Friedman's Imaginary India

Duck and cover, fellows, Thomas Friedman's back in India, and the mysterious subcontinent is exercising its usual sorcery on the wandering pundit, eliciting paragraphs of ecstatic drivel, as it has from so many Times-men.

My favorite remains a post-Christmas dispatch, published on December 27, 2002, by the New York Times's resident correspondent in India at the time, Keith Bradsher. It was a devotional text about neoliberalism's apex poster boy at the time, N. Chandrababu Naidu, chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh, Time's "South Asian of the Year."

After composing a worshipful résumé of Naidu's supposed achievements, Bradsher selected for particular mention a secret weapon that the canny reporter deemed vital to Naidu's political grip on Andhra Pradesh. "Naidu and his allies," Bradsher disclosed to NYT readers, "speak Telugu, a language spoken only in this state and by a few people in two adjacent states." What Bradsher was saying was that Naidu spoke the same language as the 75 million other inhabitants of Andhra Pradesh. It was as though someone ascribed Tony Blair's political successes in Britain to his command of English.

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