A,E,I,O,U Kings 4 U

The high-decibel debate in India over the treatment of Shah Rukh Khan and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam at the hands of American agencies betrays an almost childlike misconception among sections of domestic opinion that rules are enforced — and enforced uniformly — in the United States of America. They are not.

A former judge of the Supreme Court of India wrote authoritatively in a contemporary of this newspaper — following protests in Parliament, last month, over Kalam’s pre-boarding frisking by Continental Airlines — that not even the US president is exempt from such security checks. He informed his readers that frisking of the American president is done by a special team of airport officials and not the ones who frisk regular passengers for reasons of security.

The learned former justice is way off the mark. His mistake would not have mattered if it did not reinforce the notion among ivory-tower votaries of intellectual egalitarianism in India that the rule of law is perfect in the US and that developing countries like India should learn from the way the West does these things. For the record, the US president does not travel by commercial aircraft: he has his special VVIP plane, known as Air Force One. When he leaves Washington, he takes a chopper direct from the grounds of the White House to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where the chopper lands near Air Force One. The president simply hops on to his jet without any security check, contrary to what the former Supreme Court judge would have us believe.

Elsewhere, Air Force One arrives in designated areas on airport tarmacs and the president does not use boarding gates or departure areas the way ordinary passengers do. Such procedures also apply in varying degrees to the US vice-president, the secretaries of state or defence and other cabinet members. The security procedures that are in place for VIP travel in the US are pretty much the same as in India. The only difference is that the US list of those exempted from security clearance is smaller and much more rational. And in the US, no individual by name is exempt the way Robert Vadra, Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law, is not required to go through normal airport checks.

Of all the reactions in India to the “secondary inspection” of Shah Rukh Khan at Newark’s Liberty International Airport last weekend, the most outrageous statement came from the civil aviation minister, Praful Patel. “We will take (up) the issue with the US government strongly… We will not accept it,” Patel has been widely reported in the US media as having told reporters in Bikaner.

If a minister in a Western country had made such a bone-headed statement, he would either be held to account or he would pay the price for having said such a thing. But it is not clear what exactly our civil aviation minister intends to do. It is inconceivable that he would want the Indian ambassador, Meera Shankar, or the deputy chief of India’s mission, Arun Singh, to go to the US secretary for homeland security and demand that in future, Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan or any other celebrity Khan from Bollywood should be admitted to the US without any questions being asked at the immigration counter. It is equally inconceivable that Patel would want the Indian consul general in New York, Prabhu Dayal, to go to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — which manages Newark’s Liberty Airport — and tell Transportation Security Administration officials there that when the Khans of Bollywood depart from Newark, they should be waved off without any inspection. Shah Rukh Khan may be a celebrity in India, but he is still an ordinary citizen. And for an immigration agent at Liberty Airport, who probably lives in Hoboken or some such small town somewhere between Newark and New York City, the name of any Indian Bollywood celebrity means nothing.

So what is it that Patel intends to take up with the Americans? “We will not accept it,” he thundered. If the Americans tell him to lump the weekend’s incident, what is he going to do? The “we will not accept it” threat was so reminiscent of George W. Bush, who repeatedly threatened North Korea during his eight-year presidency that Washington will not tolerate Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, until the North Koreans tested their nuclear weapon and Bush could do nothing about it. It was assumed that the era of state impotence personified by such leaders as Bush had ended with the descent of the previous US president into oblivion, but Patel’s latest statement is a reminder that it is not the case — at least, in India.

Shah Rukh Khan, it turns out, is smarter than Patel. Khan has already made a big thing of not wanting an apology from the US. That is a smart move because no one, at least as of now, is offering him any. The US view is that in Khan’s case, they were simply following their textbook on admitting aliens into their country. The Union home minister, P. Chidambaram, hit the nail on the head when he told reporters on the sidelines of a national security meeting on Monday that “we send our joint secretaries (and) officers (of such rank) to the tarmac to receive” visiting Americans. What Chidambaram did not spell out was that the Indian psyche expects similar treatment in return and that never happens, certainly not in Washington or New York, not even in London, Paris or Frankfurt.

Chidambaram’s lament was genuine because he recently bore the slight of being searched in Washington, notwithstanding US protocol exempting him from an intrusive security procedure during his departure from an American airport. It turned out later that the incident occurred because protocol papers exempting Chidambaram were sent to the wrong airport, not to the one from which he was departing from the US capital.

The question, really, is why does New Delhi bend over backwards to please the Americans, when they themselves do not expect such favoured treatment in India? On a visit to New Delhi in June, the US under-secretary of state for political affairs, William Burns, was given a rare meeting with the prime minister, Manmohan Singh. Burns is way down in protocol to have met the external affairs minister, S.M. Krishna, let alone the prime minister. And yet, South Block readily gave in to a routine request from the US state department for access to the head of government.

In this columnist’s view, the meeting between Burns and the prime minister was a bigger insult to India’s pride and honour — in diplomatic terms — than the secondary examination of Shah Rukh Khan in Newark. By that one act of giving prime ministerial access to a mere under-secretary in the US government, India reduced itself to the level of Pakistan, where even an assistant secretary of state can walk into the president’s or the prime minister’s office in Islamabad. But it is not only in face-to-face government-level interaction with the US that India displays a craven attitude that only begets treatment that falls far short of even traces of a special bilateral relationship. An Indian applying for a visa at the US embassy in New Delhi pays a fee in Indian rupees equivalent to $131 plus a small service charge. But an American applying for a visa at the Indian embassy in Washington pays only $60 plus a small service fee.

Visa fees are supposed to be fixed on the basis of reciprocity. But repeated reminders from Indian consular officials in the US to the ministry of external affairs about US citizens paying only half of what Indians have to shell out have been studiously ignored by South Block for several years. If New Delhi is willing to accept such unequal treatment in every interaction with the US, is it any wonder that Indian ministers are ill-treated at US airports and India’s icons are treated as if they are worth nothing?