In times past, especially during the 1975-77 Emergency, the BBC was listened to as a balanced voice on developments in India. There is a strong case which has often been disregarded for ensuring long tenures in a particular country for journalists and diplomats. In the course of their assignments, journalists and diplomats having a long tenure in a particular country understand it in a way that those with short tenures of a few years do not. Mark Tully was stationed in India by the BBC for so long that he was practically considered an Indian by many in the country. In the case of diplomats, some countries who station their UN representatives for a long period get the benefit of the fact that such diplomats get on first name terms with several whole time UN staffers based at the UN headquarters in New York have a better chance of getting and influencing their opinion on various issues. The same applies to those stationed in particular countries for a long period. They link with rising politicians at an early stage of their careers, and often become friends trusted by them. Where the BBC is concerned, its credibility in India has travelled a long way down since the Tully days. Why this is so was illustrated by a recent episode of Hard Talk in which former CJI D.y. Chandrachud was interviewed by Steven Sackur, who has never hidden the resentment he feels at India straying so far away from the British establishment line on issues of consequence such as the Ukraine war between that country and Russia. The BBC host was from the start a champion of the Ukrainian side represented by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, an opportunity for him to vent his Russophobic views. The Chandrachud interview was a feast for those opposed to the independent minded trajectory of India since 2014, when the Prime Ministership came into the hands of Narendra Modi.
Sackur is from the Winston Churchill school, which has been astonished that the fragmentation of post-1947 India that had repeatedly been forecast by them is yet to happen. The former CJI fielded the bouncers tossed in his direction with skill and politesse, visibly disconcerting his interviewer. Why so many in the West do not understand, leave alone appreciate, the fact that a close partnership between the West and India is good for both is baffling. An explanation could be that they continue to live in the past, unwilling to accept the changes that have taken place since the 1990s, which marked the initiation of the process through which the centre of gravity of global concern began shifting from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. Such denial was apparent in the response of the US during the Biden term in the White House and its Atlanticist allies to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is a country as essential for Russian security as Belarus, in 2022. Ignoring the reality that what President Putin sought was merely the safety of Donetsk, the Crimea and Lugansk, and not the absorption of the entirety of the former component of the Soviet Union, the West launched a proxy war through Ukraine. Given its criticality to Russian security from a possible invasion of Russia by NATO, it was evident that the Kremlin would not acquiesce in the entry of Ukraine into NATO. The lost lands had been outside the control of Kiev since the 2014 Maidan revolution which ushered in a Russophobic central government. Ignoring the reality that Russia was a greatly diminished power from the 1980s onwards, unlike China, NATO flooded Kiev with weapons and ensured that the offer of a halt in military operations made by Putin less than two months after the war started was rejected by Kiev. Since then, the price paid by Ukraine in lives and infrastructure has been ruinous. Now with Donald Trump replacing Joe Biden in the White House, the ability of Ukraine to continue the war is vanishing, tall talk from countries such as Britain notwithstanding. Prime Minister Keir Starmer does not have the wherewithal to reverse the decline in capabilities of the UK, leave alone replacing the US as the principal supplier of weapons to Ukraine. Not that such a situation is apparent to Stephen Sackur of the BBC, who from the start has been a booster of the destructive war being carried out by Ukraine against the Russian Federation.