The Lucknow passport issue and the pitfalls of ‘twiplomacy’

Last year, while reflecting on the twin effects of citizen and digital diplomacy on the working of career diplomats, former British Ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher came up with a book carrying a rather revealing title: Naked Diplomat (William Collins, 2017). Fletcher saw it as an important, democratic and irreversible process—something that even former foreign secretary of India Nirupama Rao echoed in her speech at UNESCO, Paris, last year, while dwelling on the theme of diplomacy in the age of social media. That, however, doesn’t rule out the pitfalls of instant diplomacy as it grapples with feed and reactions in a 24-hour information cycle.

The dangers of knee-jerk responses from the government become more apparent when political leadership of the foreign service tends to develop and derive political capital in its social media engagements. The impetuous mishandling of the Lucknow passport row by the Ministry of External Affairs ( MEA) has exposed such faultlines. Though the online abuse and vile trolling of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj—a form of depravity seen in different types of social media users—is condemnable, it shouldn’t absolve the MEA from critical scrutiny of its ill-thought haste in the Lucknow case. More significantly, it should direct the discourse to examine the trappings of twiplomacy in general.

Generally speaking, twiplomacy is a neologism, which refers to the use of social media by the government, officials, and representatives for public interactions, information-sharing, and certain forms of soft power projection too. As recent years have shown, the MEA, along with other ministries, has also used it for grievance-redressal with varying degrees of success. The MEA has two different sets of functions: its core diplomatic activities—pursuit of India’s national interest in bilateral or multilateral relations and negotiations—and pursuing the same in administrative activities like issuing passports, consular access and support, etc.

In both these spheres of activities, twiplomacy—which has been the signature style of the incumbent MEA minister—can pose challenges, if not subjected to due rigour.

“Instant diplomacy is a contradiction in terms,” said Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary, while speaking to Newslaundry last year. While accepting the inevitable interactive nature of diplomacy in an era of social media presence of leaders, Saran briefly identified the issues it raises.

“Diplomacy is confronting a big challenge, and diplomacy—as understood in traditional sense—is becoming difficult to practise,” Saran said. “Diplomacy, as I see it, is a process of deliberation: a process of trying to understand a situation, and then trying to have the best possible response to a situation. Instant deliberation is a contradiction in terms. In a world where you have instant communication and flow of information is so rapid, the space for deliberation (a key element of diplomacy) has shrunk. So the leader is tweeting without due discussion, so what does the diplomat do? The diplomat would just try to catch up with what the result of that tweet is. That’s not the best way to do diplomacy. The challenge is now to ensure that how in this age of instant dissemination of information and use of social media, somebody is able to sit back and gaze at things in a reflective manner. Information isn’t always wisdom.”

These are precisely the elements that were evidently missing in Sushma Swaraj’s handling of what was essentially an issue of administrative procedure in the Lucknow passport row case. In the process of relying heavily on unsubstantiated allegations of communal discrimination—made by an an inter-faith couple (Tanvi Seth and Mohammad Anas Siddiqui)—fast-tracking the issuance of a passport to Tanvi Seth without due probe into the allegations, and the transferring of Vikas Mishra—the senior superintendent and a granting officer at the Lucknow passport office—Swaraj seemingly fell for the trappings of a knee-jerk response, which social media encourages.

Instead of answering many politely articulated and genuine questions on social media platforms about such unwarranted haste, Swaraj resorted to highlighting the abusive trolling, which was obviously odious and condemnable. The despicable online behaviour, cutting across different ideological inclinations and political affiliations, needs a separate discussion, and can’t be used as a red herring to avoid important questions which concern rule of law—as well as processing of a vital document with national security implications.

The minister had no answer for the valid defence that passport officer Vikas Mishra came up with. Subsequent developments have only exposed the unnecessary haste in the production of media outrage, as well as the MEA’s jumping-the-gun response.

First—dismissing the allegations of asking Tanvi Seth her name in all her documents, and asking her husband to convert to Hinduism—Mishra said he had just asked her to get her change of name endorsed, because she was carrying  documents with different names, and hadn’t mentioned in her application form that she had changed the name. He said that these are requirements of due diligence. Whatever the procedural argument, what’s clear is that the officer’s valid argument about the need to mention any past of changing name, can be seen below in the circled column of the form that applicants use:

Tanvi Seth and her husband could produce nothing to substantiate their allegations, and an eyewitness at the passport office denied the couple’s claims, and said that the officer wasn’t misbehaving with them.

Second, the officer reportedly raised valid questions about Seth applying for a passport from Lucknow while being a resident of Noida. The subsequent inquiry done by the Lucknow police for verification proved that the officer wasn’t wrong in asking rule-based questions. The inquiry revealed that Seth wasn’t staying at the Lucknow address provided by her over the last one year, a clear case of providing wrong details, which may also invite revocation of the passport. Apart from exemption provided to central police organisation personnel, defence personnel, and students, non-residence at the address mentioned is a serious case of concealing an important piece of information.

This is what Deepak  Kumar, Senior Superintendent of Police, Lucknow, said about the findings of the police investigation:

While waiting for more details to surface, what is evident is that the MEA should have heard its own officer’s version, and waited for the findings of a detailed probe, before taking the easy route of issuing passports to a couple who wasn’t forthcoming with details, and even provided wrong information to authorities. So what made the MEA bypass procedural rigour? Besides other possible reasons, two are more visible and disturbing too.

First, in assigning a democratic virtue to instant grievance redressal, the ministry undermined the rule of law, which is at the heart of probity and efficiency in governance. The rigour in processing a vital document like a passport can’t be held hostage to dubious allegations, which orchestrate victimhood. Citizens are only as much moral organisms as officials working for the government; their versions have to be trusted no more or less than that of officials. In attributing superiority to citizens’ versions without due probe, the ministry overlooked the possibility that ordinary citizens can be as economical with facts as people whom they accuse of harassment.

Second, the MEA succumbed to outrage produced in a section of the media following Tanvi Seth’s allegations. The nature of the allegations fit neatly into the narrative-hunting that this section of media does, on issues related to inter-faith relationships. A case in point is that just like Swaraj, many English newspapers and news portals focussed on Swaraj’s trolling, rather than the subversion of the scrutiny process caused by the MEA’s knee-jerk response.

For instance, Hindustan Times  was more keen on listing the trolls and their political affiliations. “Sushma Swaraj trolled for helping inter-faith UP couple” was a common headline for some newspapers and portals, without caring to meticulously examine the merit in this case for the “help”. Interestingly, when this was being reported, a different aspect of such inter-faith relationships was reported in a section of Hindi media, an aspect which some English newspapers and portals would find inconvenient to outrage against.

While the vile online behaviour needs to be tackled, the knee-jerk twiplomacy evident in the Lucknow case should alert the MEA to the centrality of due deliberation to its administrative and diplomatic conduct. The political leadership guiding the “naked diplomat’” can do with more reflection, information and deliberation.