A curious thing happened in America last week, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi was there on a high-profile state visit.

Even as he was being feted by President Biden and the political establishment, former American president Barack Obama churlishly tried to dampen popular enthusiasm by injecting unconscionable negativism into the media glare.

India, Obama said, was in the danger of being pulled apart by internal strife “if the protection of the Muslim minority in a majority Hindu India” was not ensured by the Modi government.

It was a hurtful statement to make about a nation which suffered the terrible horrors of a partition on religious lines in 1947, and suffers the pain of cultural separatism still.

But we shouldn’t be surprised, because this benthic level of deplorable cattiness, and the supercilious tone in which it was conveyed, is actually par for Obama’s course.

He said pretty much the same in 2015, in India, as a guest of the Indian state, to Indians, a day after we honoured him as chief guest at the Republic Day parade: “India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith…”

In 2015, our official response was only to send Foreign Secretary Sujata Singh packing the very next day. But eight years later, in a sign that this is a very different India, and one which doesn’t take such tripe quietly anymore, the world chuckled as Obama’s portends were ripped to shreds by some big names – Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman, and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh.

But what was surprising, and indicative of some intriguing clefts in who stands where on the matter of India’s honour, was the way in which a number of Indians rushed to defend Obama.

A spokeswoman for the Congress party tremulously tweeted that a diatribe against Obama by ministers in the Modi cabinet would be a death knell for diplomatic ties with disastrous consequences.

That is surely sage advice, but only in another space-time dimension, because it does not offer any pointers on what a nation is supposed to do when a globally-important public figure questions the unity and integrity of this country.

The answer to that question was provided by a leading English-language newspaper of record. It was so alarmed by the fact that Indian politicians holding high offices had dared to call out Obama for his unworthy statement, that it actually ran an editorial on the topic.

Apparently, Obama was only voicing concerns similar to ones voiced by Indians. So, rather than resorting to sharp retorts, the Indian government was better off accepting that Obama had a point, and keeping quiet, because ‘sometimes just listening – without rushing to grandstand – can be smarter’.

This is amazing, because the editorial has painted itself into a Gunga Din corner, and harks back to the bane of modern India – that old colonial mindset where brown sepoys are meant to obediently, and silently, accept advice from the West as ‘veda vakyam’, and never speak back to their masters.

This submissive mentality then evolved into that of a supplicant. Their approach was to contest the cabinet ministers’ statements, that Obama had no moral right to lecture India since he had bombed half a dozen Muslim countries when he was president.

Believe it or not, their argument was that the ministers were wrong because Obama didn’t bomb Muslim countries, per se, but only Islamist terrorists who had built safe havens for their operations in those countries.

Ah, so, the people of Libya, Yemen, or Syria, for example, may find deep relief that even though they were bombed into the stone age, and their countries were wrecked by ensuing civil wars, the reason for their misery wasn’t bigotry!

A fourth line of support put forward by such loyal Indians, is the argument that an attack on Barack Obama is an attack on America. But it doesn’t hold up to the test of logic because, if one were to roundly abuse Donald Trump, these sorts would immediately junk their Obama-America conflation to cheer wildly. So how is it that castigating Trump isn’t an attack on America, but castigating Obama is?

No degree of legal acumen can ever justify that self-contradiction convincingly, as none is possible.

Nonetheless, that lack of logic did not deter these usual suspects from springing to Obama’s defence. because this is how the Indian establishment of yore functioned – a congenital tendency to accept anything the West doled out without question, since in that fawning acceptance lay, for them and their children, all the career opportunities imaginable, access to cocktail and seminar circuits, and the riches that beckoned.

And the worst part is that even as these types revealed their true loyalties with their ‘Indian defence’, they were exposed more by the silence of the Biden administration.

For all the statements made against Obama by senior Indian functionaries, and all the brouhaha raised by Obama loyalists in India, the American government did not make a single statement.

To the White House, and rightly so, this was between Obama and India, because, in the current geopolitical climate, America has a greater interest in expanding ties with India, rather than getting bogged down by the frivolous pontifications of a has-been.

That is the difference between our ancien regime and the current dispensation: those who hold senior posts in the Modi government, and in the Bharatiya Janata Party, are not personally beholden to the West. And that is how it should have always been, yet sadly wasn’t.

Nonetheless, there is no such thing as one reminder too many, of how things once were, and must never be again.

To that end, the shameful manner in which some Indians scrambled to defend Obama, when no defence was possible, is a good thing, because it shows that there are still some Indians in positions of prominence today, to whom, ensuring that someone like Obama isn’t offended means more than India’s unity and self-respect.

Barack Obama comments on India

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