By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Is U.P.’s “Top Cop” a now-outed toady? Or is he a modern Sir Walter Raleigh? Do we see him in servile mode? Or was he succumbing to a gallant impulse, when he stooped to mop mud from his Lady’s shoes as she alit from a helicopter ?
The photo of a high-ranking police officer performing this low level service for Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati ran with disapproving headlines in most Indian dailies. Their judgment: fawning, not impulsively gallant. And the Times of India was inspired to run a satirical editorial on the all too enduring attraction of “power feet”:
It really is time for Manolo Blahnik, Salvatore Ferragamo and all the uptown mochis [shoemakers] to brave the heat and dust and fly to Lucknow. Just imagine how much free publicity they’d get the next time Madame’s PSO feels duty [if not devotion] calling….And it will certainly happen again. If the shoe fits, people will clean it. And pray while doing so that they may just escape the boot.
Some people, like Mayawati, don’t handle elevation well. It goes to their heads. They don’t try to inspire their subordinates. They rely on the imperious style. This syndrome doesn’t afflict every U.S. Foreign Service Officer, but I ran across quite a few in my time, including a couple of career Ambassadors and a pair of Consuls General. The current U.S. CG in Kolkata seems to be a particularly virulent example of this self-crowned sub-species, and her PAO is something of a scion with a prince-and-the-pea complex. Maybe they’ve been infected by some sort of Indian virus. Maybe, relegated to distant darkest Kolkata, they imagine themselves to be invisible and thus free of constraints. Maybe it’s another indication of inept human resource management in the State Department.
Back in the days of the British raj, more than a few Colonel Blimps carried on as if they were maharajas, and three different sources have told me*, independently, of a recent Consulate town hall meeting that had the reigning maharani—oops! the current CG complaining about staffers’ inattention to her personal comfort.
FYI a Town Hall meeting at an American mission gathers everyone together, Americans as well as locally-recruited staffers, for some important purpose. Perhaps awards are being handed out. Possibly there’s a major security threat. Or maybe the Consulate needs to orchestrate a SECSTATE or CODEL visit so that everything goes smoothly every single minute.
Some professionally appropriate topics may have been on the agenda that day, but what had the CG really ticked off, evidently, was personal inconvenience. To remedy indignities she could no longer endure, she made these very weighty demands:
· You must anticipate my thirst and hand me a glass of water before I ask for it.
· You must sense when I am chilly and place a shawl around my shoulders before I ask for it.
· You must watch closely as I eat and remove my plate before I have to tell you that I am finished.
The CG wasn’t making these demands of her secretary or personal assistant—demands she couldn’t force on such subordinates in the U.S. anymore, by the way. She was laying down the law to local staffers who’d been hired to fill highly responsible positions, as cultural program directors, as information assistants, as librarians. They were shocked. The shawl bit really got to them.
Now there’s nothing wrong with simple human consideration. In the old USIA tradition, there was a spirit of equality and teamwork when a program was immanent or underway. We—including the PAO—made sure that all participants (not just CGs) had water. We comforted the speaker whose stomach was queasy from sampling street food. We even pitched in to fix an AV connection or to help arrange chairs, when necessary. Every job was essential to a successful program, and everyone did what had to be done, cooperatively, generously, without concern for rank or pay grade. And if, when the program was done and the applause was over and, having successfully concealed from the audience the inevitable mini-crises of the evening, a PAO collapsed, relieved and exhausted, into a now empty folding chair and someone offered a glass of water, that PAO would be touched and very very grateful. It was a grace note that couldn’t be commanded. Meanwhile, everyone would be sharing the triumph—and the leftover refreshments. Teamwork. It brings out the best in people.
But USIA, I’m told, has become a dirty word at the American Consulate in Kolkata, and respect for local staffers is also a quaint custom of the past. In the same time period a local information assistant with an unblemished record had been accused of purposely introducing a virus into the Consulate computer network. He was summarily discharged and, in the process, deprived of some fifteen years of accrued benefits. I knew and worked with this man. Like all of us, he could have been victimized by a bug or worm. But sabotage? Impossible. And the virus, it seems, never went beyond his own computer. Some sabotage! So what was the real reason for getting rid of him? I’ve heard plausible explanations having to do with making room for an outside hire. If so, something draconian needed to be trumped up to get rid of the obvious inside candidate.
