Pakistan Calls India Corrupt — and the Sting Is That He's Right

Reading Jawed Naqvi — the veteran Pakistani journalist who covered New Delhi for Dawn — on Indian corruption produces a peculiar sensation: the urge to argue, undercut by the suspicion that he has a point. The kettle calling the pot black, one thinks. Then one reads on, and the pot starts to look very black indeed.

Naqvi's piece wove together the season's outrages: the "Azadi" debate around Arundhati Roy, against whom sedition charges were being demanded after her remarks on Kashmir, and the corporate media's complicity in the power games of the powerful. His argument was that the noise about sedition was a convenient ruse — a way to switch the headlines from the rot at the center of Indian public life to a manufactured controversy about a writer.

The instinctive Indian response is to dismiss the messenger. Pakistan has its own well-documented struggles with corruption; who is he to lecture? But the scandals of that autumn needed no foreign correspondent to invent them. The Commonwealth Games mess was still being excavated. The 2G spectrum allocations were about to become the defining scam of the decade. The Adarsh housing files were being pried open. Naqvi was not describing an imaginary India.

That is what made the article sting. A critique is not refuted by pointing at the critic's own house — especially when your own house is, that month, visibly on fire. The honest response to Naqvi was not outrage but the harder work his piece implicitly demanded: cleaning up the corruption he described, so the next such lecture lands on deaf ears.