Shashi Tharoor may get all the love, but an MPs' team led by a JDU man is getting more bang for India's buck

Sanjay Kumar Jha & Co have had better impact than the more celebrated Congress (?) charmer

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The seven delegations of Members of Parliament and former Ambassadors (and other worthies who are neither) are hopping from capital to capital with barely any scrutiny by mainstream news media.

As if it does not matter.

But it does matter, because the taxpayer deserves to know where the MPs are going, whom they are meeting, what success they are having in their assigned task of letting the world know why the Pahalgam Massacre happened, and why India did what it did.

(And what it might do, sooner if not later.)

This Luddite approach of reaching out presumes those 33 countries do not have embassies and consulates and media attaches in Delhi. Or India does not have competent diplomatic staff on their soil to swing the opinion of decision-makers India’s way.

Therein lies the key to these MPs’ excursions: they are out there not really to convince the world of Pakistan’s dastardly designs but for an altogether different purpose which has less to do with global opinion and more to do with domestic politics.

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Back in the 1980s, there used to be a TV show called the “I Team” (I for Investigative) on American and Canadian channels. All it would do was follow public servants to see what they would do on taxpayer-funded out-of-town, out-of-country assignments.

Would they really attend those meetings and workshops, or would they just fuck around, literally and figuratively, and waste public money.

India may have a few hundred news channels and newspapers, but as the government’s self-appointed booster, examining what the MPs are doing is no longer considered their professional duty for fear of being removed from the WhatsApp groups of MEAIndia and PMOIndia.

(Maybe even the brainwashed taxpayer doesn’t care, but that’s another matter.)

Nevertheless, after a week and more of the MPs’ peregrinations, it is possible to somewhat roughly compute the diplomatic gains and losses. The parliamentarians are piling on the cliches (“land of Buddha”) and platitudes (“zero-tolerance to terrorism”), while loading the sarkari jargon of the “new normal”.

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Coverage in Tamil Murasu, Singapore

What is clear (so far) is that all the teams are:

a) meeting people who are way down the food chain in their ports of call,

b) spending a disproportionate amount of time with the Indian diaspora,

c) garlanding Gandhi statues as if it might go out of fashion soon

d) having little success in getting media coverage of any value

Maybe this has to do with that thing called “protocol”. Everybody wants to meet their peers or superiors. Still, it is clear from the media coverage how little carry India’s diplomatic missions have with the movers and shakers in the countries they are based in.

Indeed the success the MPs delegations are having (or not) is possibly just a reflection of India’s diplomatic heft.

Still, here is a very subjective set of slides---the operative word here is subjective---of how the seven teams have done so far.

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So, the ranking:

1) Sanjay Kumar Jha & Co (7/10)

2) Shashi Tharoor & Co (5/10)

3) Shrikant Eknath Shinde & Co (4/10)

4) Ravi Shankar Prasad & Co (3/10)

5) Jay Panda, Kanimozhi, Supriya Sule & Co (2/10)

This is a very subjective ranking, and as Groucho Marx would have said, if you don’t like it, you can come up with your own!

Bharat Ma ki Jai Jawan.