Judge his caliber for yourself. Here’s just one example of the inspired program contributions made by this once-valued staffer. He proposed and executed (with full mission support) a documentary film festival focused on human rights-inspired videos made by young videographers in the consular district. Some videos (today it might have beenUTube postings) concentrated on the environmental abuses that underlie the troublesome Maoist insurgency. Some dealt with women’s issues. Others had to with corruption or casteism. All in all: samples of muck-raking journalism at its best and a precursor of the huge revival of documentary film-making that would characterize the next decade in the U.S., too. This brilliant idea allowed USIA to kill many birds with one stone. (1) It dealt forcefully with the human rights issues in the Country Plan. (2) It solidified contacts with bright young media people. (3) It didn’t bust the budget. How much does popcorn, even buckets and buckets of it, cost?
But the days of encouraging locals’ initiatives are over, it seems. “I had to resign,” a younger, now ex-information assistant told me two weeks ago. “I couldn’t stand the lack of dignity.” The infamous town hall meeting had been the last straw. She’d already been reeling from the evidence that unstinting loyal service counts for nothing with the State Department. “We’re yes men now,” I was told by an ex-cultural assistant who’d managed to stick it out to retirement age. “We’re not colleagues any more.” Not quite reduced to polishing the Jimmy Chos, perhaps. But kowtowing and mandarin-like respect for hierarchy reign supreme in Kolkata’s American Center now. Worse, if possible, imagine how the Consulate’s reputation (and America’s) suffers when ex-consular employees' friends and family and wide ranging professional contacts hear these tales. Working for the U.S. is the pits. The U.S. talks human values but treats people like shit.
And the disaffection radiates further. A long-serving, highly competent Indian medical professional didn’t renew his contract this year. “The atmosphere had changed,” he told me. “It wasn’t pleasant to work with the Americans anymore.” (I had the flu and saw him for treatment.) In the Bengali way, he'd departed gently, pleading the pressure of other duties.
Meanwhile, once-embraced contacts are being cold-shouldered, other people complained. “Weeding the contact list” is an awkward, but perpetual necessity, but the easing out needs to be done diplomatically. People once invited to seminars get shifted to the list for less intimate events. Or they receive fewer invitations. Finally, maybe, it’s only the massive Fourth of July bash they rate. But that’s something. And so on. Consulate Kolkata seems to have forgotten a characteristic of social organization that’s critical to PD work: even when people themselves cease to be movers and shakers, they have friends and family among the new leadership. They continue to have influence. And they can do damage. Good public diplomacy requires finesse.
Good PD also requires a balanced approach to demography, which means finding appropriate ways to communicate with the upcoming generation, the mid levels and the current top dogs. Today, I’m told, American PD in Kolkata is interested only in the the coolest of the cool Under Thirtys who can’t exist without Facebook and twitter (which have an important place in a well-filled media tool kit, but that's not the subject here.) Rock music is OK, too, I guess, with this bunch. Otherwise....BORING! Especially literature and lectures and seminars and all that dull intellectual stuff, according to the current PAO. This comes to me independently from several staffers and ex-staffers. "The scope of our work is getting narrow and unchallenging," one reports. If that's the case, how do you hire and keep good people? I wonder.
Even some young contacts aren’t worth maintaining, it seems. Not those with a non-pop interest in the U.S. anyway. Not those who’ve been nurtured by the incredibly effective American Studies Group, which is in danger of being cast aside, since the cultural assistant who so faithfully liaised with it has retired. “Who’s going to do this when you’re gone?” the PAO demanded of her. Huh?
During the thirteen years of its existence so far the American Center-initiated American Studies Group managed to have an extraordinary impact on the curriculum of Kolkata’s universities and colleges, according to a pioneering Bengali professor of American Studies, who had just returned from a lecture tour in the U.S. when I renewed our acquaintance a couple of weeks ago. Her itinerary, not funded by the U.S., included Stanford, Berkeley and Yale, among others. “We’ve had an amazing impact in West Bengal,” she reported. “Before we started, American Studies wasn’t included in any higher education curriculum. No one was teaching American Studies. Hardly anyone was qualified. Now we have courses and professors of American Studies in several institutions. And we have enthusiastic, dedicated students taking those courses.” She smiled. It was a personal triumph for her, but it wouldn’t have happened in the underfunded educational environment of West Bengal without support from the American Center.
