THE NEWSROOM, the 2012 HBO television series written by Aaron Sorkin, is an eminently forgettable compilation of the writer’s ultra-liberal riffs from earlier series such as West Wing. But there is this Jeff Daniels riff in the pilot episode that, if you change the name of the country from America to India, is apt for the times. Watch:
Here is the second part of Daniel’s riff on whether America is the greatest country in the world (Spoiler: No):
We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
I pulled this video up and watched it, wincing at the revisionist, rose-coloured version of history as in “We waged war for moral reasons”; and I returned, repeatedly, to that one line: “We waged war on poverty, not on poor people”.
My prompt for going back to this old clip was the news that approximately one in every two people in the world who suffer from hunger is an Indian; that India now ranks 101st out of 116 countries in the recently-released Global Hunger Index. Among its neighbours, Pakistan (ranked 92), Nepal and Bangladesh (ranked 76) do better than India; only strife-torn Afghanistan, two places below India at 103, fares worse.
The slip makes sense, when you consider the many millions pushed into poverty as a result of the pandemic, and the mismanagement by the government.
Is the methodology flawed, as the government claimed in a statement? Possibly — statistical modelling is not an area of journalism I am familiar with. In 2018 AltNews — which gets a bad rap for supposedly calling out only the Modi government’s fakery — published a fact check which pointed out that the seemingly vertiginous descent in rankings owed to a change in how the findings were tabulated. And that is fair — India did not fall 45 places, as it seemed on the surface.
But equally, as recently as August this year, the Ministry for Consumer Affairs, Food and Distribution used the selfsame GHI to congratulate itself on India’s improvement. Inter alia, it accepts the rankings when it says: “India’s ranking in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 brought out by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe was 80, 97, 100, 103, 102 and 94 respectively. As per GHI Reports, the composite GHI scores of India have improved from 38.9 in 2000 to 27.2 in 2020. Thus, the country has shown consistent improvement over the years.”
In other words, the government is happy to accept the composite score from the selfsame report it decries as flawed.
Hair-splitting aside, remember this line from the Jeff Daniels riff? “The first step in solving any problem is recognising there is one”.
The government recognised a problem — one of Public Relations — and solved it as per usual, by playing the referee. The government professes to find it “shocking” — not that there are hungry people in India, which is undeniably true without splitting hairs about the exact numbers, but that a survey called it out. The government played the man, with its condemnatory statement immediately amplified by its captive megaphone — but not a word about the ball, the underlying issue, and what it intends to do about it.
Hunger has been reduced, as has so much else, to political point-scoring; to one cycle of media noise.
CLIPPING news items and saving them in folders is a habit ingrained in journalists of a certain vintage. Over the last couple of years or so, I’ve found myself starting new folders as items of a particular type proliferate. “Modi says…” “Modi launches…”
The file that caught my attention, as I was sticking the latest item relating to the country’s deteriorating position across indices, is titled “India slips…”
On the World Justice Project index, India slipped a further three places from its 2014 position. This slide is a fallout of the country slipping down the ladder across relevant indices — to 81st position on the corruption index; 114th position on law and order and security; 84th on fundamental rights; and 78th on the criminal justice system.
The Henley Passport Index, which measures the desirability of a passport based on the number of countries its holder can visit visa-free, had us at 74 in 2013. We are now at 90 — a drop, over the tenure of this government, of 16 places. We were at 84 just a year ago; we have dropped six places in 12 months, at a time when Asian nations Japan, Singapore and South Korea occupy the top three slots.
Having to apply for a visa is not a big deal, actually — passport holders take it as a matter of course. Sure, it would be nice to just up and fly to where you want to go — if you hold a passport from Japan or Singapore, for instance, you can travel to 192 countries without pre-applying for a visa — but in the larger scheme of things, no big deal.
It wouldn’t have been worth even a passing mention, except that Home Minister Amit Shah, as late as last week, had this to say:
“During the Congress government, it was such a coalition that it was laughable… each minister considered themselves the Prime Minister, but no one thought of the helpless PM as the Prime Minister.
“Now, when you show the Indian passport, foreign officials smile and ask if you have come from the country of Modi… Modi has done this job of enhancing the value of the Indian passport.”
The very fact that the Home Minister, who is campaigning in Goa while the country is roiled by unrest, chose to bring up the relatively obscure issue of the Indian passport’s value should tell you two things: One, that the lowered ranking of the Indian passport has been noticed at “the highest levels”, and it is hurting and, two, that the government’s playbook remains unchanged: Whatever goes wrong, yell at the top of your voice that sab changa si, glory be to the Great Leader. Righting whatever is going wrong is clearly not a priority.
India slips 28 places in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, making it one of the worst performing countries with a rank of 140 out of 156 countries.
On the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals front, India slips two places to rank 117 among the 193 UN members that signed the pact in 2015.
On the UN’s Human Development Index, which measures health, education and standards of living, India ranks 131st out of 189 countries as of 2020, the latest year for which reports are available — a drop of two places from its 2018 position. What should hurt is that UNDP Resident Representative Shoko Noda, while releasing the report, had to apply rhetorical salve by saying the slip in ranking didn’t mean “India didn’t do well, but other countries do better” — a piece of specious reasoning that rubs salt, not salve, into that wound.
In the latest edition of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, India slipped two places to 53rd. The EIU report attributes the slip — from a high of 27 in 2014 — to “democratic backsliding” under the present regime and “crackdowns on civil liberties”, among other reasons.
