Mihir S Sharma: Statesman of spin

The new govt has much going for it, above all the hopes of India and the world. But don't spin stories ahead of its success

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is being described as something of a global statesman, by which we mean that he has been photographed at a lot of summits recently. For example, he was photographed at the SAARC summit in Kathmandu, wearing a dark suit while ignoring Nawaz Sharif, and a light suit while looking intimidatingly at China through binoculars. He also delivered a speech there, which is par for the course since many have come to the conclusion that Modi delivers speeches even when ordering breakfast in the morning. ("Mitron, Sixty seven years of despotism by fried eggs are over. The time has come for poori-aloo.")

Still, it was an exceptional speech in that it demonstrated Modi's grasp of exactly how far from integrated South Asia is, how little we trade with each other, and how much we need to do to fix that. His commitment to increased trade, including with Pakistan, shone through his words, and I, for one, was vastly relieved by them.

The thing with speeches is that it is tough to spin them. I am fairly sure I know what Modi meant when he talked of trade, just as I knew when I read his speech at the G20 - where he talked of "reform by stealth" being bad, but also that there was minimal popular backing for subsidy reform - that he felt he was capable of building a reform programme, but did not believe even he had the political mandate to make it particularly radical. I know what he said because he said it fairly clearly, as is his wont, and in these cases, I did not need to depend on garbled, exaggerating and worshipful background briefings from his bureaucrats, or credulous re-reporting by the Indian media of puffed-up official releases.

This mis-statement of what the PM and his government is achieving, this constant puffery, is ever easier to see through. It is also why we believe his greatest successes so far have been in the domain of foreign policy; because, in domestic policy, it is a lot harder to get away with imprecision. For example, Modi may have said more than once that one-rank-one-pension has been arranged - but the ex-servicemen expecting the money know that it hasn't, not exactly. Whether on this, or on black money, there are any number of places where the government is being forced to grapple with the realities of administration, and its mendacious campaign rhetoric is coming in the way.

And so we have foreign policy "successes" claimed instead - at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), with black money at the G20, in restarting relations with the US, and so on. Many of these claims have been reported uncritically, sourced to unnamed officials. Given the Indian media's capacity constraints - and, let us be frank about it, its minimal interest in challenging the official narrative at the moment - this should not be surprising. Nor are we China, for example, the sort of country that is important enough for its own government's claims about its foreign policy to be examined and challenged regularly by the media in the rest of the world.

Still, some nuggets of the inconvenient truth do filter through, no doubt much to the chagrin of this government. For example, the government reiterated on Friday that it had made no compromises at WTO. This was an attempt to say that its bull-headed stance in favour of our subsidies to farmers had paid off, to justify that "strength" of which Global Statesman Narendra Modi is so proud. Sadly, this may not exactly be the case. As it happens, more than one foreign reporter happens to be covering this issue - remember, India has not one journalist who was at the G20 in Australia as well as the two WTO meetings at Geneva in July and Bali last year that are relevant. The reporters who do follow this tell a different story. The Financial Times' trade editor Shawn Donnan, for example, tweeted that India got only "minor and symbolic" concessions over what it was offered in July, when it first acted petulant, and it backed down from its threat in September to torpedo all negotiations. See the irony here: the government actually acted with praiseworthy maturity, in seeing that its first acts, too soon after it took office perhaps, were in error; but it didn't get credit for that, because the truth was not discussed.

Consider another nugget: the prime minister himself has claimed, as has his government, that the Australia G20 summit was a "success for India" because its insistence got the grouping to act on black money. Well, let's discount for a moment the fact that acting against tax havens and evasion has been one of the pillars of the G20 since it began. Look instead at what was specifically claimed by the PM's Sherpa and the relevant Secretary: that India's insistence had ensured that low-tax countries could not make tax rulings that benefitted particular individuals or companies. We don't know what happened behind closed doors. But we in India hadn't heard of this issue before - whereas in Europe, it had been a big deal for weeks, coming after recent leaks of confidential documents that showed Luxembourg had acted to help companies. This is Merkel's issue, not Modi's. Again, a claim that wilts when faced with evidence.

The new government has much going for it, above all the hopes of India and the world. There is no worse way to fritter away its advantages than by telling stories of success before the successes have been achieved. Even in the arena of foreign affairs, this strategy will come undone. You can prevaricate about many things, but not life or death. When the foreign minister of India stands up to say we have no idea whether our citizens in Iraq are alive or dead, there is no way to spin that positively, and even this government should not try.

mihir.sharma@bsmail.in