Critical support. And yet how modest, in monetary terms. Here’s all it took: (1) a fairly regular dose of lectures by U.S. professors provided by USIA to appropriate destinations around the world; (2) one full-day seminar a year at the American Center, with top notch papers presented by Indian professors; (3) an annual journal collecting those excellent papers, published by the American Center and made available to all Indian universities. The journal itself served as a major incentive for participating in a program that allowed professors to maintain professional rapport while giving their graduate students a chance to deepen their knowledge. Publishing the journal cost just $200 dollars in recent years. Getting that measly $200 was like pulling teeth, however. “It was a major battle, every year,” I was told. “I never knew if I’d get the funds.” How pathetic! How short-sighted!
And now, even though the electronic revolution has opened incredible new horizons for research and intellectual collaboration that can be enhanced by the American Center's media savvy librarians, the whole program is in danger of vanishing. (And how about an e-journal?) “My students will be desolate,” my Bengali professor friend told me. Given today's communications environment, any well-educated American PD officer could maintain and probably even improve this program, and all PD officers are well educated, aren't they? But, as of a few months ago, the program’s future as a productive academic enterprise and source of contacts among university and colleage students was in doubt. So much for the current PAO’s commitment to the young! I guess the serious types aren’t cool enough for him.
Another problem: this PAO insists on traveling like a raja processing through his realm. “He's not a trouper,” I’m told. “He has to stay in five star hotels.” What a laugh!. How do you conduct programs in Nagaland or Megalaya or Manipur, if you can't abide hotels where the hot water gives out? Or even in Assam? Recently the PAO undertook a field trip to Gowhati, Assam’s capital. The schedule was ambitious. Many people were expecting him. But when he got to Gowhati, he discovered—surprise! surprise!—that the hotel couldn’t meet his rarified standards. “Cancel the appointments. Cancel the programs,” he said. Shocked and embarassed, his staff did the necessary. And so the prince slept that night on his own no doubt super comfortable mattress in Kolkata.
How did this kind of guy get posted to underdeveloped Eastern India? The grapevine says the CG wanted him, even though he had no knowledge of or interest in India. Birds of a feather—peacocks, in this case—flock together, I suppose. So he came, for career advancement reasons, maybe, and got what he wanted. His next assignment will take him to where he really wants to be, to Latin America.
Meanwhile, he openly declares his dislike for India to his Indian subordinates, I’m told. What’s more, he doesn’t even make an effort to get to know Kolkata, as I learned on asking whether he explores the city or attends lectures or cultural programs, etc., when not officially compelled to. “No. He only gets out for appointments with important people.” What an odd way to elicit good will and hard work from Indians who have more than a little cultural pride!
It used to be said that effective PD work was impossible without the loyalty and cooperation of well-connected, loyal local staffers. While I was in Kolkata, these good, normally discrete people described, in despair, how a superb institution has been systematically destroyed by arrogant USIA-haters, who actually know nothing about public diplomacy. How can a PAO conduct an effective PD campaign, if he’s ignorant of the cultural context of the people he’s supposedly communicating with and hasn't the least interest in filling his knowledge gaps? How are PD people being selected these days? How are they being prepared for post? Something is seriously wrong with the assignment system. Or is this what's intended? If so, it's a disaster.
There’s something seductively liberating about living abroad, especially in places that are distant not only in miles but in culture. All of a sudden, it seems, fantasies can be lived out. Although modern day Kolkata is a far cry from Victorian Afghanistan, the tragic notion of “the man who would be king” seems relevant. Would these sorry representatives of American culture strut and preen as they evidently do, if they remembered, every minute, that their actions and pretensions are under constant examination by people with high ideals and traditionally high expectations of America, even in Left-leaning West Bengal? These days, with America's image somewhat tarnished, exemplary behavior is even more important.
It’s really quite amusing, on one level. The Americans in charge of public diplomacy in Kolkata aggressively celebrate (as all communicators must) the era of social networking, cell phone revolution photos and texting under fire without realizing that they, too, are more than ever visible to the outside world. If you want to see what's happening to PD under the current dispensation, take a look at Kolkata. The picture, unfortunately, isn’t pretty.
*As an ex-PAO in Kolkata, I arrived in late January to revel in Indian classical music and renew friendships in a city I like. During my four weeks in Kolkata, I got many many earfuls from trustworthy people, and the picture of a very troubled post was too important not to share. This is the last of my personal PD reports from India. The others are here and here.