The globalisation of Hypocrisy

Call this the double standards decade, or century, or millennium. Or call it an unrecognizable transformation of regional geo-politics post-11 September. For decades, India spoke loftily from the United Nations rostrum about Gandhi, ahimsa, nonalignment. Its prime minister of today wrote teary-eyed poems in memory of the Hiroshima dead. And then, with Atalji firmly at the helm, India decides to build the Bomb in earnest. Overnight, diplomats, media analysts and apologist academics willingly change their tune and compete for outdated hawkishness.

India used to rail against the Seventh Fleet and wanted the United States out of Diego Garcia, and now without batting an eyelid they offer all sorts of airstrips and support to the United States. Today, Diego Garcia is a fait accompli for the Pentagon, and not a peep out of South Block. As for the Mahatma, he is an embarrassment for those who want to globalise and go nuclear.

When the American ambassador to Nepal openly castigated the government earlier this year in the presence of the late King Birendra, chiding it for corruption – do you think he left some space for introspection? The ambassador's concern, like that of all good people, was Nepal's tardy development. But what of the fact that USAID had spent 50 years in Nepal (in fact, the occasion was to mark that milestone) as long as Nepal has been "developing". It must be mighty tempting to put all the blame of Nepal's underdevelopment on Nepali fatalism and corruption. You would have expected mature aid agencies to realise by now that pouring money into poverty is not going to reduce it. Perhaps there would be questions about why the breeding ground for Nepal's Maoists is actually the very region of the Rapti valley where USAID had its biggest integrated projects over the Panchayat decades.

Still on the subject of detached donors. There must be something to be said about the annual migration of the entire donor community out of the Subcontinent during the northern hemisphere summer. Why is it that the summer vacation comes above every other need of a developing country? The delays these cause in decision-making are almost as serious as the tardiness of our local bureaucracies.

When Royal Nepal Airlines bought its two Boeing 757 jets back deep in the Panchayat years, the kickback was allegedly divided up by the royals. The taking of the money was greed, but could the giving of it be considered corruption as well?

Double standards. It runs in the human family, and it is the first among the baser instincts because of its source in self-centricism, which is the stepping stone to hypocrisy. When the two planes rammed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, there could have been no reaction other than one of untrammelled, unqualified horror, and yet we all immediately had to have a 'position'. Barely had the towers collapsed in that cumulous of dust, when the time was still for ingesting the scale of the tragedy, we were already seeking a moral high ground and pointing at US policies which "explained" why people would do such acts against innocents. And, speaking of double standards, why would the Secretary of State of the bastion of free speech call on the Emir of Qatar to squelch Al Jazeera television, just because it was broadcasting uncomfortable footage?

Double standards is no monopoly of Foggy Bottom, and is equally practiced by, say, Nepal's Maoists. The chief ideologue of the underground party, which wants monarchy out and republicanism in, claimed as soon as the 1 June Royal massacre took place, that the Shah Dynasty had after all been a nationalist vanguard that had unified the country, and that they (the Maoists) had had a "working unity" with the late king. When the reference to unification created problems with the radical ethnic leadership because it considers that a conquest by Prithvi Narayan Shah, the chief ideologue was quickly willing to issue a 'correction' and take back his claim.

That's not double standards or byprocrisy, it is lying. In broad daylight, and when everyone is watching. Hurnan hypocrisy will stay with us. And it will germinate and grow wherever power is accompanied by arrogance. The only way to counter it is transparency, independence and sunlight. Someone remind Jaswant Singh of Diego Garcia. Colin Powell of the First Amendment. The Americans of kickbacks for 757s. And Baburam Bhattarai of the Nepali "unification".