Dawn is a reputed Pakistani Newspaper that also has a correspondent in India. Recently, I came across a rather interesting article in it's online version. Title of the article was "Don't shoot the messenger". Link to the original article is at the end of this post.
The gist of this article was that while nobody likes to see their country's dirty linen being washed in public by another national or (God Forbid!) in another nation's newspaper, Indians seem to be hyper sensitive to any criticism of their country by foreign nationals and foreign newspapers. The author Irfan Husain points out that while Indian media is good at fishing out scams and corruption stories it seems to play along with the Government's slogan of "India Shining". He accuses India of refusing to acknowledge its soft belly while it celebrates the growth of a small portion of its population. His advice to India is that it's hyper sensitivity to criticism creates the danger that it may lose sight of the huge problems that still exist.
I forwarded this article to my team here at Choices and it seems that we all agree that Mr. Irfan Husain does have a point. All Indians regularly criticize our politicians, bureaucracy, roads, education system, police etc.. However, if a Non Resident Indian criticizes the country in a similar manner most of his/her family members and friends can not accept that criticism. Even amongst Indian nationals, often a student criticizing his country will be bombarded by questions like "What are you doing for the country if you have such a problem?", "Don't you think you are being a hypocrite for criticizing the corruption in a system when you benefit from it at times?", "Why don't you clear up your own act before saying that the country sucks?".
While we must agree that these statements seem morally upright the problem with them is that such statements necessitate some sort of qualification before you can point out the bitter realities of your nation. This is obviously a problem as nobody needs any qualification to state the Truth and if an Indian needs to be a perfect citizen before pointing out the flaws and weaknesses of his country then nobody can ever speak the truth because nobody is perfect.
We hope that Indian nationals will have the courage and strength to accept the criticism forwarded in the article by Mr. Irfan Husain. After all, shooting the messenger does not eliminate the bad news. It merely makes us ignorant.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/14-irfan-husain-dont-shoot-the-messenger-030-zj-06
