True Allies
India & Daniel Pearl.

February 27, 2002 8:15 a.m.

hen the fact and gruesome details of Daniel Pearl's murder were announced, they received headlines and lead stories all over the world. But the Indian press treated them-strikingly — with almost more grief and anger than even the U.S. media.

Pearl's death struck the Indian soul at many levels. In life this quiet American, who played a mean jazz violin, was personally popular with his journalist colleagues and with the other Indians he met in Bombay's lively cultural scene. The Indian Express devoted most of its op-ed page to tributes that depict Pearl as a friend of Indians and thus of India, like this one from a fellow jazz musician: "He used to jam with us at the Indigo restaurant. He was a real sweet easy-going guy . . ."

Another tribute asks, more ominously, "who will pay for Danny's death?" For, in death, Pearl has been embraced by a wider Indian public that sees him as a fellow victim of Islamist terrorism. Less than three months ago, on December 13, the same gang that murdered Pearl attacked the Indian parliament and killed and killed nine parliamentarian servants. He now stands in the same pantheon as these Indian martyrs.

Inevitably, an element of political calculation infects this mourning. India and the U.S. have recently been forging a closer friendship. That friendship is tentative as yet because the U.S. is also restoring its alliance with India's bitter rival and neighbor, Pakistan, which Indians blame for fostering terrorism both in Kashmir — a territory claimed by both nations — and within India itself. Indians cite Pearl's murder as evidence that Pakistan's President Musharaff needs to crack down much more firmly on his ISI intelligence service that originally helped train these Islamist terrorist groups. And they want the U.S. to side firmly with them in demanding such a crackdown.

How far the U.S. will go in pressuring Musharaff is uncertain because it does not want to destabilize his government. But whatever America's immediate difficulties in combining alliances with both India and Pakistan, the long-term "fundamentals" look good for a closer friendship between Delhi and Washington.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, in which India was a wary fellow traveler of the Soviet Union, the country has been moving crabwise towards a better relationship with the U.S. Many factors have contributed to this: a common nervousness of China; India's abandonment of failed socialist planning and its adoption of free-market reforms; its emergence as a leader in information technology; the growth of highly educated and successful Indian Diaspora within the U.S.; the increasing importance of links based on the English language in a world where the internet has dethroned geography and elevated culture; the war on terrorism in which India and the U.S. are compelled by their enemies to be allies; and, above all, the fact that both nations are liberal constitutional democracies.

India's democracy often looks fragile, but it is deeply rooted both in the cultural flexibility of Hinduism and in Britain's legacy of the rule of law. And it survived a vital test in overcoming the late Indira Gandhi's unconstitutional seizure of power in the so-called "emergency" of 1975-77. On that occasion the U.S. ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, announced the coup to President Ford with the words: "Congratulations, Mr. President, you are now the leader of the world's largest democracy."

Mrs. Gandhi censored the press, arrested parliamentarians, and ruled by decree. But even she felt so restrained by India's democratic traditions that she never suppressed opposition entirely and she accepted her surprise defeat in an election called only because she was confident of victory. In this survival of democracy against the odds, both the Indian and the world media played their part.

If I remember it well, it is because it was my first foray as a foreign correspondent — and my only experience of journalism as Hollywood thriller. At one point I had to stand at a street corner reading the Times of India; a car pulled up; I got into it and, blindfolded; was taken to a dinner with Indian parliamentarians on the run from the cops — which gave me excellent copy to counter Mrs. Gandhi's claims of democracy as usual.

Green as I was, however, I would have broken no stories without the fatherly guidance of the Daily Telegraph's local stringer, a roly-poly bundle of energy named Ram Dass, who helped me discover and report that Mrs. Gandhi had embarked on a cruel birth-control policy of "forced sterilization." As an Indian national, he could not risk putting his name on the sensational scoop he had jointly authored. I am happy to make amends now with this acknowledgement.

Reminiscing about those days with the editors of the Indo-Asian News Service, I learned how they — then young desk editors at an official news agency — had exploited the censor's rules to discomfit the censor. One such rule forbade the publication of bad news for India without his explicit consent. In due course an international weather report forecasting storms and clouds for the sub-continent arrived one late afternoon. Waiting until 2:00 A.M., they telephoned the censor at home in bed with an urgent request for his consent to publishing this bad news. Grumpily he agreed to listen. And as the catalogue of rain, hail, storms, clouds, and typhoons was read to him, he gradually exploded with fury — and with frustration that he could hardly punish such punctilious regard for his own instructions.

These acts of journalistic defiance may seem trivial in comparison to the sacrifice made by Daniel Pearl. If so, that is not because Indian journalists were not similarly devoted to their craft and the freedom to practice it, but because the murderers of Daniel Pearl were much more ruthless enemies of democracy and press freedom than Mrs. Gandhi and her censors could bring themselves to be.

Pearl labored in life to bring India and America to a closer understanding of each other. If Indian and American newspapers could now jointly award a journalistic scholarship in his name, it would be a fitting memorial to him in death. And a fitting symbol of the Indo-American friendship that seems destined to exercise a growing and surely beneficial influence on world politics.