Rehman Malik is a troll, but India is a fool for humouring him

It is, of course, tempting to airily dismiss, as many have done, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik’s string of offensive and provocative comments while on Indian soil as the motormouth indiscretions of a politician who suffers from an acute case of the foot-in-mouth syndrome.    After all, the man is mocked at and pilloried even in Pakistan, where too he has endeavoured valiantly to offend anyone with even an iota of sensibility. The most charitable reason that the media in Pakistan cite in order to account for his bizarre, over-the-top pronouncements (such as that the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan was funded from Sri Lanka) is that when Malik was a baby, his nanny probably dropped him on his head - twice. (More in the same irreverent vein here and here.) In a curious sort of way, Malik’s ridiculous outpourings as an equal-opportunity offender on either side of the Wagah border have only served to consolidate public opinion in both India and Pakistan that relations between the two countries are  ill-served by having buffoons in charge of setting the tone for the discourse. And, in any case, we have our own Digvijaya Singh and Beni Prasad Verma - spokespersons whose sole purpose, in other contexts, is to muddy the waters on any public issue with their provocative verbal bombs, and effectively draw attention away from the core issue at hand. [caption id=“attachment_558403” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Rehman Malik abused his hospitality in India, but only because the UPA government let him. AP[/caption] And yet, it is folly to humour Malik in the way that our officialdom and our media have done, by treating his outlandish, insensitive comments as the  harmless, even when grating, exertions of the court jester. In the space of a few hours, Malik virtually resorted to a carpetbombing of Indian sensibilities in their entirety with injudicious comments. First, he scoffed at India’s forensic evidence of Pakistani official complicity in the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai,  by establishing false equivalences between that act of proxy war and India’s internal law and order problems. Then he suggested that Kargil war hero Capt Saurabh Kalia, whose mutilated remains bore evidence of torture at Pakistani hands, may have died owing to inclement weather in the high Himalayas. Having whipped up sufficient hysteria in the Indian media, which was his primary intention in the first place, Malik then resorted to spin to cover his tracks, suggesting that his comments had been deliberately twisted by media outlets that were out to wreck the Indo-Pakistani detente efforts. But barely had the outrage died down than Malik lobbed another verbal grenade by suggesting that Abu Jundal, the Pakistani operative who had been arrested in Saudi Arabia and extradited earlier this year, had been an agent of an Indian intelligence establishment. And with enormous gall, Malik suggested that it was time for India to move beyond the November 2008 attacks and look ahead to the future.  As the official representative of a country that, as Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah pointed out, still harks back to a 1950s UN resolution on Kashmir, that is a bit rich. Even for a gifted clown such as Malik, this string of repeated motormouth offenses, while on Indian soil, cannot have been an impromptu performance, and points to deliberate application of mind. More seriously, Malik’s statements fit in with the pattern of past Pakistani actions in attempting to devalue  the burden of India’s case against Pakistani complicity in terror attacks. Malik’s gameplan is throw enough reckless muck at India in the hope that it will drown out India’s far more serious accusations of Pakistani role in sponsoring jihadi crimes in India. India’s Home Secretary RK Singh has rubbished Malik’s claim that Jundal was an operative of an elite Indian intelligence agency as “ridiculous”. But Malik has already had his day, and continues to reiterate the baseless charge. Malik’s disinformation strategy against India works largely because Indian officialdom and the media have played along with him by providing him a platform to pontificate - without challenging him vigorously enough. With its  masterly ability to score self-goals, the UPA government has rolled out the red carpet for an agent provocateur to peddle his lies - on Indian soil, without a robust challenge of that false narrative. This fits in with the larger failing of the media and the power elite in India in providing a platform for Pakistani politicians, including war criminal Gen Pervez Musharraf, to come to India and bad-mouth it ( more here ). As happened most recently with Musharraf and with Imran Khan, Indian officialdom and the media are in a perpetual state of ritual self-abuse: for them, it’s Muharram all the year round, given the self-flagellation that they subject themselves to. Rehman Malik is a troll of the first order, but the government and the media have made fools of a billion Indians by rolling out the red carpet and giving Malik a stage from which to advance his trolling.  A yearning for peace shouldn’t require us to bend over backwards to appease a truculent troll. Malik egregiously abused his hospitality in India, but only because he was given a licence to by our spineless officialdom and a pliant media.