There are many problems with India but we seem to take peculiar pleasure in running down our country in front of foreigners

Yours truly travels a fair bit across the world, and has noticed a peculiar variety of Indian passport holder. The self-loathing Indian who takes it upon himself or herself to educate the world of India’s ills. This is rarely in front a group of Indians, but almost always when there are foreigners in the audience, the whiter they are the better.

Initially, I put up with this; heck, I will be the first to admit that I even joined in the conversation quite often but over the past decade I find these conversations not just irritating but positively anger-inducing.

This writer will be the first to admit that there are hundreds of systemic problems in India and then there are the historic wrongs that have been committed on a vast number of Indians some of which must be discussed at global forums. But much of the conversations I overhear nowadays are nothing but imagined wrongs or worse all driven by a unmitigated hatred of the party in power or more directly Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The belief that badmouthing India is directly badmouthing the party in power or the man in power through complaining about India to a white audience befuddled me.

Not to stretch the ‘I met a taxi driver’ analogy particularly favoured by self-loathing Indians but there have been Americans, Europeans and even Chinese folks I have met recently who after hearing such a conversation ask what is the problem with us Indians is and whether the Indian nation-state is on the verge of collapse.

Yes, there was a section of Narendra Modi’s supporters who took the 2014 election victory as a seemingly cultural victory of ‘us’ over ‘them’ and it is a pity that the party has not reined in some of the more extremist elements on the Hindu right. But there is also no doubt that there has been even more extreme selective outrage by so-called ‘liberals’ who have come across as Brahmanical defenders of an outdated ideology and believers in making noise on social media for self-serving purposes.

Nobody wants to indulge in whataboutery but the simple fact that some of these ‘liberals’ have bent over so much that their noses touch the ground. Of course, the foreign read Western media confined to the hypocritical liberal outposts of Khan Market, Kala Ghoda and the Jaipur literary Festival laps up every word of negativity.

In their own failing states, hearing about India’s failures from a supposed first-person perspective they can never get in China perhaps makes their readership feel good, forgetting the fact that the US elected a demagogue, the British voted to leave the European Union and their populations are as such more nationalist/right-wing than most Indians. But sharing stories of ‘deplorables’ from across the world gives reports a fizz.

Self-loathing Indians are only too happy to feed narratives that India-haters in the West want to build. A favourite tactic is to flame-bait on social media, saying something outrageous and then feigning hurt and threats when called out; such people are the trolls too.

These are the people who had the ear of the Indian state and now that their privileges have been taken away they are the very definition of ‘namak haram’. They would happily sell out the nation for an American or British residency, but thanks to electoral forces in those countries that revolted against their own self-loathing individuals that’s becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. So some ply their trade on social media or pretend to be comics.

The only way to deal with such people is to either counter them, without resorting to the malice they use, or better still ignore them altogether.

There are problems in India and we have to acknowledge them, and some who take offence to any question asked of this Government have to understand that. Have things changed in the past four yearsIJ Yes, they have. Have they changed as fast as some expectedIJ No, they haven’t. But the course has been set and expect the self-loathing Indian to get even louder in the coming 11 months.

(The writer is Managing Editor, Special Projects, The Pioneer)