18 August 21, 2015
Oh, Snap
EDITORIAL/COMMENTARY
Indian Without Being an Indian BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Each time Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes a trip abroad, one of the outcomes is an image of him staring into a camera with his counterparts in whichever part of the world he happens to be visiting. Before he whipped out his cellphone outside the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, Modi and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang tweeted a picture from Beijing that the Wall Street Journal labelled as perhaps “the most powerful selfie” ever. There was one in Fiji with Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama and another at the Melbourne Cricket Ground with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. (A notable absentee from Modi’s selfie bingo card is US President Barack Obama; instead of a selfie, the two were pictured embracing.) These images become wildly popular for one reason: They seem unburdened by the pomp and bombast of proper protocol. Instead, the awkwardly composed shots suggest informality. After all, it’s what ordinary folk — people who don’t run countries — would do to record a special moment. With a selfie, Modi and his companions indicate an offbook, impromptu interaction that comes from a place of genuine friendship, and so they become instantly more accessible to their constituents. Yet, for all their seeming spontaneity, these selfies are likely just as affected and carefully curated as the more traditional forms of diplomatic communication. The studied casualness of a selfie is a handy way to reflect a vision of diplomatic relations that privileges the personal equation between two leaders. As a side benefit, politicians come across as less stuffy and more in tune with the zeitgeist — also the reason why, say, the White House released Obama’s summer playlist. Still, such experiments with the cellphone are fraught with danger. Diplomacy is a deliberate art and mixing its natural tendency to caution with the selfie’s impetuousness is bound to create tension, as Obama, UK PM David Cameron and then Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt found out, to their own peril, when they decided to take a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Indian Express
What am I? I was born in Delhi, in a hospital in the military cantonment, my maternal grandfather having been a stiff-backed officer of the Indian Army. Every member of my immediate biological family resides in Delhi. I cheer for India at cricket, at hockey, and at every other sport worth shouting for, and follow Indian politics more closely than the politics of any other land — including that of the US, the country in which I live (and whose domestic politics I abhor). I am fiercely proud of India’s achievements, fiercely critical of its failings, and never neutral about anything of import that has to do with the land of my birth. I’m Rafi over Kishore Kumar, Vilayat over Ravi Shankar, Dravid over Tendulkar, langda over alphonso, and idli over dosa (as long as there’s good gunpowder). But I’m not Indian. Or, put another way: I’m not an Indian citizen. Every life has its trajectory and mine took me to Britain as a teenager. I chose to settle there after I finished my studies and lived there for two happy decades, retaining my Indian citizenship all the while. I became a journalist, and in due course my newspaper, The Times, sent me to Madrid as bureau chief. Getting a work permit for Spain was a chore, but the newspaper’s name carried some heft and the Spanish authorities fast-tracked my Indian passport through the bureaucratic labyrinth. One fateful day, a breaking story of significance required me to hop on the next flight out of Madrid to Casablanca, in Morocco. But I couldn’t: With my Indian citizenship, the Moroccan Embassy in Madrid said it would take two weeks for a visa. I watched as my competitors — Brits to the last man — hopped on that flight out of town and filed their stories. The Times carried wire copy instead, and my editor was pissed off. “Get a UK passport,” he said. “You can tell me you’re Indian all you like. But don’t tell me you couldn’t do the job.” So I got a UK passport. There was a breaking story out of Morocco two months later — and I was on a plane to Rabat in a flash. I had to surrender my Indian pass-
Why not extend the option of Indian nationality to those among this group of people who had once been Indian citizens? They would embrace it with gratitude and gusto. port, a fat, wedge-like thing, three books gummed together, with an insane (and dazzling) array of immigration stamps and visas. Only Nepal, I recall — and perhaps Mauritius, though I can’t be sure — let Indians in without a visa in those days. It was a serious professional liability to be a working journalist in Europe with one of the world’s leading newspapers and to have an Indian passport. My decision to surrender my Indian passport was wholly pragmatic. Did I love India less after I became British? Hardly. There are hundreds of thousands of people like me outside India who have had to surrender their Indian passports for foreign ones for purely professional and practical reasons. These are people who would gladly have retained their Indian citizenship, even as they took on the citizenship of another land, if India’s laws had permitted dual nationality. Sixty-eight years after Independence, India is an economic and political powerhouse. One of the keenest weapons in its arsenal is the Indian diaspora, which includes Indian citizens residing abroad as well as many millions of people of Indian
origin who are the nationals of other countries. Why not extend the option of Indian nationality to those among this group of people who had once been Indian citizens? They would embrace it with gratitude and gusto. At so many levels this would be the right thing for India to do. In a world where numerous countries offer dual citizenship, India is depriving itself, limiting the free flow of people and ideas for no advantage that I can see. The notion that it would be a security hazard is bogus. Dangerous infiltration isn’t deterred by passports and nationality. (Remember David Headley?) It would also show confidence and maturity, and a pride in people who may have left the Motherland, but for whom the Motherland is always a source of inspiration and love. Indian Express
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INDO AMERICAN NEWS • FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015 • ONLINE EDITION: WWW.INDOAMERICAN-NEWS.COM
Tunku Varadarajan is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.