprehension that a protest might lead Sri Lanka to befriend China and Pakistan. Nothing could be more naïve than that assumption. And nothing more ill-informed. The fact is that Sri Lanka has embraced China and Pakistan with great fraternal affection because it knows India will not react.

And Sri Lanka isn’t done with us yet. Every other day it catches our fishermen and we appeal to its good sense to treat them well. On occasion it has also killed some of our fishermen. Why does it do so? Will it treat China or even Pakistan in the same cavalier fashion? In fact it was forced to release Chinese fishermen within hours, and with apologies, when its navy had recently dared to detain them.

The fact is that the world tramples upon those who are known to be soft. Would Sri Lanka or Maldives have trifled with India in a similar fashion had Mrs Indira Gandhi been alive, and in charge?

A former Ambassador, the writer is a novelist and an artist.