Apropos, among the many less noticed news items in a month dominated by the Narcotics Control Board’s bizarre misadventure with Aaryan Khan was this: Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Yadav, who has been scathing on the subject of the Delhi police and the cases it has filed in connection with the riots of early 2020, has been transferred.
Like “Modi says…” “Modi schemes…” and “India slips…”, my Evernote also has a file called “Institutions”, in which I collect stories relating to how the government subverts every single pillar of democracy — investigating agencies, police forces, courts, the media, even Parliament itself. I could do you many more examples, like the one above, to underline the slide in rankings, but why bother when every single day brings at least one fresh instance?
So, instead, cue Amit Shah — who, like Abou Ben Adhem, has recently woken up from a deep dream of peace to make various proclamations about the greatness of Modi. Including this riff claiming that Modi is one of the most democratic leaders he knows:
“I have had the opportunity to work with Modi ji both in the Opposition as well as in the government. I have never met a listener like him. Whatever issue a meeting may be about, Modi ji speaks as little as required and listens to everyone patiently. He considers the value of the person’s opinion, and not the person’s importance or lack thereof, and then takes a decision. So there’s no truth to the charges that he is dictatorial,” said Amit Shah.
A giggle-worthy Freudian slip in this report reads: “He discusses the matter, listens to everyone, and evaluates the pros and cons. The final decision rests with him, of course, because he is the prime minister.”
“He discusses the matter”? That is a soliloquy, not a discussion — but I’ll enjoy my private giggle and put that down to mistranslation.
Moving on: In the 2021 edition of its report on press freedom, Reporters without Borders ranks India 142nd, out of 180 countries surveyed. RSF named India one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, and said the media was exposed to violence from the police and activists, reprisals by criminal groups, etc. Then Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Prakash Javadekar, who has since lost his job, said the government “will expose” surveys that present a “bad picture about” freedom of the press in India.
The irony? On the back of a similarly damning report last year, the government acted. By setting up an Index Monitoring Cell tasked “to improve India’s ranking in the World Press Freedom Index and to evolve an objective yardstick to gauge media freedom”. You can’t fault the government for ambition when it comes to PR — the cell, formed in February 2020, has chapters embedded in 18 ministries, with the overarching task of improving India’s position on 32 international indices. Those would, note, be the very indices the government routinely “slams” as being faulty.
Go back and read the home page of the Index Monitoring Cell. Notice that on March 15 of this year, a report was submitted to the government. Priority number one? “Decriminalise defamation“.
Merriam-Webster defines defamation thus: “The act of communicating false statements about a person that injure the reputation of that person.”
That is how the government’s media cell plans to improve India’s ranking: by permitting the communication of false statements about a person. Where is that face-palm emoji when you need it?
It’s not that the government condemns every such ranking. For instance, when the World Bank released its Ease of Doing Business Report 2020 and it was announced that India had improved its ranking in the period 201402019 by an astonishing 79 positions, Modi was among the first to hail his own accomplishment and threaten to do even better.
We’ll never know if Modi delivered, though, because almost immediately after that report was released in 2020, questions were raised about its methodology. And a year later, after an extensive internal investigation, the World Bank has junked its report, citing data irregularities.
And so it goes on, the story of India’s vertiginous slide on pretty much every single global index.
TO revert to where this post started, with the Jeff Daniels riff, we — you reading this, and me writing this — were never part of the “greatest country in the world”. And it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter because there is no such thing — like all else, “greatness”, on whatever scale you chose to measure it, is cyclical. One day — one era — you are up; the next, not so much. But there is this: we were stumbling along, in our own bumbling fashion, towards that “heaven of freedom” Tagore dreamed of and exhorted us to aspire to.
The path was strewn with mis-steps, the infamous Emergency being merely the most visible, but even so we kept picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off and getting back on the path.
And now? Read that quote from the Daniels riff again, see what resonates, then ask yourself why. Ask also why, and how, we got to this place.
A place where poverty is rising and so is hunger while also being home to the third most number of billionaires in the world. Where we have more homeless children than anyplace else in the world. Where India ranks 134th out of 195 countries in life expectancy; 113th out of 223 in infant mortality; 141st in per capita expenditure on health; 145th on the UN education index; 139th on the World Happiness Report; 129th on the Human Development Index; 117th on the Social Progress Index; 139th on the Global Peace Index; 86th on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index…
How did we get to a place where I have to maintain a file just to keep track of our precipitous descent into the dark, because it is no longer any one thing we are getting worse at, it is every measurable thing?
And finally, ask yourself this: Why does this not matter more to us? Why is this not a subject for discussion on prime time shows, in the editorial and oped pages, and across our coffee tables? And — might as well wish for the moon while I am about it — a question that is not posed relentlessly to those who govern us?
To discuss such issues — including ones that reflect badly on the government of the times — is not to be “anti-national” or to “show the country in a bad light”; it is not the prerogative of the “Lutyens Lobby”, whoever that is, but the foremost duty for every citizen.
British novelist and essayist GK Chesterton once wrote: My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober’.”
But whimsy aside, my favourite definition of patriotism comes from an exchange on the floor of the United States Senate. Wisconsin Senator Mathew Carpenter, in course of a speech justifying a manifestly unjust action, said it was the duty of every citizen to support his country. “My country, right or wrong!”, Senator Carpenter declaimed.
To which Carl Christian Schurz, a former German revolutionary who migrated to the United States to become, successively, a newspaper publisher and later a Senator representing Missouri, responded with this line:
My country, right or wrong; when right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.
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