Shooting yourself in the foot

Language, with the best of Indian politicians, has always been a bit of a dog. I recall in my rookie days as a journalist, travelling through the election season with a woman politician whose English was as weak as was my Marathi. So I insisted on speaking Hindi but she kept talking to me in English. As we were returning to the circuit house, she broke into a diatribe about how her Gandhian husband never allowed her to wear silks or chiffons on the ground that not many Indians could afford even simple cottons.

Apologising for her homespun saree, she said, "He will only ever allow me to wear khadi." She then added with a naughty look on her face, "But still I have managed to collect four-five functional sarees!"

As I turned to her in puzzlement - for I thought her crib was about her husband allowing her to wear only basic, functional fabrics - she said, "Functional sarees, you know? What I wear to functions!"

She was so proud of her enterprise that I did not bother to correct her language. At least, it was a whit better than that of one political worker who, in the middle of a hot May election campaign, offered to get me out of the Sun and into an air-conditioned restaurant for a meal. As I hesitated (for all I wanted to do was get back to work and file my story), he said in very concerned fashion, “Don’t worry, Madam. Even, I am a vegetable.”

Again, I did not dare tell him I was no vegetable, though vegetarian I may have been. Likewise, I did not have the heart to correct another man who thought he was “catchy" because “I (he) catch(es) things fast"!

Soon after Sharad Pawar became Union Defence Minister, he returned to Mumbai armed with a lot of Army jargons and tickled reporters pink with his own turn of phrases. Up until then, he could speak little but Marathi with any degree of fluency, and it was rumoured he was advised by his close bureaucrats to pick up some English to be able to communicate well in Delhi circles. So he would often ask you to give him a “twinkle” – the services jargon was 'tinkle' – and when a reporter asked him what India would do if Pakistan went for first strike, he replied promptly, “Let them go on strike. How much does it matter!”

When Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray was abusing him a lot, Pawar, by then firmer on his jargons, told me in an interview, “Do they think any Tom, Dick or Harry will say anything about me and not get a fitting reply?”

Thackeray's “fitting reply" to that challenge was to send for me and tell me, “Tell that Tommy I can also call him all sorts of dirty names...etc.”

I don’t think Thackeray quite got the English idiom of ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ or even understood how rude and obscene referring to Pawar as “Tommy" sounded. Though if he had, I am sure he would have been unapologetic and savoured every bit of that insult to Pawar who was by then leader of the Opposition.

However, these were all linguistic faux pas by people to whom English was an alien language and those who were more comfortable in their native tongues. When Arun Jaitley was contesting the Lok Sabha polls from Amritsar in 2014, I heard him speak in very slow and measured Punjabi to reporters and thought even then he would be no match for his opponent Captain Amarinder Singh's effortless Punjabi. Jaitley is one of the most articulate ministers in English in the Union cabinet. So one presumes, if he really drafted the sealed envelope reply to the Supreme Court in the Rafale case, he would know his past tense from his present tense or future tense and would know the plural from the singular while writing his prolific blog, or even know not to confuse Bofors with Rafale.

For all that leaders like Pawar ended up with bloomers in spoken English, I have never known such mistakes to be made in official documents for they were always vetted by bureaucrats with a fine tooth comb. When Thackeray did not seem to know the difference between a commission of inquiry and an enquiry committee at a press conference, I saw a senior officer rush to his side and whisper into his ear to correct the misconception, even though Thackeray was not part of the government.

So it stretches one’s imagination to believe that the Union government submitted a shabbily drafted letter to the Supreme Court, using words indicating that a report of the Comptroller and Auditor General was already submitted to the Public Accounts Committee when it was actually only in the process of being submitted.

I can see it was an over smart effort to mislead the nation through the apex court. Expecting three judges to glance into the future and divine the government’s intention was stretching it too far. The court judgment was meant to take the wind out of the sails of the Opposition, particularly the Congress and its president Rahul Gandhi. What the government ended up doing was reload the Rafale gun and hand it on a platter to its opponents. If anyone had even an iota of doubt that the Rafale deal was not all above board, suspicions now have been aroused even among the ardent believers in the government that there must be something being hidden. Filing a correction in court has only helped to shoot themselves in the foot.

But looking at the grammar of Jaitley's blog, I now wonder if he really has problems with grammar. And confusing Bofors with Rafale seems to be a Freudian slip. Though those errors have now been corrected, Jaitley must realise that you may fall into the pit you try to dig for the others. As the government has clearly done in this case and Narendra Modi has fallen right into it.