Principled Hypocrisy

Few spectacles are more unedifying in a democracy than elected representatives rejoicing at what they believe to be their own country’s humiliation. Yet that is precisely what parts of India’s Opposition and its left-liberal entourage have chosen to do. The alleged guilty plea of Nikhil Gupt, who admitted in a U.S. federal court to his role in a failed assassination plot against Sikh separatist leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York, has been greeted by parts of the Opposition and the left-liberal ecosystem with barely concealed glee. Social media erupted in declarations of national embarrassment.

It does not bother these entities that Pannun is no benign dissenter but a designated Khalistani extremist under Indian law who has openly advocated the break-up of Indian sovereignty, issued threats linked to civil aviation, praised mass violence abroad and urged intimidation of Hindus worldwide.

This selective indignation is striking. These same voices that lecture endlessly on due process and warn against believing confessions extracted at home now accept a foreign prosecution narrative with uncritical enthusiasm.

More troubling is the open delight expressed by some elected representatives, who rushed to frame the episode as proof of moral collapse at the top. The impulse was not to assess evidence or consequences, but to celebrate what was framed as a blow to the ruling party. In matters of foreign policy and national security, such behaviour is not brave dissent but sheer civic irresponsibility.

Democracies require opposition. They also require a minimum consensus that the country’s external posture is not a partisan toy. To cheer what one assumes to be a failed covert operation, whether real or imagined, is to signal abroad that India cannot speak with coherence even when its security is at stake.

The hypocrisy deepens when compared with the indulgence shown to extremist rhetoric overseas. In Canada and elsewhere, Pannun has been platformed as a legitimate commentator while his calls for violence are sanitised or ignored. That a man who praised terror tactics and issued threats could be treated as an expert by sections of the foreign media should disturb anyone who claims to care about liberal norms. That Indian liberals choose to overlook this while posturing as guardians of democracy is revealing.

What India witnessed instead was national schadenfreude. In their obsession with opposing Modi, some critics have drifted into opposing India’s stated interests, even contradicting the official position of the state they represent. Hatred of a leader has metastasised into disdain for the country.

India’s left-liberal cabal prides itself on its cosmopolitan credentials, wearing globalism as a badge of moral superiority. a politics so consumed by hostility to Narendra Modi that it has lost the capacity to distinguish between holding power to account and rooting against the country itself.

A mature democracy argues abroad with care and disputes at home with responsibility. What it does not do is cheer midstream at allegations that might weaken its own hand in matters of national security.