Lahore And After: Why Hypocrisy May Be The Best Policy For Us

We should learn to use hypocrisy to further state interests from Pakistan.

Hypocrisy and distrust are embedded in the Indian psyche. We can routinely combine extreme religiosity with crass materialism; high personal morality with a complete lack of public ethics; we can keep clean houses and yet pile up garbage outside; our politicians can talk endlessly about the poor and then systematically loot the exchequer; we can embed “Socialism” in our preamble and then happily practice crony capitalism.

In personal dealings we can say nice things about people we know and do the dirty work of undermining them privately. Not for nothing did we invent the phrase, “Munh me Ram, bagal me chura” (Ram on your lips and a dagger by your side).

It is possible to speculate why we are the world’s best hypocrites. A land of extreme diversity possibly keeps the peace by pretense and compromise, and by ignoring reality to some extent. We learn to forget what is inconvenient, and remember what is convenient.

Given our national character of in-built hypocrisy, it is a paradox why we are unable to use our strengths in this area to further the national interest. Let’s be clear: diplomacy and geopolitics are about combining national interest with hypocrisy, so that ethics and morality don’t come in the way of what needs to be done.

Consider how our inability to practice hypocrisy in geopolitics has consistently let us down. We loudly cheer the slogan of “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” and let the Chinese walk all over us. Jawaharlal Nehru didn’t even build a road to move the army to the front when needed badly in 1962. We happily jump into a bus to Lahore and come back with a piece of paper hoping for “peace in our time”, only to find the Pakistanis infiltrating into Kargil.

We happily accept US assurances that they want us on the Security Council but we don’t see that they can easily use proxies to block us. We are now given to talking about soft power without realising that soft power is useless without hard power. If anybody thinks Bollywood and yoga will help India secure its political and economic interests, he or she is living in a fool’s paradise.

The truth is the alleged novices in hypocrisy use hypocrisy better to further their national interests than the world champs in personal hypocrisy (that’s us). We recoil in horror when the Chinese, the Pakistanis and others stab us in the back when we have been doing nothing but adopt moral postures on everything. We declined a Security Council seat when it was offered to us, we accepted a Kashmir ceasefire when we are winning the battle (in 1948 and 1965), and we return 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war after 1971 for another piece of worthless paper called the Shimla agreement. We pull defeat from the jaws of victory every time our emotional nature intervenes and our moral sense needs to be stoked.

On the other hand, consider how easily the Christian West is able to use hypocrisy to its advantage. We get lectures on racism and communalism from the US when the latter’s own racism is so blatant (against Afro-Americans and Muslims). The Christian west brings up Jesus to show peaceable intent and to further its corporate goal of getting more customers for the church, but it follows none of Jesus’s fundamental recommendations for moral behaviour – turning the other cheek, or allowing the blessed meek to inherit the earth. Instead, the meek are ethnically cleansed (the American Indians in North America and the Aborigines Down Under), and the browbeaten into compliance with their wishes. The meek Indian geek is targeted as a job-stealer in “open market” America.

Consider also how assassination using clinical drones has become official policy for the US against jihadis in West Asia – despite formal belief in the rule of law. The US talks democracy and liberty and then spies on its own people and maintains a Guantanamo. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are treated as public enemies and not as heroes of open government and transparency. If we did the same, the US secretary of state will be wringing his hands in despair at this “attack on liberties and democratic values.”

The Chinese can make ambiguous statements on supporting India’s global aspirations and then covertly undercut us by instigating its ally to bark and bite us. China will use Pakistan to slow us down and trip us on the road to higher growth and political strength.

The Pakistanis are probably even better than the Americans in hypocrisy. They are the world’s jihadi headquarters, but get financial and other help from the Americans, the Chinese, and, now, maybe even the Russians – even though all three partners are implacably against Islamism and jihadism. The countries most decidedly against Islamism are its greatest benefactors.

Consider how important hard power is for all the big powers, and for Pakistan, despite the fact that they have oodles of soft power themselves. The Pakistanis use our softness to weaken our resolve while consistently building their military capability. They use duplicity against us and we fall for it repeatedly by pretending “we are the same people.”

Actually, we are not the same people anymore. Not after 1947, 1948, 1965, 1971, 1993, 26/11, etc. Pakistan was created as a Muslim homeland and the establishment there has steadily told itself and the world they are anti-Hindu, anti-everything-Indian. While it may be true that there may be goodwill and camaraderie in people-to-people relations, at the state level all bets are off. For hard power, it is the state’s attitude that matters, not soft people power.

The challenge before Indian diplomacy is to continuously build hard power while feigning softness. It is in this context that we must see Narendra Modi’s Lahore trip and the accompanying pictures of bonhomie with Nawaz Sharif. The optics are vital for strengthening us globally and to provide the cover while we strengthen ourselves militarily and economically. If the second part is not the goal, the first part makes less sense.

We should learn to use hypocrisy to further state interests from Pakistan.

Here’s what we must do.

First, we must outwards talk friendship and goodwill, but privately prepare to land the Pakistanis hard jabs to the head when provoked.

Second, we must downplay every act of Pakistani perfidy (26/11, LOC violations) publicly, but privately hit them back with twice the strength. The veneer of everything-is-normal is vital for delivering the hard underlying message. We must be peaceful in words, and covertly violent in response to provocation. This is the only way Pakistan will get the message.

Third, we should never fool ourselves that real peace is possible by soft talk and good wishes. Candlelight vigils on Wagah cannot be thought of as aids to state policy. They should be seen as subterfuge. Narendra Modi should meet Sharif with a candle at Wagah or even spend the latter’s birthdays in Lahore, but his NSA Ajit Doval should be scheming to figure out how to hit the Pakistanis hard when they next breach the peace.

This is what Pakistan does: demand a composite dialogue while sending jihadis across. But every time we board a bus or reroute our flight to Lahore, we start believing peace is round the corner.

It is worth pondering over how we have forgotten the art of double-speak and double-think to further our national interests. I believe that it started with Gandhi, for whom morality was an end itself. For Gandhi, moral victories were more important than practical wins; his successor Nehru, even though he did not have much faith in Gandhian morality, allowed his easy impressionableness and personal ego to determine national interest.

He heard about Soviet collectivisation of farming as thought it was the answer to Indian farming; he was impressed by the early achievements of Mao to believe that socialism was good for India; he believed that India has such soft power standing in the world that the Chinese would never invade us.

But there is no point blaming Nehru too much either. Vajpayee fell for the same emotional appeal of being a peace-maker, and so did Indira Gandhi before that in Shimla. One hopes Modi has learnt from their mistakes and doesn’t treat magnanimity to enemies as some kind of virtue.

It is a paradox that the land that discovered Chanakya Niti before Machiavelli does not understand the value of hypocrisy in pursuing national interests. We are repeatedly enticed by the doubts of Arjuna rather than the resoluteness of Shri Krishna.

India’s enemies want us to think like Arjuna before Kurukshetra rather than listen to the message of the Gita that genuine peace needs a willingness to fight.

Hypocrisy is not needed with friends; but it is vital in dealing with enemies and frenemies.