Indian Official Gets Far on a Few Words [NYT]
By LYDIA POLGREEN
NEW DELHI — It seemed an innocent enough question, posed by an Indian on vacation recently in the palace-studded region of Rajasthan. Should the Indian government make it more difficult for tourists to visit the country’s glorious sights by tightening visa requirements in the name of preventing terrorism?
On a road trip with his wife, the man who posed the question, Shashi Tharoor, tapped out this brief missive to his Twitter followers on his BlackBerry, in the cramped argot necessitated by Twitter’s 140-character limit: “Dilemma of our age. Tough visa restrictions in hope of btr security or openness & liberality to encourage tourism & goodwill? I prefer latter.”
But Mr. Tharoor, a writer and a former top United Nations diplomat, who is now a member of Parliament and a junior minister of foreign affairs, is not just any Indian, and the message went out not to just a handful of friends but to more than half a million people who follow him on Twitter.
That message, along with a few others mildly questioning the merits of India’s new, stricter tourist visa policies, landed him on the front page of most of India’s English-language newspapers, which accused him of a very big mistake in Indian politics: appearing to disagree publicly with his superiors on a delicate issue.
Politicians in democracies the world over have warmed to Twitter, the microblogging service, and other social media tools, like Facebook, to connect with voters. Many members of the United States Congress use it, as does Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd.
But in India, the world’s largest and most boisterous democracy, it has not caught on with elected officials. Indeed, many of India’s power elite, whether in politics, the news media or business, seem to look askance at Mr. Tharoor’s enthusiasm for a medium that collapses the distance between the governors and the governed and dismantles the layers of protocol and decorum that keep elected officials and senior bureaucrats here aloof from the everyday concerns of those they serve.
Most of India’s political elite seem to have no idea what Twitter is. Many senior bureaucrats see it as a waste of time. Asked if he would consider using Twitter, India’s home secretary, G. K. Pillai, pursed his lips disapprovingly and said, “I haven’t got the time.”
But Mr. Tharoor reads almost every post sent his way, according to his staff, and personally responds to as many as he can. Such direct access to an elected official is almost unheard of in India, and Mr. Tharoor’s use of the medium has helped define his political rise...
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