The War on Misguided Youth and Other Indian Euphemisms

Nytcredit: The New York Times Young people shouting slogans in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, on Aug. 9, 2010.

If the “War on Terror” had been undertaken by the government of India, it probably would have been called the “War on Misguided Youth.” That’s because in the 1980s and ’90s, when New Delhi was trying to suppress separatist movements in Punjab, Kashmir and Assam, each official speech and classified document used the euphemism “misguided youth” to refer to young men who had rejected the idea of India and had taken to arms.

Such a tame euphemism conjures images of sulky teenagers falling into bad company at the school playground, rather tha the reality of politically active young people challenging the existing order. Undoubtedly, by understating the movement’s potency, the euphemism also served to undermine it.

As India’s government did not send in a battery of guidance counselors to settle grievances but instead sent in the Indian Army to subdue the “boys,” India’s war on terror might even have been called “Befitting Reply to Misguided Youth.” The army likes to talk in terms of giving fitting and befitting replies; it not only gives a sense of the other guy having started it, but it also sounds gentlemanly, as if war were cricket and it was now the home side’s turn at bat.

The Indian Army isn’t much different from the Pentagon in using euphemisms that seek to give a clinical gloss to the essential job of militaries, which is killing. The only difference is that where the Pentagon is Orwellian in its language, the Indian Army is Wodehousian. Thus the government never tires of! declaring to its citizenry: “Our armed forces are prepared for any misadventure,” as it did in its response to the fourth war with Pakistan in 1999 in Kargil in Jammu and Kashmir. A lethal battle on the disputed border is routinely described as a skirmish. Perhaps, then, the war on terror would correctly be called, in Indian officialese, “Befitting Reply to Misguided Youth’s Misadventures”.

After the reply comes the reconciliation. Especially if the government believes that the problem is solved, as New Delhi apparently does nowadays with regard to Kashmir. Reconciliation includes forgiving. Or, as the government of India puts it, it’s time for an “amnesty scheme.”

In India a scheme is not an underhanded plot, or a piece of seamy intrigue; it is on par with a countrywide macroeconomic plan or a national developmental mission. In this usage, Indins follow their former colonial masters, the English, though the latter are sparing in their schemes.

So, in India, the largest Kensyian intervention to generate work for the rural poor is titled Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, a title so wordy that it sounds like a misadventure. There is also the Indira Gandhi National Widow Pension Scheme and the Rajiv Gandhi National Rural Electrification Scheme, but the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission leads me to believe that some secret subversive in government is determined that anything that is named after a Gandhi is necessarily a scheme.

In a proper English classroom, “amnesty scheme” is an oxymoron, and bound to fail.

What does stick in the public mind is the possibility of an amnesty scheme for those with black money. Such a scheme is in fact a desperate plea by government to dishonest businessmen, corrupt politicians and cunning bureaucrats: a plea to bring their stash home and pay a token t! ax on it.! Ever since the 1997 Voluntary Disclosure of Income and Wealth Scheme unearthed about $10 billion (at prevailing exchange rates), various finance ministers have been under pressure to announce another “black money amnesty scheme.” It has not happened, probably because this form of amnesty has been cacophonously denounced by lawyers, tax experts, politicians and the media, as an officially sanctioned money-laundering scheme.

Manpreet Romana for The New York Times A couple in a public park in New Delhi.

You could thus say that the government was in a difficult position, or that the black-money amnesty had left it compromised. But in India, you could not say that the government was in a “compromsing position” because a police party would then land up at the next Cabinet meeting brandishing handcuffs. In India, anyone caught in the act of intimacy, be it cuddling on the lawn of a public park or behind the bushes at a national monument is said in official parlance to be a “compromising position.” The euphemism, when published in newspapers, leaves a lot to the imagination of the reader, which probably helps the beat constable who, more often than not, in every nook and corner of the country, aims to extort middle-class youngsters or middle-aged adulterers.

If you asked someone in government to change its police’s position on “compromising positions,” he would probably decline, citing “the national interest,” a euphemism that has to come to mean anything but what is in India’s interest. Its provenance is the era when the government thought it had a mo! nopoly on! deciding what was best for everyone and so shoved its policies down the country’s proverbial throat with the paternalistic justification that these policies were in the interest of the newly independent yet vulnerable nation.

Under this line of reasoning, anyone opposed was unpatriotic. Indeed, anyone disagreeing with the government was routinely accused of stoking “fissiparous tendencies”, which was presumably invoked to scare people about the potential balkanization of young India. However, when you consider that “fissiparous” is itself a tendency to break apart, “fissiparous tendencies” would actually mean “tendencies to have a tendency to break apart” which is somewhat less sinister. And lest you think that “national interest” and “fissiparous tendencies” are euphemisms of a bygone era, then think again: both figured in discssions last month of the states’ chief ministers over the federal government’s proposal for a National Counter-Terrorism Center.

I could keep giving example after example of clunky Indian officialese, but then this piece would start sounding like the prime minister’s Independence Day speech at Red Fort. You have to wonder why it is that Indians love a good euphemism, because it doesn’t just appear in official-speak, but also in corporate memos as well as in the posts and tweets of online India. So what lies behind this euphemism euphoria? Perhaps a sensitive government tries not to offend the ethnic, linguistic, religious, class or caste groups that populate the Indian mosaic.

Or it may simply reflect the government’s continuing conceptual confusion. It could even be part of a larger scheme: India’s zombification of the English language â€" killing words and phrases, and then bringing them back to life in a brain-dead disfigured form that seeks out healthy humans as prey. ! Whichever! way you look at it, you have to admit: giving a befitting reply to misguided youth whose fissiparous tendencies threaten the national interest sounds a lot jollier than “war on terror”.

Aditya Sinha is the former Editor-in-Chief of Daily News and Analysis and The New Indian Express.