You’d be surprised to realise how it is much more likely you would get away with saying something entirely facetious and silly, but get into trouble when you try making a serious, sincere point. That, at least, has been the story of my life. At a series of public functions in Pakistan several years ago, I said Pakistan was in many ways as imperfect a dictatorship as India was an imperfect democracy: the central argument being that just as India had not been able to accord all its citizens all the freedoms that a democracy of this quality should have, Pakistan had not quite been able to deny their people all the freedoms that a classical dictatorship should have. That is why a reasonably free media functioned even under Musharraf, an Indian editor was able to say rude things at the launch of a newspaper (by now the widely respected Daily Times) and there was a reasonably independent judiciary; not the kind of things you would see in Saddam’s Iraq, Ahmedinejad’s Iran, or even China and Saudi Arabia.

It instantly got me in trouble. The NDA was in power then and the attack came from saffron blogs and pro-BJP columnists on well-known websites. It was as if this Indian editor had gone to Pakistan and given his country a bad name by finding faults with its democracy and merits in Pakistan’s dictatorship. What is happening right now, after the terror attacks, and particularly in Mumbai and among our upper classes has to be seen in that context.

... contd.