Twenty years ago this week when the student protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square ended in a violent crackdown by the Party-state in China, the government of India responded by ordering the state television to pare down the coverage to the barest minimum.

The government’s monopoly over television two decades ago helped Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi signal Beijing that India would not revel in China’s domestic troubles and offer some political empathy instead.

The instrumentalist logic behind the deliberate decision of the world’s largest democracy to turn its back on a rare outpouring of political liberalism in China was an impeccable one.

After all, Rajiv Gandhi had travelled to China barely six months before the tumultuous events of Tiananmen. He was the first prime minister to visit China after the tensions in bilateral relations during 1959-62. Rajiv Gandhi’s historic trip in December 1988 did end the prolonged chill in bilateral relations. As he sought to move forward with China, Rajiv Gandhi had no incentive to undermine his new diplomatic initiative.

Two decades later, India has even stronger reasons not to view China’s evolution from the limiting but popular Western ideological prism. “Democracy versus dictatorship” is surely the easiest way of remembering Tiananmen; it is also probably the laziest in an intellectual sense.

The images from Tiananmen Square 20 years ago — a lone student trying to stop the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army or that of a large crowd of young

Chinese men and women looking up to a replica of the Statue of Liberty — are unforgettable. They are also profoundly misleading.

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